RS

Well what you need to know is this is not the first time this has happened. In 2009 there was a fire in another tower block in South London called Lakanal. It was caused by many of the same kinds of issues. Essentially, the fire safety provisions were completely inadequate. It was blamed on the local council, in that case, and they were fined over five hundred thousand pounds.

But it’s also related to legislation and it’s related to the fact that the government has had a report into the need for proper fire safety provisions at tower blocks in the United Kingdom. They are completely underserviced, and the government sat on the report.

In addition to that, they’ve been cutting back on public provisions all over in the context of austerity. And particularly in this case, fire service provisions. 21 percent increase in deaths as a result. Three fire stations near Grenfell were closed. We were fortunate that the fire service was able to get there and was able to save some lives. But it does look as though, given the scale of the fire, given that it consumed so much of that tower block so quickly, that the death rate is going to be atrocious.

So there’s laws, there’s health safety legislation. There’s also the question of social cleansing. Now, this is a pattern. I know that you know of this and you have this in the United States: gentrification. This is a pattern, certainly in London, where two things are happening. First of all, landlords are jacking up rents in the center where they feel the market rate is much higher than the current rent rate. That’s because there’s a high demand for accommodation in these areas. They are using higher rent rates to drive out the poor and to redevelop these properties to make them more appealing for richer, more affluent residents.

This is helped along by changes to the benefits system, cuts to housing benefits, which are the only way to pay for rent if you’re poor. Even if you’re employed, if you’re in work, there’s no way you can afford rent unless you can get some housing benefits. And you are allowed to apply for them even if you’re in work. But they’ve been cut significantly and the local council refused to support local residents who’ve been driven out. They said they would re-house them, but outside of the area. For many of the poor that means outside of London. So, the capital is slowly being turned into a kind of playground for the rich.

This is not a completed process by any means because we saw what happened in Kensington at the election. Kensington, the richest constituency in the borough, saw a surprising coup by the local poor and working class who organized and voted to get an anti-gentrification activist [Emma Dent Coad] standing for Labour elected. First time. And it was a shock. It was a part of Labour’s nationwide sweep. And I would generalize out from this. I would say there was a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis certainly for this government but more generally for a system — particularly the political system, the way we’re governed, the structured neoliberal capitalism and the debt-speculation economy that we’re tied into.

The government stood for election saying there was no magic money tree. “We’re gonna have to make cuts.” This patronizing line was rejected by the majority of the electorate. There was a surprise surge for Labour in part as a reaction against austerity which we’ve had for years and years now, and which hasn’t resulted in restored growth or reduction of the deficit as was claimed.

So this has accelerated and exacerbated some of the crises in the system. And what we’re finding is that more and more people are excluded by an economy that’s based in debt and speculation. To be clear about why that’s relevant: in order to be able to support your wages which are going to fall relative to productivity you need to have some assets. Given that the pension system isn’t going to support you properly, given that the welfare system isn’t going to support you properly, given that wages are falling relative to profits and productivity, you have to get a private pension; you have to have some savings and you have to have a house. The value of the house, because of scarcity, and because the government doesn’t build enough housing, is going to rise. It’s going to soar year on year. We’ve got a crazy property market here. So you can continually borrow against it to buy the stuff that you need.

That worked for a period of time. But younger generations have been increasingly frozen out of that because the price of houses are impossible. Also since the credit crunch they’ve been frozen out of the labor market in greater numbers. And the higher-education system which was supposed to be the mechanism of meritocracy — you know, you work hard, you get somewhere — is increasingly difficult to get into. The education maintenance allowance, which was a benefit that allowed working-class kids to get to the higher education system, to qualify for it, was scrapped. Tuition fees were trebled. And a new kind of marketized hierarchy was created in the education system. So that there’s an “ivy league” effectively that have the best resources and the rest are just made to do with whatever.

This is the situation we face. The result of that is increasing inequality in terms of access to the things, property and so on, which you are told enable you to participate in the democracy, a property-owning democracy, we were told we could have. And that is partly why we have, in response to this, even though the majority of people don’t live in tower blocks or anything like that, a generalization of the problem because more and more people recognize the system as being one that creates situations like this. The landlords get away with everything. The rentier class get away with everything, austerity, the way policies get implemented in their interest against ours. That has put an already embattled government on the back foot.