I found Nez leaning on a wall, staring at the tower block where her friends lived. Friends she has not heard from since before the fire. Friends she does not expect to see again.

She is crying.

Crying for her friends she believes she will never see again. Crying for her sister-in-law who made it out just in time and is now recovering round the corner with her brother.

'About 600 people were crammed into these flats, six flats to a floor, 24 storeys high. Maximum-capacity dwellings with minimum possibility of escape'

'It is surreal, this burned-out black building, still billowing acrid smoke up and across the people scattered in the surrounding streets'

Crying in anger, too. Angry that 'they' let this happen. Angry that no one cared. Angry that the people she loved were left to burn.

Angry they were told to stay inside, pushed back, told to seek safety in their own homes and use wet towels to blot the smoke from the door when they were begging for help to get out.

Emergency responders were following protocol. I have just passed them on the kerb, faces blackened, looking half-dead themselves.

The agreed evacuation policy was to 'stay put / defend in space'. And the frightened residents did as they were told by the people who knew best.

They stayed put. Defended in place. And died in place, too.

Onlookers were forced to watch the horror of small children crying for their mums, parents pleading for help. One mother throwing her baby into the night, hoping arms would catch his fall.

Helplessly watching other human beings waving towels from windows, flashing lights on and off, desperately signalling for help in the most basic and urgent of all languages. Like flares at sea: SOS! But with no sky-boat to pluck them from their raging hell.

'The agreed evacuation policy was to "stay put / defend in space". And the frightened residents did as they were told by the people who knew best'

People here are angry. There is a real feeling that all these residents were a sacrifice to greed, at best, and vanity, at worst.

An £8.7 million refurbishment project on this tower was completed in May last year. Nez says it was cheap. She makes a face. She believes 'the bathrooms, the materials, everything was the cheapest, the worst.'

There was no care for those on the inside, staring forlornly out. The cladding on the outside was for the benefit of the outside world looking in; the spanking new Academy and Leisure Centre deserved a better backdrop. So ‘they’ clad the tower block in stuff that would be less offensive to the eyes they were trying to attract.

Probably turning the homes of the people living there into a Roman candle in the process.

I walked here through leafy Notting Hill, the richest borough. Family mansions, inherited wealth, tidy as the desk of an accountant, gleamed white in the sunshine. There was no suffering there, no pain, no need to make do and mend. Or bump along at the bottom of life, sucking up the stuff others throw away.

The contrast could not be more stark. Down the hill everything is black. The tower is a crematorium, with bodies piled up inside. Hundreds, they say.

It is surreal, this burned-out black building, still billowing acrid smoke up and across the people scattered in the surrounding streets with dust masks on their foreheads and necks.

It’s all too macabre for the real world; I feel like I’ve stumbled onto the set of a film, a made-up scene plonked in the middle of normal-ville.

Except this is real.

A woman pushes past me with her shopping to get back into her home in the block of flats directly opposite, muttering something about the number of people missing. One hundred? Two? Others nod in agreement. She says we will never know. People had friends to stay. She says these will be the invisible people, turned to dust,

About 600 people were crammed into these flats, six flats to a floor, 24 storeys high. Maximum-capacity dwellings with minimum possibility of escape. They had just one stairwell and one shared exit point between them.

No alarm to speak of. No sprinklers. No exit routes. No hope.

They never stood a chance.

And they knew it, too. Lived with death as a real possibility.

'We stuffed a shitty tower block full of immigrants, the poor and the least powerful in one of Britain’s richest boroughs, and then turned it into a Roman candle'

We stuffed a shitty tower block full of immigrants, the poor and the least powerful in one of Britain’s richest boroughs, and then turned it into a Roman candle. It is a just punishment that so many of us were forced to watch it burn. Penitence for our sins.

We deserve to feel bad. I feel bad. We are just down the hill from the posh places where perfect mums push prams around homes too big for the souls inside.

We have gone very wrong.

Instead of fixing a problem we hid it behind cladding apparently so flammable it went up like tinder.

Instead of listening to worried residents, who predicted all this would happen, we ignored them until it did.

Quite simply, the people at risk weren't important enough, weren't connected enough. They had no voice and no power. Many were in homes provided by the council.

I can hear myself saying: you have to be grateful for what you are given; beggars can't be choosers. I thought I was a hard capitalist.

But not this – no one deserves this.

No one should be grateful to live in a death trap. No one should have to. Even if it looks pretty on the outside.

How many lives have to be lost to make people sit up and take notice?

Two hundred? Four?

This event marks a macabre new exchange rate, where the life of one politician is infinitely more valued than the life of the 600 people they are supposed to represent.

This is the worst possible face of capitalism. The worst of all truths. And it stinks.

There will be investigations, recriminations. People will try to explain this away. To distance themselves from the problem. To shirk the accountability they were royally paid to accept.

Perhaps someone will lose their job. Perhaps Robert Black, the CEO of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, who is on £140K a year with a fixed salary pension?

Contrition is not enough.

'I can hear myself saying: you have to be grateful for what you are given; beggars can't be choosers. I thought I was a hard capitalist. But not this – no one deserves this'

Multiple sackings won’t be enough. This is corporate manslaughter on a scale we have never seen in our lifetime, where the lives of ordinary people were considered incidental to the career and salary advancement of the few.

A grubby trail of lies, deceit, cost-cutting and backhanders are likely to be uncovered. I can almost smell them out here on the street between the bits of building strewn about the floor.

Somebody needs to go to jail.

All the executive team should serve time inside and see what life is like when you are nothing, have nothing, and your voice counts for nothing.

But none of it will change this reality. It won't change this horrible thing and it won't make it better.

They are all dead.

Latest estimates say 12 confirmed dead; locals say you can easily add a zero to that.

Now we’re listening! How pathetic we are. How cruel.

Sadiq Khan will tell us 'lessons have been learned' and that 'changes will be made'. He's good at this scripted sh*t.

Right now, to these people I am with, that means nothing. Their anger is real and it’s justified.

I am angry with them.

It is time some people were made to pay.