Grenfell: an unquenchable blaze (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine waking at night inside walls of dripping flames in a fire that’s engulfing your flat in the tower block that is your home. A crackling storm of searing flames, where the walls turn to molten polyethylene (uPVC), a material described by Peter Apps, an editor at Inside Housing magazine, ‘like a solid petrol’ burning. It’s a material that melts as it burns, which it does easily at low temperatures. The air itself becomes as hot as the fire itself, scalding your lungs with each breath. Many victims of fire die in hospital from burn damage to lungs, days or weeks later after inhaling a suffocating thick black petroleum-based smoke. One element of the chemical cocktail released from burning uPVC is cyanide.

The escape routes, once familiar corridors and communal areas, now transformed into dark labyrinths of despair. The firefighters had told you stay put for safety but now the building’s uPVC shell is quickly and fully alight, dripping flaming materials floor to floor.

Grenfell Tower’s residents experienced this horror on 14 June 2017, when the 24-storey block was engulfed in fire, causing 72 deaths. The fire began with a malfunctioning fridge-freezer but spread due to the building’s combustible cladding, revealing systemic safety failures in UK construction and government oversight.

Survivor and campaigner testimonies

Survivors and bereaved families had consistently criticised the lack of accountability from authorities. They argue that Grenfell happened because the people in power saw the residents as expenses, not individuals. Grenfell Action Group (GAG), which was instrumental in raising concerns before the fire, repeatedly warned that a disaster was inevitable. Their warnings, however, were ignored. In a blog post written months before the fire, GAG chillingly predicted, ‘only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord’.

Testimonies to the Inquiry, whose final report was published at the beginning of September, revealed that fire safety was sidelined in favour of cost reduction and aesthetics. Architects and contractors ignored basic safety practices, contributing to the mass killing. As lawyer Stephanie Barwise KC, representing survivors, noted, there were repeated opportunities to prevent the fire, but none were taken.

The inquiry has also shone a light on the inequality and indifference shown towards social housing tenants and marginalised communities.

Refurbishment and cladding

It started with regeneration. Decisions in relation to Grenfell made during the refurbishment of the tower avoided consulting residents who before the fire had formed a residents’ committee. The refurbishment project was carried out by private contractors under the direction of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO)

Following decades of deregulation and privatisation, social housing management has often been outsourced to private contractors, as was the case with KCTMO, which managed Grenfell on behalf of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This system of privatised management prioritised efficiency and cost-reduction over the safety of the residents.

Originally, fireproof cladding was planned for Grenfell’s refurbishment. However, the material was downgraded to save money. An email from one contractor revealed that lower quality cladding was selected to save money despite warnings about the fire risk posed by the material. As one Inquiry expert aptly described it, ‘the cladding was a time bomb waiting to go off’.

The decision to downgrade the type of cladding was made to increase profits for the subcontractor. It directly led to the rapid spread of the fire. It was a decision that didn’t involve the people whose lives would be affected, but whose lives were ended by this decision. The money ‘saved’ on the cladding and which ultimately ended 72 lives was £293,368.

Grenfell was a block in the midst of one of the most affluent areas of London, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and was considered by its rich neighbours as an eyesore. The cladding served more for aesthetic purposes, making the building blend in with the affluent neighbourhood of Kensington rather than improving its safety. It was, as one resident put it, just ‘lipstick for the building’.

The residents themselves pointed out that they were more concerned with the activities inside the building such as the decommissioning of the communal boiler in favour of installation of individual boilers in the hall outside of the flats. These boiler cupboards were installed so the KCTMO could reduce their own servicing costs while passing the cost of heating and hot water to individual residents, while still jacking up service charges, an area where regulation doesn’t prevent extortion of residents. These same boiler installations were cited by one victim of the fire as what prevented him from getting his daughter and pregnant wife out of the building during the fire. What was previously a straight line to the fire exit was now a series of enclaves that in the thick tar of petroleum-based plastic fuelled smoke, had trapped his family.

Systemic inequality and class divide

The KCTMO repeatedly ignored safety concerns raised by residents. Residents had formed grassroots resistance against the faceless body managing their lives, but their warnings fell on deaf ears. The KCTMO, motivated by cost-cutting, neglected the safety of Grenfell’s working-class residents. The residents were living in unsafe conditions.

Social inequality, an essential aspect of capitalism, was a core underlying cause of what happened. Survivors and campaigners pointed out that the fire would likely not have occurred in a building which housed wealthier residents, because standards of safety and maintenance would have been higher. Edward Daffarn, a Grenfell resident and campaigner, stated:

‘We were treated as second-class citizens because of our postcode and because we were poor’.

