The final report of the public inquiry into the fire on 14 June 2017 at Grenfell Tower in west London was published on 4 September, more than seven years after the devastating – and, as it concluded, totally avoidable – blaze that killed 72 people. The 1,700-page report has taken six years to complete and cost more than £200m, but ultimately tells us little we did not already know about the ‘decades of failure’ that put profit ahead of the lives of working class people. As FRFI stated when the inquiry was first announced, ‘it is, as with all such inquiries, an exercise designed to drag out over the years, exhaust the participants and kick the whole issue of a failed and criminal housing policy into the long grass’ (RCG statement on Grenfell fire, 19 June 2017).
Crooks and criminals
That is not to say Martin Moore-Bick, the judge who led the inquiry, is not meticulous in his apportioning of blame. The list of ignorant, unscrupulous, contemptuous, profit-eering and criminally negligent organisations includes:
National government, which for decades had been warned about flammable cladding, particularly on high rise buildings. The then Department for Communities and Local Government ignored both statutory guidance on fire safety and the recommendations of the inquest into the 2009 Lakanal fire in south London in which six people, including three children, were killed. The government instead enthusiastically pursued ‘deregulation’ in the construction industry in the years after Lakanal, in particular measures relating to fire safety.
The local council, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) and its housing management organisation, KCTMO, who were at best indifferent and at worst downright hostile to their working class tenants on the Lancaster West estate where Grenfell Tower was located, ignoring years of warnings, from residents and from the London fire brigade, about major fire safety risks. RBKC failed completely to ensure KCTMO met any of its obligations in relation to repairs, fire safety or managing the estate in the interests of residents. Both used incompetent and unqualified fire assessors who had lied about their qualifications for the job. Both were more interested in saving on costs for the refurbishment of the tower than protecting human life. Fire doors were substandard; fire alarms did not work; there was no evacuation plan or fire action plan or even up-to-date data on who lived at Grenfell.
The contractors, Rydon, brought in to manage the refurbishment after illegally agreeing to shave £900,000 off the cost of the project to undercut the bid of their preferred competitors. The report found Rydon was completely unqualified to take on a project of this kind, inexperienced, shoddy, incompetent, exercising no oversight over any of the subcontractors, unaware of its contractual obligations and essentially concerned only with bringing in the work on budget.
The three main companies that made and provided the highly combustible rainsheet cladding and insulation that allowed the flames to sweep up the sides of the building within minutes, burning at temperatures of over 1,000C. Moore-Bick points to their ‘systematic dishonesty’; lawyers for the Grenfell families more accurately described them as crooks and criminals. US-based company Arconic marketed Reynobond 55 PE, an aluminium composite material cladding panel with a polyethelene core described by one expert as ‘solid petrol’. It deliberately misrepresented its product as suitable for high-rise buildings despite being fully aware of evidence from huge fires on tall buildings in Dubai in previous years that it proved lethal when set alight. Celotex (a subsidiary of French multinational Saint-Gobain) deliberately marketed its R55000 insulation as having passed fire tests when these related to a completely different – and less flammable – product. The Irish insulation company Kingspan simply cheated fire tests to get its dangerous product certified as safe.
Incompetent, indifferent, shoddy, penny-pinching outfits like the architects Studio E, cladding ‘experts’ Harley Facades, and fire safety ‘experts’ Exova, all of which failed time after time to ensure even the most basic fire safety compliance and each of which blamed the others for their failures.
Organisations like the British Research Establishment, privatised in 1997 and the British Board of Agrégement, set up to guarantee safety in construction, who certified fraudulent fire tests and shoddy work because they were more concerned about not upsetting commercial customers than applying rigorous safety standards.
Every single one of those named in the report effectively signed the death warrant of the 72 people who died. Yet, having conveniently decided from the get-go not to seek prosecutions until after the report was concluded, the police have now announced that it will be at least a further 18 months before they bring any criminal charges – and whatever cases are brought may not even come to court until the end of the decade.
Capitalism kills
The report makes 58 recommendations which the new Labour government has promised to ‘consider’. This is mere lip-service. By July 2024, a full seven years after the Grenfell fire, government figures show that 4,630 residential buildings of 11 metres or higher in Britain – housing tens of thousands of residents – still have unsafe cladding. The Dagenham fire in east London in August this year shows how real the threat to life and safety remains. And even if this cost-cutting, grimy government were prepared to fund new regulatory measures – which it’s not, given its emphasis on ‘slashing planning regulations’ in construction – no number of ‘independent construction regulators’, better definitions of what constitutes a high-rise building or improvements in the process of certification will make any difference. The construction industry in 2022 contributed 7% to British GDP – more than 300 times as much as North Sea gas and oil. It is inevitable that it will continue to find ways to make profits at the expense of working class lives, with the full collusion of whatever government is in power, in the interests – as one witness to the inquiry put it – of ‘UK PLC’. That is, of British capitalism, which battens off the lives and health and wellbeing of the working class.
