In plain sight
Rory Hamilton
I have lived my entire adult life under austerity - I cannot even think of a time in my youth when there was not austerity. I am grown tired of hearing that there is no money for public services, or that the public has to face another round of ‘tough choices’ and that we are the ones having to make sacrifices, not cosy CEOs sat on six figures. And yet, I have seen corporate profits grow, the gap between the wealthy and the poor open up even further, and it is clear that the money is out there to fix the cracks.
Grenfell, to me, feels like the epitome of this scenario.
The story of Grenfell is surprisingly simply: 72 people died in a high rise flat in London because the local council - under the context of austerity government - chose cheap cladding material when refitting a building that they saw as an eye-sore marked for demolition, and the private companies involved in the supply and production of the cladding had cut corners to minimise costs.
The fire occurred in June 2017, seven years ago, and yet not a single arrest has been made. None.
The Grenfell United group, organised of families of victims and survivors of the fire, issued a statement, following the release of the Grenfell Inquiry stage 2 report on Tuesday, which said, “It speaks to a lack of competence, understanding and a fundamental failure to perform the most basic duties of care.”
There is no better way to sum up this tragedy. Earlier this year, four Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to five years in prison for being on a Zoom meeting planning to block the M25. However, the executives at Kingspan, Arconic and Celotex, and the former housing and local government secretary Eric Pickles, and the numerous individuals at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea all live comfortably today guilt-free. To rub our noses in it, the Met has said it will likely take a further two years before sentences are handed out.
How can it take nine years to prosecute clearly negligent individuals for social murder? Social murder, incidentally, sounds like a strong term to use but Tribune editor Taj Ali highlighted Friedrich Engels’ discussion in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845 [1967], p. 126):
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results we call that deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. but when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or the bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live - forces them… to remain in such conditions until that death ensures which is the inevitable consequence - knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.
My apologies for the long quotation, but I don't feel it is out of place to draw on this poignant point by Engels in today’s context. Indeed, he could readily be describing the conditions of austerity that caused Kensington Council to do health and safety on the cheap. What is important here, is that had these been luxury flats under private ownership or development, and a similar demographic of the other wealthy residents of Kensington and Chelsea had been subject to the fire, I have no doubt this process would have been expedited, reparations made, and heads rolled.
It is the exploitation of the working class, powerless in themselves to raise enough pressure to exert justice, that justice for Grenfell has taken and is still taking so long. It is the exploitation of the working class, the belief that ‘oh we can afford to skimp on those flats, but not those ones’, that resulted in the poor regard for safety in the first place. It is the exploitation of the working class, that the political elite can blindly walk us into another round of austerity, just like the measures that led to this fire in the first place.
It is surely impossible to look at the findings of this report and not see that profit was a motivating factor in the decision by Arconic to ‘deliberately conceal’ the safety risks of its product (described as the largest contributor to the fire); or that profit was a motivating factor in Celotex’s ‘false and misleading claims’ about the suitability of the product; that profit motivated Kingspan to mislead the market by failing to reveal the limitations of its product.
The signals that this behaviour comes from government, however, and the years of austerity which not only sought to reduce public spending, meaning that the London Fire Brigade had a lack of strategy and training to evacuate the towers once the fire was out of control, but also sought to get rid of the ‘red tape’, i.e. regulations, which affected safety of life.
"Grenfell Tower fire" by Natalie_Oxford on Twitter is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
I wonder how many lives have been lost as a direct result of austerity?
A 2022 paper published by the University of Glasgow suggested the number of additional deaths that had occurred between 2012 and 2019 was approximately 335,000.
And we are about to do it again. We’ve been forced to accept that there is no alternative. We’re not allowed to imagine that there might be other ways of running the economy which does not have such a high death toll.
On the day that the Grenfell report was published, another set of flats in South East London set fire, fortunately controlled and put out by around 70 firefighters. The fire was in an area called Catford, not far from where I used to live, in Forest Hill in a block of ex-council flats. If I wasn’t already emotionally invested in the tragedy of Grenfell, through sheer compassion, then the realities of this frequent occurrence hit home even more. Fires in high rise buildings as well as older buildings like the Glasgow School of Art, or Ayr Station Hotel, seem to occur more and more regularly.
And how many of us will know the genuine safety we live in? Our faith is put in the authorities above us, the regulations on paper, and the willing of other humans to do right by their fellow citizens in following through on producing good, safe and tested products like cladding.
As David Graeber said, “Capitalism is a situation where people can systematically turn their wealth into power by control of productive resources.” Nothing has so plainly illustrated this as the case of Grenfell, where those in control in the construction industry, and those in charge of government are remunerated for their bad decisions, and the working class, alienated from their work and from their housing on account of its condition are left without power, and no recourse to justice.
We are all Grenfell, we should all care about this. It cannot turn into another ITV drama which, 20 years after the fact, brings minimal compensation and prosecution to a blatant case of corruption.
How many more lives will austerity go on to claim in plain sight, and approved by the political elite? In our hospitals, in our homes, in our schools, on our streets, in our retirement homes, in our youth centres, austerity touches everything, and everything it touches is laid to waste.
I was originally going to write about the compressed 4-day week proposal coming from the UK government this week, but following the publication of the second part of the Grenfell report, nothing else was really in my mind.
If you are looking for some useful analysis on the 4-day week proposals, I highly recommend this week from the 4Day Week Campaign in Tribune: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/09/we-need-a-real-4-day-week
Or listen to our podcast episode with 4Day Week Campaign director, Joe Ryle: https://commonweal.scot/podcast/the-common-weal-policy-podcast-episode-159/