Grenfell Tower Could Happen to Any of Us
There are some of us who are angry the survivors of Grenfell Tower are receiving compensation and housing; half of those who survived the fire are to end up in local ‘luxury housing’ paid for by the Government. I could link to the newspapers and show you what they have printed, but you already know which ones they are. I could link to the furious comments, but you already know which websites they belong to. For any of them to earn ad revenue or attention from this tragedy is somewhat distasteful.
Some of those so bothered are locals saddened that the prices of their houses or flats will depreciate because of their new neighbours. Survivors of the fire did not lose an investment. They lost their homes and all of their possessions; very many of them have lost neighbours, friends and family. Their need is immense and was generated by forces entirely outside of their control. To force them to give up the right to continue to live in the area is to ask them to abandon their jobs, their schools, the lives they have built and the community they have grown in order to protect the profits of some of the richest amongst us. This in addition to the loss they have already endured.
Owning property is not a license to prevent others from living nearby. A mindset which is not ecstatic to live in exceptional comfort and be able to easily make the smallest sacrifice possible in order to rescue the lives and livelihoods of many other people is baffling. It is not unfair that a sliver of the burden for this disaster should incidentally fall on those of us most able to absorb it. It is a duty.
Others are outraged despite not losing a single thing. There is grumbling that the compensation is not earned, that many of the residents were immigrants, or on the dole, or perhaps even here illegally. That this is the real crime.
Our very concept of justice is dependent on there always being avenues through which we may pursue relief from injustice. The legal system must be accessible in order to secure our rights, of which one of the most fundamental is our safety. We are all supposedly equal under the law and there is a duty of care in housing: we do not pay ever-increasing rents merely for the right to exist in a building owned by someone else. We pay rent for the owners of the property to ensure it is habitable. It is not unreasonable to wish to live in a society where we will not lose everything due to a fire sparked by some dodgy electrical equipment — and who among us knows if our electrical goods are faulty until they break — owned by someone else somewhere else in our housing complex.
Avenues of justice were denied the residents of Grenfell Tower: cuts to legal aid over the past seven years make it impossible for most Britons to afford the legal system to seek redress, preventative measures or to even receive legal advice when we believe our housing to be unsafe. It is too expensive for most of us to avail ourselves of the law.
The Grenfell Action Blog, set up to bring attention to perceived deficits in fire safety at the Tower, had been threatened with legal action by the local council for even trying to bring public attention to dangers identified by residents. The residents of Grenfell Tower did everything in their increasingly limited power to prevent disaster: they decided the possibility of compensation and new housing afterwards shockingly was not worth the horror of what actually ended up happening.
In an austerity-beholden Britain the fundamental right to justice is rendered a privilege, a tool solely for the wealthy. It could have been you in that Tower. It could have been your friends or your relatives who lost their homes or their lives. It is a very small step of compassion and self interest to understand why our state has a responsibility to ensure very basic safety regulations should apply for all of us and to ensure all of us have the right of use of our legal system when we believe anything dangerous or unlawful is taking place.
The precise failings in responsibilities that led to the fire and the devastation it wrought will, hopefully, be uncovered by the inquiry promised by the Prime Minister. Much hinges on the judge and solicitors assigned to lead it and the powers they are granted: inquiries have a deservedly variable reputation for excessive duration and potential lack of independence, when it is clear that immediate and intense pressure for change is necessary. The outpouring of outrage — dismissed as rioting mobs by some of our newspapers — is all the compulsion the public have to resist the inquiry being made deliberately impotent or dragged out in the hopes that people become fatigued by caring.
But whatever the result of the inquiry — and whatever its legitimacy ultimately ends up being — the fact remains that it is not normal or acceptable for a fire to be able to spread throughout a tower block within minutes in one of the richest countries in the world. What is already demonstrable is that numerous warnings about fire safety and its deregulation were ignored by the Government, the local council, the company owning the tower block. These were issued by numerous fire authorities, architecture authorities, local action groups and a coroner’s inquest into the Lakanal House fire in which six people died. One enormous calamity was not enough to provoke action.
The advice made by all such parties was not implemented: a fire safety review recommended by the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety & Rescue Group into these reports has been delayed ever since by successive Conservative Housing Ministers. The Lakanal House fire happened in 2009.
In particular numerous fire safety groups such as the Fire Protection Association have declared that sprinklers would have saved lives. Irrespective of the cost-benefit analysis involved in retrofitting sprinklers, irrespective of what it would have cost the landlord Conservative MPs who voted against improvements to the habitability of properties, there is an expectation that such things become regarded as basic and necessary safety equipment. The flammable cladding recently installed on the façade of Grenfell Tower — which is very similar to the cladding which caused the Lakanal House fire to spread as rapidly as it did — has been implicated in the spread of other fires and as a result is banned in the US and Germany, contradicting a particularly reprehensible and denialist report made by a certain newspaper that they were installed per an EU directive. The cladding has been used in numerous other high rise tower blocks in England — we do not yet know the full figure, although it appears to be more than a dozen. Yet its use is apparently illegal in high rise tower blocks in England. 16 separate council inspections of Grenfell Tower failed to find anything wrong with it.
The compensation and care offered to survivors of the fire at Grenfell is their due for fundamentally unsafe housing and the tragedy that resulted. The fire is not a warranted punishment for being insufficiently rich and British. Even if sympathy for the fire’s victims is lacking then the need for millions of pounds in pay-outs is, as numerous members of the public and less savoury members of the Press have declared, an injustice against the taxpayer. But it is not an injustice created by surviving an inferno. Such ire is better directed at the apathy, the greed, the lack of compassion and lack of concern which allowed an entire tower block to be engulfed in fire in the first place.
