Stolen by Grace Blakeley

Author:Grace Blakeley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

CHAPTER SIX THE POST-CRASH WORLD

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear — Antonio Gramsci.

Ten years after the crisis began, Grenfell Tower burned to the ground.1 The fire started on the fourth floor of the tower block and, within an hour, it was rising up the external walls at an alarming pace. The building had no central fire alarm. Ineffective fire doors meant that the flames quickly entered the block, consuming the hallways and the stairwell. By the time the firefighters arrived, the flames were so strong that those above the fourth floor were trapped. Seventy-two people perished in the blaze, making it the UK’s deadliest residential fire since the Second World War. The youngest victim was a six-month-old baby, except perhaps for the pregnant woman whose child was stillborn due to the trauma.

Residents had spent years warning of the dangers posed by the building’s poor fire safety standards. An inquiry later revealed that the cladding on the building’s exterior, which had been erected in 2012 to improve its appearance, was highly flammable: a more fire-resistant option had been ruled out because it was too expensive. Grenfell Tower didn’t even have fire sprinklers. Many argued that financial difficulties caused by the government’s austerity programme had made it impossible for the council to respond to the residents’ concerns. But in the year of the Grenfell fire, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea wrote to residents proudly announcing that all top-rate council tax payers would receive a £100 reimbursement. Over two years later, many victims of the fire still have not been found adequate housing. There have been twenty suicide attempts amongst former residents since the blaze. The council and the tenants’ management organisation are being investigated for corporate manslaughter. And yet the only arrests related to the fire have been those of the men and women found burning an effigy of Grenfell on bonfire night 2018.

What happened at Grenfell was a violent crime committed by elected officials in one of the wealthiest parts of the country. With tax revenues flowing from the pockets of its millionaire residents, the lives lost at Grenfell were, and are, seen as expendable. As is now clear from the inquiry, Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council had more than enough resources to respond to the concerns raised by residents and independent observers before the fire, but they chose not to. Instead of spending a few thousand pounds on fire-proof cladding, or installing sprinklers, or buying new fire extinguishers, the council chose to deliver a £100 tax rebate to some of its wealthiest citizens. In the end, the towering inferno at Grenfell has emerged as a symbol of the ruthless and unnecessary cruelty shown by the British state to its most vulnerable citizens as part of the austerity programme introduced in 2010. Grenfell is not a tragedy that can be chalked up to a lack of

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