Dr Lee Elliot Major, a social mobility expert, concurred: ‘Grenfell exemplifies how housing policy in the UK, driven by neoliberal economics, has led to a profit-driven culture where the most vulnerable are treated as afterthoughts’.

A major critique emerging from the Grenfell fire is how capitalism treats housing as a commodity rather than as satisfying a basic human need. Housing policy has shifted towards encouraging individual ownership, with little regard for the safety of those left living in social housing. This has been underfunded and neglected for decades, often outsourced to private contractors whose primary concern is profit, not safety. Grenfell epitomises where this leads.

Corporate negligence and government deregulation

The corporate entities involved in Grenfell’s refurbishment, which included Rydon, Arconic and Celotex, are rightly criticised for their role in the mass killing. These companies continued to sell or install materials that were known to be unsafe, driven by the profit motive. Internal documents from Arconic, for example, showed that the company knew their cladding was highly flammable but continued to supply it because it was cheaper and there was little regulatory pressure to stop doing so.

These corporate entities are not just the few bad apples. Maximising profits is the standard practice not just in the housing and building industry but within all capitalist enterprises. Everyone living under capitalism is subjected to this law of the jungle that permeates every aspect in life.

The role of successive governments in the mass killing cannot be overlooked. They must share the blame. The previous Labour government brought in the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, weakening fire safety regulations. This measure transferred responsibility for fire risk assessments to building owners and landlords, who rely on private contractors who, as always under the pressure of profit-making, are incentivised to minimise costs rather than maximise safety.

The Tory-Lib Dem coalition government which took over from Labour in 2010 is also to be blamed for its role in the policies and decisions that contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire, especially Eric Pickles, who was its Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2010 to 2015. His time in office was marked by several actions related to fire safety and housing regulation, many of which are now seen as contributing to the fire.

Pickles cut back on regulations including fire safety, as part of the broader government push to reduce public spending and further ‘cut red tape’. Under Pickles’s leadership, there was a move to reduce the burden on housing developers and councils to meet stringent safety standards. One example was the weakening of building regulations, which reduced the requirement for fire safety inspections in some types of properties.

This drive to deregulate was touted as making construction and housing development more cost-efficient, but by unleashing profit-seeking private companies it compromised safety; it was an outgrowth of capitalist ideology that places emphasis on reducing government oversight in favour of what are euphemistically termed market-led solutions. Profit always trumps the lives of working-class people. As socialists we know no matter how much the market is regulated no length of leash will hold back the mad dog of capital from attacking when his food bowl is threatened.

The role of capitalism

The decisions leading to the Grenfell killings are a reflection of capitalism’s systemic failures. The drive for profit at all costs, the deregulation of safety standards, and the neglect of social housing tenants are all inherent features of this economic system. As a result, the lives of working-class people are deemed expendable in the pursuit of wealth.

In 2017 in the aftermath of the fire David Lammy, now Foreign Secretary in the current Labour government, summed up the situation as: ‘This is what happens when you deregulate and allow market forces to dictate safety in housing. Profit comes first, people come second’.

Grenfell is not just a story of corporate and governmental negligence; it is a symbol of deep-seated inequality. The fire exposed the glaring class divides in London, where working-class residents of social housing are treated as expendable. Now that the Inquiry has reported, the survivors and campaigners remain determined to hold those responsible accountable and to ensure that no other community suffers the same fate.

For survivors and the bereaved, justice remains elusive. As survivor Edward Daffarn stated during his testimony: ‘No one has been held to account for what happened at Grenfell. We don’t just want words; we want to see real change.’

‘Justice for Grenfell’ is not merely about criminal charges or compensation—it is about systemic change, ending capitalism with its class inequality and profit priority.

A. T.

So They Say: Corrective Education? (1975)

The So They Say Column from the February 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Corrective Education?

Among the other learned voices raised against the “lack of discipline” within schools is that of Dr. Rhodes Boyson. He is concerned that children are being exposed to

  cells of neo-Trotskyist, new left teachers who wanted to use schools to destroy our way of life. Unless these destroyers and wreckers were watched, every history lesson became a study of some peasant or racial revolt against real or so-called oppression.

(The Times 31st Dec. 74) 

We have no doubt that Dr. Boyson considers himself satisfactorily qualified to do some of the “watching”, having, as a Conservative MP, a clear idea of the correct “order, belief and structure” that society should take. His concern has a practical application for capitalism of course. He feels that teachers have lost sight of what schools are for:

  the three R’s, passing on our culture, preparation for outside work, and a development of individual talent.

