“IT is difficult to escape a very sombre national mood,” said Her Majesty the Queen recently. In a country reeling from terrorist attacks in London and Manchester, the Queen’s Birthday statement has captured that fact that the Grenfell Tower Disaster is not only uniting the nation in shock and grief, but has also become a flashpoint for growing disquiet at the divisions between rich and poor; between those who have the ability to control their lives and those whose lives (or even chances of life) are largely at the mercy of others.

The accusation that the wealthiest borough in the country (which has boasted a surplus in recent years while other councils around the country struggle to balance their books) may have used substandard material in the refurbishment of the tower blocks that house its most vulnerable residents, has yet to be proved. But the fact that the claim may have merit, has been enough to fuel the divisions in our society.

This is a time of political instability; a government weakened by its own divisions, propped up by a minority party representing one faction in the most riven community in our country.

Beneath the tragic and harrowing human stories that are at the heart of the Grenfell disaster, lies a seething anger at a system that tolerates such wide disparities between rich and poor. The abject need of the Grenfell survivors and the condemnation of the borough’s most underprivileged to inhabit buildings that are seemingly unsafe; where their concerns about welfare have been ignored, is an affront to decency. Salisbury has escaped the scourge of the tower block, but the dissonance between those who live in its leafy residential streets and those who are housed in its crumbling estates is still striking.

Some people cannot choose where they live and children cannot choose the families into which they are born. In Britain today, the opportunities of good health and a good education are denied those who have the misfortune to be born into the poorest households. I am privileged to be governor of a school just outside the city. It’s a church school and staff have courageously taken in children whose troubled past has led to them being excluded from other schools – a policy not always welcomed by some parents. However inspections have shown that children there are happy, feel very safe and, most importantly, have a sense of inclusion and empathy towards the needs of others. I can’t help feeling that in a world heightened by ethnic and religious fanaticism and intolerance, where divisions between affluent and deprived are becoming ever wider and more transparent, the prosperity and well-being of the country will depend more upon the empathetic ability of our future citizens, than their ability to parse a sentence or solve quadratic equations.