Police man a security cordon as a huge fire engulfs the Grenfell Tower in west London, June 14, 2017.
By Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images.
The
horrifying fire in West London on Wednesday was bound to have an impact
on a country already shaken by three terrorist attacks in three months,
a political crisis that has followed the Brexit vote, and the recent
general election that not only provided no clear winner but deprived
Prime Minister Theresa May’s
Conservative Party of its
political mandate. But in the intervening days, the fire, which swept
through the 24-story Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, has come to
symbolize everything that is wrong with the country and its awkward
prime minister. When May visited the scene on Thursday, for instance,
she apparently did not think it necessary to speak with survivors and angry local residents.
An inferno like this makes for combustible politics. Within a couple of hours of the outbreak, an apparently prescient blog post
published last year by the Grenfell Action Group regarding safety and
living conditions was circulating on the Internet. “The Grenfell Action
group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the
ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO (Kensington and
Chelsea Tenant Management Office), and bring an end to the dangerous
living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they
inflict on tenants and leaseholders.”
Indeed, as we now know, the apartment block had just one external stairway, no central alarm or sprinkler systems, and was clad in a combustible material
that would have generally been banned in the United States for
buildings taller than 40 feet. The tenants were essentially living on
the top of a highly inflammable firetrap, one in which mass evacuation
was impossible, as was evidenced when a few of victims filmed their last
moments with their phones. The authorities appeared to have ignored multiple warnings that drew from the experience of fires in other properties under their control, simply because they were not constrained by the law and knew the tenants were powerless to do anything.
The conclusion seemed clear to many—if the complaints and warnings had
been made by tenants in any of the wealthier areas of the Royal Borough
of Kensington and Chelsea, something would have been done.
For
many, the fire played into the two main issues, inequality and economic
austerity, that explained the unexpected tide of support for Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn in last week’s election. As I’ve noted previously,
the austerity measures of the last seven years have created a sense of
real hopelessness among a very large number of the electorate.
Previously, their anger was directed at many targets—Europe, immigrants,
and so forth. But, more recently, this frustration began to find
expression in a properly socialist platform, one that coalesced around
an old-style leftie whom everyone, including me, had written off. While
May spent just half an hour at the fire scene, Corbyn thoroughly toured
the area, listening to local residents and hugging those who had lost
loved ones. Whether it is the job of a leader to publicly emote at the
site of a tragedy like this may be debatable, but Corbyn’s obvious
empathy and his subsequent demand that the vacant properties of the rich
should be seized to house the homeless played well politically. These
days, after all, opinion is on the march in Britain. The ground is
shifting under the Conservatives’ feet, and it's clear that the debate
about the divisions and inequalities of modern Britain have been given
impetus by the fire.
May has her hands full.
She must negotiate with both her new ally, the Democratic Unionist Party
in Northern Ireland, negotiations that are designed to prop up her
government, and her colleagues in Brussels about Britain’s exit from the
European Union. But she now must also keep a close watch on the rising
discontent, and Corbyn’s use of it. As the collection of essays Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World
shows, politics can be devastating for those who ignore public anger
after an event like this. While May has ordered a public inquiry, it
will not allow residents to be represented by their own lawyers, or ask
questions of the authorities on matters such as their failure to heed
warnings, the use of inflammable materials, and the lack of basic fire
safety systems. This seems a mistake, given that there were a high
number of immigrants in Grenfell Tower. Many see the loss of these lives
as symbolic of an unjust social order.
Particularly
dangerous for the government is the record of contempt for safety
standards from privileged Conservative politicians, like the former
mayor Boris Johnson and M.P. Jacob Rees-Mogg, both of whom went to Eton. Footage has emerged
of Johnson telling a Labour member of the London Assembly to “get
stuffed” after he raised a question about fire safety. Another video
has been unearthed showing Rees-Mogg suggesting in a parliamentary
committee that the U.K. could slash environmental and safety standards
“a very long way” after Brexit. Given that Rees-Mogg, who has a private
fortune estimated at nearly $200 million and his in-law’s ancestral
home, Wentworth Woodhouse, has received around $9 million of taxpayers’
money in a restoration grant, his remarks about safety standards have
gone down very badly. Rees-Mogg, for what it is worth, was one of the
most prominent people in the U.K. to endorse Donald Trump.
But it is not just these two. The Fire Minister, Nick Hurd, and May’s new chief of staff, Gavin Barwell,
are among 72 Conservative M.P.s who are landlords and voted against a
Labour motion to make homes “fit for human habitation,” which required,
among other things, that landlords undertake electrical safety checks.
In the circumstances, it just seems grossly insensitive and politically
inept for May to allow Hurd to lead the government’s response to the
Grenfell tragedy—especially when her own job may be on the line.
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