There is nothing so useful to private property ownership than reasonably literate workers steeped in the idea of capitalism, and who are prepared to run it. If a worker has particular talent which may be exploited, so much the better.

Lesson Two

This theme is echoed by Dr. Joyce Morris, a BBC adviser on language usage. She said at a conference on education in the North of England on 2nd January, that “crazy and dangerous ideas” in education techniques have led to an increase in illiteracy, and urged those attending to restore reading “to the central pivot of the curriculum.” The dangers she sees in increasing illiteracy among secondary school pupils are similar to those of Dr. Boyson:

  As technology advances the need for unskilled labour decreases and the illiterate must face the prospect of almost certain unemployment in the not too distant future.

(The Times 3rd Jan. 75) 

Her call has not yet reached the eyes of Lt. Col. Stuart Townsend, headmaster of Prince Charles’s old school, Hall House Junior School. Townsend has his own ideas of education and has recently been explaining his views to the parents of his 500 boys, who pay up to £600 a year in fees:

  Today in London many school children have no manners, are destructive, look dirty, slack and lazy. Some Hill House School boys come to school like this and are a disgrace to the uniform. These boys should be removed.

(News of the World 12th Jan. 75)

The punch-drunk Colonel does not say where they should be removed to, but emphasises that good manners and discipline are of paramount importance, not least among members of his staff.

  There’s a battle going on in education. Someone has to make a stand. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’ll win. I just get rid of anyone who doesn’t agree with me.

One thing which does not appear to trouble the Colonel, however, is illiteracy, at least not in his own case. One parent complains:

  He boasted to me that he never answers letters and when I went to meet him I saw a waste paper basket full of unopened letters.

Unread maybe, but surely not unopened? How could the Colonel have extracted all those cheques for £600?

Patent Mistake

A document for patent assigned to the Secretary of State and filed in 1962 has recently been taken off the secret list and is available to anyone visiting the Patent Office. Its title “Improvements in the manufacture of organic phosphorous compounds containing sulphur” reads like an improved formula for manure. It is in fact a detailed document explaining fully the chemical processes employed in the production of VX, one of the deadliest nerve gases ever to be invented.

In liquid form, a pinhead sized drop of VX on the skin is lethal.

(Sunday Times 5th Jan. 75) 

It appears that the patent was taken off the “classified” list by accident, and that the Defence Department is confused as to how this particularly nasty skeleton emerged from the cupboard. A spokesman attempting to defend what will doubtless be considered an error of judgement said:

  Information on how to make an atom bomb is freely available, but people don’t go around doing it.

That not everyone “goes around doing it” is quite true. However we are all aware that too many “people” have already done it, and continue to do so. In regard to VX itself, the production details were passed to the us some years ago “under a long standing agreement on the free exchange of chemical warfare information” with the inevitable result that the US

  eventually manufactured it on a large scale and put it into store.

Having learned who our friends are, MPs have been writing to Mr. Rodgers, Minister of State for Defence, not apparently concerned with the reasons for the production of this deadly gas, but appalled that the details of manufacture are now public knowledge. They will doubtless be happy to learn that Mr. Rodgers ordered a review of de-classification procedures on 6th January.

Black Power

Leaders vary in the degrees of subtlety they employ to maintain their positions of power. President Nguema of Equatorial Guinea is one who believes in taking the gloves off, straight away. On January 7th his constitution was approved by a referendum. Among other things this

  confirmed his dictatorial powers for life by threatening to torture or kill anyone who voted against it, refugees said in Madrid. The President had made sure of the outcome of the referendum by making members of his single National Workers’ Party the sole election judges. The balloting slips were printed beforehand, the vast majority of them with the word Yes. Anyone bold enough to pick up a slip from the ‘No’ pile and put it in his voting envelope, risked reprisal.

(The Times 8th Jan. 75)

Opposition spokesmen have so far failed to comment. Or materialize.

In the Clouds

Mr. Michael Burbidge of the sociological branch of the Department of the Environment said on the 6th January that many Local Authorities would be housing families in “unsuitable high-rise blocks for years to come”. The reason appears to be the same as that for climbing Everest — because they are there. Families thus housed will be those who are already suffering greatly from poor housing conditions. Speaking with reference to particularly unsatisfactory high-rise estates, he said:

  The more choosy tenants will move out and only disadvantaged families with no alternatives will be persuaded to take up the resulting vacancies.

