Grenfell to Gaza: Deadly Hierarchies of Race and Class on the 8th Anniversary of the Grenfell Tower Fire

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Eight years ago today, the world awoke to a vision of horror — an inferno of flame engulfing a residential tower block of social housing in North Kensington in west London.

72 people died in the fire, by far the largest loss of life in any housing fire in modern British history.

From the beginning, for those paying attention, it was clear that this was a disaster that should never have happened, brought about through the persistent neglect of the block, and, in particular, through its recent refurbishment, which had involved it being “prettified” with insanely flammable cladding, a deranged situation that had been facilitated and allowed through the homicidal greed of the international manufacturing companies involved, and the shameful deregulation of safety standards by central and local government.

Eight years on, however, despite a long and expensive public inquiry, no one has been held accountable for the failures and omissions that led to the fire.

As the Guardian explains today, “Dozens of the individuals implicated in the Grenfell disaster, from civil servants, government ministers, councillors and corporate executives have gone on to have successful careers, many of them still involved in housing and local government.”

Amongst the individuals highlighted by the Guardian is Laura Johnson, who was director of housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the council that was ultimately responsible for Grenfell, even though it had handed the management of all of its social housing to an intermediary, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, in 1996.

Johnson, as the Guardian reports, “is now an interim director of property and development at Barnet Homes, which manages and maintains 13,000 council homes.”, even though, the public inquiry found that “she had slowed down the installation of self-closing mechanisms on fire doors for ‘financial and practical reasons’, despite being urged to do so by the London Fire Brigade.”

Johnson “also pushed for a new contractor to carry out renovation works on the block on a lower budget, which ultimately meant metal cladding was swapped for combustible plastic-filled panels to save money.”

Others highlighted in the Guardian article are the civil servant Brian Martin, who admitted to being a “single point of failure” in the run-up to the fire, Deborah French, a sales manager at Arconic, “the multibillion-dollar US company that made the combustible cladding panels on Grenfell Tower”, who “has admitted she knew the cladding she was selling could burn but did not tell customers”, and Nicholas Paget-Brown, who was the leader of RBKC at the time of the fire, and who was condemned for the council’s “muddled, slow, indecisive and piecemeal” response to the disaster. He now runs “a consultancy firm on public policy issues.”

As a spokesperson for Grenfell United, which represents survivors and bereaved families, said, “We relive the pain every day. They are carrying on with life, careers intact, while we are still here – grieving, waiting and fighting for justice. The fact that some of the people involved are still working in housing is a slap in the face to every survivor and bereaved family. If there are no consequences for decisions that cost lives, what does that say about this country’s values? Justice delayed is justice denied – and we will not stop until those responsible are held to account.”

In a separate article today, the Guardian highlighted a report by the thinktank Common Wealth, which suggests that “companies who are found responsible for unsafe cladding should face unlimited fines and permanent bans from public contracts.” The report’s author, Leela Jadhav, said, “The Grenfell Tower fire was a disaster caused by corporate greed, not an accident. Justice in real terms means sanctions, prosecutions and a more robust and enforceable accountability regime. Nearly a decade has passed – accountability is long overdue.”

She also stressed that the UK “was falling behind other countries which have stronger due diligence laws”, and warned that, because “the law fails to effectively hold companies to account for corporate negligence”, it leaves the door open for another Grenfell-like disaster.

‘Managed decline‘

Competed in 1974, Grenfell Tower was a typical 24-storey block of social housing, built towards the end of a 30-year period, following the Second World War, in which entire estates of social housing were built by councils, replacing streets of largely terraced housing assessed as slums, or built on bomb sites from the war, to provide safe and affordable housing for life for people who, previously, were at the mercy of unregulated and often unscrupulous private landlords.

