On November 20, 2016, the Grenfell Action Group, a tenants’ organization for a tower block of low-cost housing in one of London’s wealthiest areas, issued a
regarding the company that managed the property, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, titled “KCTMO—Playing With Fire!” The tenants wrote: “[We] firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO…. It is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar high density residential property is the most likely reason that those who wield power at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to justice!”
These proved to be prophetic words. Seven months later, in the early hours of June 14, the 24-story Grenfell Tower was consumed by flames, leaving an estimated 80 dead and 70 injured. In this building disproportionately inhabited by immigrants, people of color, and the poor, some people leaped to their deaths; others were burned alive.
Ordinarily, following a tragedy such as this, the political implications would have been buried even before the victims’ bodies had been recovered. In the version of requiem so often recited by the political and media classes after a mass shooting in America, sentimentality is privileged over the critical faculties: “Now is not the time for politics. Let us mourn instead.”
But this was no ordinary moment. The fire took place less than a week after the British parliamentary elections. The Labour Party, led by the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, had run a campaign arguing for the redistribution of wealth (including more social housing) and against austerity, thereby challenging a consensus that had dominated British politics for a generation. As a result, with these arguments still reverberating, the tragedy was immediately understood as the product not of bad luck, but of bad policy.
With the black smoke still billowing from its upper stories more than 24 hours later, Grenfell Tower stood as an enormous sepulchre to the inhuman ramifications of inequality and neoliberalism. People started drawing a distinction between the living standards of the emergency-service personnel, who risked their lives to save the tower’s residents and have seen a significant decline in wages following a
, and the ballooning wealth of those who live in the nearby Kensington and Chelsea neighborhoods.
Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May visited the first responders at Grenfell but failed to meet with residents when she was initially scheduled to do so—and when she finally did manage to meet them, she was booed. Corbyn, on the other hand, was embraced. None of this could bring back those who had perished, but thanks to the broader arguments made during the weeks before, the incident was framed as an avoidable outrage made possible by greed
and neglect.
Corbyn’s liberal detractors are quick to point out that Labour did not win the election. On this point they are, of course, correct.
: The Conservatives emerged as the largest party but lost their majority and, at the time of the Grenfell fire, were still cobbling together a shaky
with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party—the UK equivalent of an only recently demilitarized Tea Party. (Indeed, the main reason Corbyn’s supporters were so buoyed by the result was that his critics in the party had predicted a humiliating defeat; when Labour actually gained seats, the bar had been set so low they couldn’t help but jump for joy over it.)