He does not mean “perusaded” of course, but forced. However an angel of wisdom has since appeared on the scene in the shape of Prince Phillip. His rôle as president of the UK Council of European Architectural Heritage Year (i.e. 1975) led him to make some informed comment on the plight of the poorly housed.

  The public should complain if they disliked a building. He wanted people to say ‘Look, we don’t like living 16 furlongs up and the ideas of having more open space at the bottom is totally useless to us.’ 

After such practical advice, we viewed with some suspicion the comments of Lady Dartmouth, chairwoman of the executive committee of the European Heritage Year campaign, who remarked the following day:

  Architects and planners thought the best thing was to raze everything and start again. But now re-cycling was the vogue and the aim of conservation should be to re-cycle buildings.

(The Times 3rd Jan. 75)

A. D'Arcy

Housing and Human Problems (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

One morning in the early 1920's, a young mother trudged up the front steps of a town hall in one of the London suburbs. She was confronted at the top by a portly commissionaire, pompous in his petty authority, but she pushed angrily past him and found her way to the Mayor’s parlour at last. There was certainly no respect for civic dignity about her as she barged through the door and demanded of the official there when he was going to get her and her family somewhere decent to live.

Her husband had been unemployed for two whole years after his return from the slaughter of the Great War, and their marriage was early feeling the strain of trying to live with their young ones in two small rooms. No wonder the poor woman was at her wits end. In desperation, she pleaded— and threatened (she would drown herself and her three children, she said), but it made no difference. The official was not impressed.

You had to have a “regular” job in those days even to get on the Council’s waiting list. Eventually they took over the whole of their pokey terraced house, but by then there were three more children, so they were not much better off anyway. The young wife did not solve her housing problem. Like many others, she lived, grew old and died in the same seedy place. And like so many others of her day and since, she never did grasp the real reason for her plight, and for the sordid conditions of her life which threw a barrier between her husband and herself, so that they really hardly knew each other, even after forty years of marriage.

Perhaps you could shrug this story off if it were just an isolated instance, but the sheer human tragedy of the housing problem will just not let you do that. The lives of those affected are soaked in misery and despair in the grim struggle to raise families sometimes under the most appalling conditions. It is hardly surprising that tempers fray, nerves suffer and couples who started married life full of love and high hopes, often end up barely tolerating each other. If you think this is far-fetched, remember that social workers in London’s East End, for example, find frequently that among those who consult them about their bad housing conditions are many who are under medical treatment for nervous disorders.

Ironically enough, there is a new brand of neurosis associated with the high blocks of flats in which workers are re-housed, and in fact there is growing suspicion that the very act of taking families from streets and separating them sometimes at great heights is having an adverse effect on their health. The working class mother may have had to cope with ghastly slum conditions before, but at least she did not have to keep her young children cooped up in a flat because the playground is too far below for her to keep an eye on them. Like most workers, she is kept busy, and there is always the nagging fear that one of her kiddies will somehow escape her attention and fall to his death from a balcony or landing.

But bad nerves are only one of the evil effects. It does not take a great deal of brains to realise that cramped and dilapidated dwellings are injurious to health in countless ways. In fact, so great has this become that some local authorities deal with it as a separate priority under “Medical re-housing.” In theory, of course, you are eligible for special consideration if you have some health defect which your doctor thinks has been caused or aggravated by your living conditions. It often carries little weight in practice, though, because the shortage of workers’ houses has become so acute that only a small fraction of those available is allocated to medical cases.

In London, the housing famine is acute, and the County Council have since 1958 been able to reserve only a miserable 250 flats a year for re-housing the seriously ill. Before then, it was a mere one hundred. In 1961, the whole allocation had been used up by the spring and there were still more than a thousand urgent cases outstanding. And even if you are lucky enough to be so ill that you are offered a flat, you may find that it is one of the older blocks, without a bathroom or lift, and with a shared W.C. So your troubles are by no means over and you could easily find yourself back on the waiting list before long.

Take a look at some of the other human tragedies of the housing scandal. Understandably, we are so preoccupied with the plight of families and the bad effects on youngsters that we tend to forget the pathetic conditions that many single people have to endure. Young, middle-aged, and old are all afflicted, but perhaps the last group suffer most because of their infirmities and inability to earn a living. Mostly you will find such people in private (as opposed to municipal) dwellings, such as the oldest tenement blocks of East London. The accommodation is generally cheap, which at once tells us a lot about it in terms of dilapidation and sheer misery for the occupants. Try living for twenty years, as one epileptic did, in a room 7 ft. by 6 ft. with plasterless walls and a leaking roof, and you will get our meaning. Often there is very bad overcrowding, and conditions in many of the houses are indescribable.

