Opinion: The Grenfell Tower disaster has exposed the glaring inequalities in our society in the most tragic fashion, says Aidan Semmens.

You don't have to compare it with the £369 million handed over to refurbish Buckingham Palace to see that £5 million to rehouse the former residents of Grenfell Tower was an insult. Like chucking a 5p coin at a beggar.

But no cash handout could assuage the grief and anger following that most avoidable of horrors.

Grief and anger that have stoked an almost revolutionary mood in this most unrevolutionary of countries.

The blackened ruin of that former high-rise slum casts a shadow far beyond the neighbouring well-heeled streets of Kensington.

The word 'murder' may be tabloid hyperbole. 'Manslaughter' may technically be a more accurate term. There may be doubt over exactly who is guilty, and of what, but there will be political as well as human and legal costs to pay.

A lot has been said and written about it already and a lot more will be. But I feel moved to share the words of my friend and former colleague Chris Storey.

'This is a Third World fire, here, in Britain. Had this happened in a sweatshop in Calcutta, we'd have been shaking our heads and saying, 'Isn't life cheap in these corrupt and backward countries?'

'You announce a bonfire of regulations. And you get a bonfire.'

To put it another way, this is lack of health and safety gone mad. More dangerously – fatally – mad than any terrorist atrocity on these shores.

While the nation obsesses over terror attacks, it's hard to imagine anything much more terrifying than to be trapped in a 27-storey inferno.

If it is a government's duty to protect its citizens, it raises the question of what or who it must protect us from. And how.