Structurally, Grenfell was resolutely solid, its concrete superstructure built to last. Internally, however, it required regular maintenance, which, shamefully, was neglected throughout the entire social housing sector by central and local government. Lifts needed to be maintained, as did fire doors on each of the flats in a block, escape routes needed to be maintained and kept clean, as did dry risers to facilitate effective firefighting, especially because most blocks weren’t equipped with sprinkler systems.

The neglect of safety concerns was by no means unique to Grenfell. Councils have routinely failed to adequately maintain their properties, and, beginning with Margaret Thatcher, who began selling off council housing in the 1980s, have also been subjected to severe budget cuts by central government. As a result, councils have often allowed their properties to fall into disrepair, a state of ‘managed decline’ that, particularly over the last 25 years, has then been used to justify their demolition and replacement with private housing, or a hybrid monster of public/private housing, in which councils have been sidelined in the provision of social housing by housing associations, generally philanthropic organizations that have increasingly become indistinguishable from private developers.

‘Managed decline’ was certainly part of Grenfell’s story, as Kensington and Chelsea, one of the UK’s richest councils, had little or no fundamental interest in ensuring that its social housing remained safe, and had been eyeing up the entire Grenfell area for many years for ‘regeneration.’

Cladding as flammable as petrol

As noted above, it was the refurbishment of the tower that particularly enabled the fire to spread with such vigour, primarily because of the toxic products produced by the companies that make insanely flammable cladding, whose use has never been prohibited — in the UK, at least.

The chief culprits are Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan, and, as lawyers for the bereaved explained to the public inquiry in November 2020, these companies were “little more than crooks and killers”, who operated in a “toxic and incestuous culture”, in which they showed “widespread and persistent wrongdoing” as they sold products they knew “were dangerous to life.”

As Sam Stein QC told the inquiry, “These companies knew their materials would burn with lethal speed and yet they marketed their products into an uncaring and under-regulated building industry which spread them around like a disease.”

Race and class

Behind all of the necessary focus on safety factors, however, what the Grenfell Tower Fire also laid bare were issues of race and class, even though, in general, these have been persistently ignored or underplayed in mainstream media reporting.

Even the Guardian, which has today republished accounts, first published in 2018,  of those who died, based on interviews with family members and friends, the commendable list of tributes and testimonies fails to highlight what is apparent from reading though the accounts — that the majority of those who died (85%) were of Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic (BAME) origin, although the Guardian did make note of that in its 2018 article, stating that “Grenfell was not a microcosm of Britain or London. There were few white-collar workers among the victims and only seven white Britons, indicative of how the disaster disproportionately affected minority ethnic communities.”

At the public inquiry, lawyers for the Bereaved, Residents and Survivors made a persuasive case for the inquiry to recognize that BAME residents are disproportionately placed in the higher floors of social housing blocks, but were ignored in the inquiry’s final report. As the Guardian described it at the time, “Nabil Choucair, who lost his mother, his sister, her husband and their three daughters in the disaster, told the Guardian: “Most of the people that were affected or died were of BAME origin. They were never listened to or their problems dealt with. We were fighting to get the inquiry to look at racism and they didn’t. You have to look at how the families were being treated differently.” The Guardian added that “Choucair, along with other bereaved relatives, survivors and their lawyers, called on the inquiry in 2020 to look at the role of institutional racism and for it to be included in the terms of reference, with one lawyer describing it as the “elephant in the room.”

In its accounts of those who died in the fire, the Guardian paints vivid portraits of the wonderful array of people with hopes and dreams and love, humour, faith and resilience who lived and died in the tower, which is a powerful antidote to reductionist racist narratives about our vibrant multi-cultural society, but it would be worth spelling out quite how much this refutes the alarming spread of racist hatred in the UK today.

Also helpful would have been an explicit mention of how some of those living in the tower were not social tenants, but were leaseholders or private tenants, as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ policy, 14 of the tower’s 120 flats had been bought under ‘Right to Buy’, and were either occupied by the leaseholders themselves, or had been rented out privately on the open market.

