Grenfell is not just a burning scar on Britain’s conscience it’s another example of a country that lets the marginalised rot while the powerful shrug, says Brian Reade
I know what I would be doing today if I lived in London. I’d be revisiting a part of North Kensington I first walked one summer morning eight years ago when the air was heavy with ash and grief and a block of flats called Grenfell Tower stood like a blackened tomb.
Around its charred hulk that day a dazed community wept and raged, some attaching photos to fences, begging for a stranger’s reassurance that a family member was not one of the 72 poor souls incinerated in the deadly blaze two days earlier.
Six dozen ordinary people living in a tower block they had begged for years to be made safe had their lives stolen by a combination of greed, corruption, negligence and political indifference.
Six dozen people were betrayed to the grave by distant figures who saw them as numbers on a balance sheet while those elected to protect them from such evils as cheap, flammable cladding, looked away. That blaze didn’t just consume a 24-storey building and claim 72 lives, it exposed this nation’s rotting underbelly.
Today, on the eighth anniversary, campaign group Grenfell United has invited everyone to walk the streets around that still-standing tower at 6pm to show solidarity with their cause. As they write in their open invitation: “Eight years on. No arrests. The tower is a stark reminder of what happened that night but the government has decided it’s time to bring it down. They want the tower out of sight. But we won’t stop until the criminals are brought to justice.”
Despite a six-year inquiry and a 1,700-page report which concluded glaring failures by local and national government, and the private sector, led to Grenfell becoming an inevitable death-trap, there has been no accountability. Just “unreserved” apologies, admissions of “systemic failures” and empty pledges that “this must never happen again.”
Welcome to Britain, where accountability is a suggestion, not a command. Where, eight years on, Grenfell’s working-class survivors still fight for answers, and many of them, for permanent homes.
Meanwhile, across the country, scores of thousands of flats are still wrapped in dangerous cladding as promises of reform are lost in a buck-passing haze. You have to think that had this fire happened in a swish block of designer apartments in another part of Kensington and Chelsea (actually, the wealthiest borough in Britain) that heads would have rolled on a scale not seen since the guillotine-happy days of the French Revolution. And any cladding on similar ones across the country would have been ripped down long ago.
Grenfell is not just a burning scar on Britain’s conscience it’s another example of a country that lets the marginalised rot while the powerful shrug. It’s about Hillsborough, the Post Office scandal, the infected blood inquiry, about every time the system has kicked the voiceless and told them to stay quiet.
But the people of Grenfell aren’t staying quiet. As evidenced by today, those mentally-scarred survivors and dogged campaigners are still marching, still shouting, still holding up the names of the 72 like a mirror to our shame.
Grenfell isn’t history, it’s a warning. A reminder that when we let inequality fester and the powerful dodge accountability we’re all at risk. So, today, march with them if you can. If you can’t then think of them and feel the weight of eight long years without justice while the guilty sleep well at night.
Then contact your MP and demand the Hillsborough Law is introduced in full, so when the next Grenfell happens the voiceless can force the guilty to answer for their sins.