Struggling along on the very borderline of destitution, there is a loneliness and black despair which many times overtakes these people, and they seldom manage to get clear of their awful predicament. They are generally the ones with whom capitalism can deal particularly harshly, such as widows, divorcees, those in failing health and even mental cases. Their common misery is the product of their common identity as members of the working class.

But there is one other group who have given up the strain of trying even for the meagre respectability of a dingy furnished room. Ironically, in many cases they have lost what accommodation they had as their lodgings were closed to make way for slum clearance. They sleep anywhere they can—odd nooks and crannies, bombed sites and railway stations. During the day they do work of sorts, although clearly they do not earn much at it. For them, the hopelessness of the situation is just something they have accepted in blank apathy and each day of struggle is pretty much the same as the next. Their predicament gives us an insight into the horrible pressures which mount against single people living on their own in a place like London.

Rarely do they appear on the waiting lists of local councils. They probably realise the utter futility of trying this, because the queue is miles long as it is. As one observer has put it, they suddenly find themselves clinging to the very edges of society. Maybe some have been ill for a while, and without friends or relations to help them have found themselves on the streets. Others have drifted from one dingy room to another before succumbing and joining the rest of the destitutes.

Capitalism does things in a big way. It can produce huge quantities of goods and build enormous cities. And just as surely, in its usual contradictory way, the majority of its people have to put up with narrow, drab lives. And for the lonely ones the very bigness of capitalism's towns restrict their chances of ever belonging anywhere. This extremity illustrates perhaps most of all the underlying tragedy of the whole housing problem. To say that it is a problem of working class poverty is indeed a truism which runs like a thread through workers' whole lives. For poverty of ownership in the means of life begets poverty in so many other things— perhaps in human contact and friendship most of all.

Eddie Critchfield

Editorial: Burning Injustice (2017)

Editorial from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

So many things about the Grenfell Tower fire continue to stink, even weeks after the disaster. The flames were not even out, nor the bodies counted, before the recriminations and finger-pointing began.

Not surprisingly the building owners, Kensington and Chelsea Council, quickly came under savage criticism for spending £8.6m on a recent refurbishment aimed at creating new rentable space and prettifying the exterior with new cladding, but not bothering to install sprinklers or ensure that the cladding material was fire-proof.

Why, people wanted to know, was there only one fire exit in a building of 120 flats, an exit frequently blocked by rubbish including old mattresses which the council did not remove? And why, when the fire broke out, was there such chaos on the ground with nobody from the council on the scene to establish any kind of central meeting and information point for survivors and anxious relatives?

Perhaps it was to deflect some of this blame that the council leader shamelessly implied to the press that sprinklers had not been installed because residents did not want the inconvenience. Though disaster frequently brings out the best in ‘ordinary’ people who fall over themselves in a rush to help, as we also saw after the Manchester and London attacks, the same cannot be said for elected officials. While Jeremy Corbyn lost no time in racing to the scene, and even the Queen turned up, the hopelessly aloof Theresa May bungled yet another press opportunity by ignoring the victims and speaking only to firefighters, sparking a huge march in Whitehall demanding her resignation.

It would be a truism to point out that capitalism doesn’t care about the poor. It comes as no surprise to learn that tower blocks for rich people have multiple exit points, sprinkler systems and efficient fire-proofing. A similar fire that swept through Dubai’s plush Torch Tower in 2015 yielded no casualties at all. The fact that residents’ frequent warnings about the building’s safety were ignored by a council presiding over one of the richest boroughs in one of the world’s richest cities is also par for the course.

What we ought to learn from this, if we don’t already know it, is that capitalism’s elected officials and bureaucrats are not smarter, better or faster than the rest of us but are, on the whole, greedy careerists and bone-idle time-servers with their eyes on the perks and not on their responsibilities. When it really counts, it is the so-called ‘ordinary’ people who, time and time again, show initiative, common-sense, cooperation and indeed heroism, while the elected officials stand around with their thumbs up their backsides waiting for someone to tell them what to do. If socialism relied on people like that, we would give up the revolutionary project right now. Instead, it is the ‘ordinary’ people – the vast majority of the world’s population – who show in times of crisis that they have got what it takes. They are, in short, ‘ordinary’ enough to change the world.