To highlight the race-based component of the Grenfell story and how it skewed sympathies, imagine the uproar if everyone who died had been white, and, to highlight the class-based component of the story, imagine the uproar if the block had been privately-owned, and the residents had all been “upwardly mobile” white owner-occupiers.

On both race and class analyses, what the Grenfell Tower fire revealed, horribly, was both entrenched racism, and a widespread class-based prejudice against those who live in social housing.

In the glory days of social homebuilding — firstly in the inter-war years, and then from the 1950s to the 1970s — politicians, planners and especially council architects often approached their work with a visionary zeal, inspired by socialist or even communist ideals, and envisaging an egalitarianism in which social housing was for everyone.

This began to change, in particular, under Margaret Thatcher, when “aspirational” tenants were seduced by the ‘Right to Buy’ program, and existing social tenants began to be regarded as the the neediest people at the bottom of society: as second-class citizens, essentially.

Gone were the visionary days of providing safe and affordable socially rented housing for all, and in came a strict hierarchy, in which owner-occupiers were regarded as “aspirational” and “virtuous”, while social housing tenants were increasingly regarded with suspicion, as “spongers” or “shirkers” or, condescendingly, as the “deserving poor” that Victorian reformers focused on, while continuing to dismiss these regarded as the “undeserving poor.”

These narratives have all helped to fuel a horrendous system of rentier greed, in which an ever-increasing number of people are unable to afford endlessly-increasing and unregulated private rents, returning us to the plight that social housing was first introduced to address, and completely ignoring the reality that those who live in social housing, freed from the stranglehold of private landlords’ greed, are often only able to do the work they do, both in vital but underpaid jobs, and in all kinds of creative endeavours, because of the affordability of social housing.

From Grenfell to Gaza

For the last 20 months, I’ve been thinking about Grenfell as I’ve been watching Israel’s genocidal destruction of the Gaza Strip, fully supported by the same UK-based establishment that presided over the Grenfell Tower fire, and reflecting that the same racist, classist ‘regeneration’-based mentality that demeaned Grenfell and its residents applies to Gaza too.

There, apartment blocks weren’t “cleansed” through infernos of fire, but were systematically blown up or bombed, collapsing on their inhabitants as ruthlessly as Grenfell’s residents were incinerated, but on a scale and with an intensity that is almost impossible to process, the logic of ‘gentrification’ writ large.

As with Grenfell, this has only been possible through the persistent dehumanization of those killed, regarded by Israel as “human animals”, unmourned and disregarded in the west because, at best, they were regarded as inferior to the genocidal gentrifiers, and at worst because they were regarded as what the Nazis regarded as “untermenschen” in relation to the Jews, who, for 80 years, have been replaying what was done to them to the Palestinians who have the effrontery to be living on what they regard as their land.

The State of Israel has a Wild West — via its settler expansion, particularly in the West Bank — but its cities and its organized settler communities are effectively a colossal ‘regeneration’ project, in which those regarded as inferior are an obstacle to ”progress”, just as, in a less messianic and less exterminatory manner, those who live in social housing in the UK and those who are not wealthy are an obstacle to visions of the UK as a nation of “aspirational” owner-occupiers and private landlords, finally colonizing, with the full force of predatory 21st century capitalism, their own country, and establishing, as at Grenfell, that lives don’t really mean anything when the colour of your skin, your class, your wealth and your social status don’t fit with an extremely narrow definition of worth.

As Grenfell showed, the visionary nature of those who sought to create social housing for everyone — and, in many ways, our hopes for an egalitarian future — were brought to an incendiary end eight years ago today, and justice has still not been delivered to the survivors, to the families of bereaved and to the wider community.

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In 2018, I recorded ‘Grenfell‘, my song about the fire, calling for accountability and justice, with my band The Four Fathers and the great Charlie Hart, which is available below on Bandcamp, as featured on our 2024 album ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance.’ I hope you have time to listen to it.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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