‘I cannot help but feel that had our community lived in a different part of the borough, on the more affluent side, had we been from a different class, had we been less ethnic, the response in the aftermath would have been immediate’. (Hanan Wahabi, whose brother’s family died in the fire, Grenfell Inquiry, April 2022)
Throughout the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017, which killed 72 people, it has been clear that the residents of north Kensington’s Lancaster West estate were failed catastrophically at every stage. Residents’ concerns were persistently ignored. Cost-cutting and the drive to ‘regeneration’ trumped any concerns about safety. A bunch of frankly criminal manufacturers, contractors, architects, fire safety ‘experts’, builders and engineers colluded in maximising their profit margins while carrying out the lethal refurbishment of Grenfell Tower. These failures were not accidental, but rather the logical outcome of the priorities hardwired into a capitalist system interested only in making profits for the ruling class.
Class hatred: fear of ‘the mob’
Recent testimony to the inquiry exposes not only the contempt for but also the fear the state has of the working class. Karim Mussilhy, whose uncle died in the fire, described police on the night of 14 June as hostile, ‘ready for a fight’, viewing residents as ‘crooks and criminals’. He said they seemed to fear traumatised families ‘were going to form a mob… that seemed to be their main interest – it’s not helping us, or looking after the families or the people that survived. They were more concerned about an uprising’. Less than 24 hours after the fire broke out, the council’s CEO, Nicholas Hughes, was warning councillors of ‘hostile residents very vocal in negative comments towards the incident’ and warning of a potential ‘revolt’. A representative from the Department for the Community and Local Government (DCLG) who attended a council crisis meeting noted that councillors raised concerns that ‘embittered residents’ were ‘painting the situation in a very poor light [and could] incite a mob’. They flagged up that police assistance might be needed. That class hatred was in evidence at the first public council meeting after the fire in July 2017, where you could see the fear in councillors’ eyes as bereaved families and their supporters — who’d been corralled and locked into the public gallery – demanded access to the chamber.
This prevailing narrative was used to strangle any possibility of local resistance. After residents temporarily occupied Kensington and Chelsea town hall on 14 June, demanding answers, the council’s efforts were directed not at mitigating the humanitarian disaster unfolding on its doorstep, but rather on deflecting local anger. Within 24 hours it had scrambled a phalanx of opportunists to lead a silent, respectful march – incorporating police and local politicians – well away from the town hall to pay their respects at the still smouldering Grenfell Tower. It was a crucial moment, setting the tone for all future protests over Grenfell, creating the framework for organised and political local resistance to be quashed. In the months after the fire, the RCG was among those who found themselves physically threatened as we worked on the streets of north Kensington with those who wanted to build a movement for justice.
On the ground, meanwhile, the council’s response to the unfolding crisis was described as ‘chaotic’ and ‘dire’; no one from the government, council or Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) was anywhere to be seen for several days. Searching for his family as the tower burned, Nabil Choucair was threatened with arrest. He travelled to designated emergency centres but could find no one to answer his questions. It would be weeks before he was formally notified that six members of his family had died. Many who escaped the blaze spoke of being harassed when they sought official help, asked for ID they no longer had, and refused information.
Concerned that it would ‘look like we can’t cope’, council CEO Nicholas Hughes refused help from other councils. Central government failed to intervene, having given ‘Gold Commander’ status to Hughes on the basis that he’d previously worked at the Treasury. Officials from the DCLG who visited the Westway emergency centre noted the absence of any senior council leadership or management of any kind – just traumatised people milling around with only community and voluntary organisations to help. By 17 June senior civil servant Mark Sedwill warned the DCLG that if central government did not step in, ‘This will become our New Orleans’. More than 1,000 people were killed in the United States in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, with the poor and predominantly black population of New Orleans catastrophically failed by the state.
Profits before people
The inquiry’s questioning of government has focused on the fact that no review of fire safety regulations was carried out following the Lakanal House fire of 2009. The coroner at the 2013 inquest into the death of six people in the fire at the south London housing estate made a series of key recommendations relating to external fire spread and the retro-fitting of sprinklers in residential blocks. The promised review was repeatedly shelved by government housing ministers. The former Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, gave testimony to the Grenfell inquiry at the beginning of April, first warning barristers not to waste his time as he was a very busy man, and then getting the number who died at Grenfell mixed up with the deaths at Hillsborough (working class deaths being much of a muchness for the ruling class). He said it would have ‘made no difference’ if he had accepted the Lakanal findings. Former DCLG minister Stephen Williams persistently brushed aside appeals to act over sprinklers and to raise standards for combustible cladding on buildings. He said Pickles described such recommendations as ‘regulatory madness’ and those demanding them as ‘Guardian-reading pinkos’. Baron Pickles now sits in the House of Lords, having been ennobled for his services to capital in 2018.
One of his officials, Brian Martin, with responsibility for fire safety, backed up Pickles’ stance, saying of the Lakanal recommendations: ‘we only have a duty to respond to the coroner, not kiss her backside’. It was Martin who in 2009 told the Building Research Establishment to ‘step away’ from investigating the Lakanal fire, and blocked a pro-sprinklers expert from being in charge of redrafting building safety regulations as ‘not necessarily in the best interests of UK PLC’. When warned that a fire like the one at Lakanal, if it occurred overnight, could kill up to 12 times as many people, Martin retorted ‘Where’s the evidence? Show me the bodies.’
The fire at Grenfell provided not just the bodies but ample evidence that safety regulations geared towards protecting profits cannot provide security for the working class. The government has already rejected a key recommendation from the inquiry – that owners of high-rise flats be required to prepare Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans for disabled residents – as ‘not proportionate. At least 15 of those who died at Grenfell had disabilities limiting their ability to escape the blaze. As Karim Mussilhy told the inquiry: ‘The system isn’t broken, it was built this way, specficially to benefit them… the government will do whatever they can to keep us quiet, sweep this under the carpet and continue to make money the way they have been doing for decades, and either we accept it or we change it.’ We cannot accept it. We have to fight for change.
Cat Wiener