The report specifically says it is not considering recommendations for the social housing sector because it concludes that the Social Housing (Regulation) Act of 2023 sufficiently addresses the issue. Why then are tens of thousands of working class people living in homes with known fire risks? Why are two million people living in social housing homes with health-threatening damp and mould? Why have more than 200,000 social homes been sold off since 2017? Karim Mussilhy, the vice-chair of Grenfell United, whose uncle was killed in the fire, summed it up: ‘the system isn’t broken – it was designed this way’.
Resistance – strangled at birth
On 16 June 2017, as the Grenfell Tower still smouldered, thousands of local people – the majority of them young and black – marched to Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall and occupied it. That righteous anger – that ‘rage undammed’ – of the working class of north Kensington, saw the councillors whose actions had led directly to the disaster scurrying for cover, hiding under their desks, or escorted from the premises by police. The ruling class was terrified. Then prime minister Theresa May and newly-appointed council leader Elizabeth Campbell emerged to make all manner of promises: everyone would be rehoused within weeks if not days, with no immigration checks; there would be criminal charges; there would be compensation. Within months, every single one of these promises had been reneged on. Six months later, more than half the survivors remained in temporary or emergency accommodation; immigration checks were reintroduced within a year and instead of criminal charges the protesters were fobbed off with the empty promise of a public inquiry. And the money… that’s a good question. Where did all the money raised, by charities and celebrities and benefits and football matches go? Not to the majority of the Grenfell families, that’s for sure.
Why was this able to happen? The reality is that while the emergency response of the state to help the survivors of Grenfell was woefully patchy, negligent and slow and informed by racism and contempt, it moved like lightning to defuse any possibility of a real movement emerging in the wake of the devastating blaze. All the efforts of the council, the police and local authorities went into ensuring that their control in the area would never be so threatened again. There would be no repeat of the London uprisings of 2011 that followed the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham. Within three days, the necessary forces from within the community had been co-opted. On 19 June, a Silent March was organised to lead local people away from the town hall. It was led by a seemingly radical local film-maker, Ishmahil Blagrove, who just days before had called for revolution from the steps of the town hall. Now he wrote: ‘We are asking that everyone who attends remain composed, dignified and respectful’. This was to be the pattern of all future marches – away from the seat of local power, silent, deliberately squeezing out the possibility of political organisation. Meanwhile, the Justice4Grenfell campaign was rapidly launched by the opportunist left, immediately billing itself as the ‘official’ Grenfell campaign. Soon it was little more than a front for the Socialist Workers Party, acting to divert calls for real action against the state into ‘safe channels’ – such as the campaign for Labour in the 2018 May local election. It acted consistently to censor and exclude those who attempted to organise independently to demand justice. But it did not act alone. To its ranks must be added local petit bourgeois opportunists who also aggressively acted to ‘depoliticise’ at every turn any possibility of building a movement for justice.
The Revolutionary Communist Group was involved in working in solidarity in north Kensington from the first days following the fire. It took part in every protest, including every Silent March, and protested for over a year at every council meeting. At one, we saw the terror on the faces of councillors demanding ‘Don’t let them in!’ as scores of local people, corralled behind glass screens in a public gallery high above the main chamber, demanded their voices be heard. At another, we forced the council to hear a petition signed by several thousand people demanding rehousing, criminal charges against the guilty, and a people’s inquiry, to applause from those in the public gallery. We joined local organisations to demonstrate outside the KCTMO AGM, organised a picket of Rydon’s headquarters and, prompted by local demands for action, held a rolling picket along the streets of north Kensington targeting the homes of local councillors. At every turn we faced censorship, sectarianism and avoidance by those who claimed to be leading the movement. Various local opportunists in the form of self-appointed ‘community representatives’ threatened the RCG: for holding a local meeting in a community hall, warning us that we would be ‘driven out’, emailing individuals with veiled threats of physical violence, or vilifying our events as ‘communist’ and a ‘decoy’; knocking over our stall when we demonstrated outside RBKC; telling RCG campaigners on the streets that we were not wanted in the area. Many of the local people who had initially worked with us were warned off.
The horrors of the Grenfell fire could and should have been a launchpad for a militant class struggle – in an area of London with a history of resistance against state racism and repression. The RCG is amongst those who fought to allow the voices of those demanding justice, action and accountability to be heard. The possibility of building such a movement was derailed by opportunist forces who, consciously or otherwise, ended up serving only the interests of the state. These are the forces which time after time will attempt to interpose themselves between the working class and its enemies, and by whom, in June 2017, the fight for justice for Grenfell was betrayed.
Cat Wiener
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 302 October/November 2024
