The Grenfell Inquiry into the fire has lasted five years and
has largely been a whitewashing of events. Apps is heavily critical of the Inquiry
but not to the extent that he believes this was an act of social murder. It has
been clear from the outset that the ruling elite has covered up the true nature
of this crime. Such a cover-up has been compared to the one involving the Hillsborough
football stadium disaster in which 97 people died.
The British ruling elite is an expert in denying justice
using public inquiries. They are deaf to the demands of the survivors. Yet
still, millions of people live in unsafe, dangerous housing. Still, the
government even refused to implement all of the limited housing safety measures
recommended by Moore-Bick.
As Charles Hixson and Robert Stevens write, "The
Inquiry bore witness to endless self-justifications by corporate and government
bodies, shamelessly passing the buck for the use of shoddy, dangerous and
illegal materials on the refurbishment of the tower even as documents confirmed
that residents' concern about safety was treated with contempt. It has been
painfully obvious to everyone since the immediate aftermath of the fire that a
small number of individuals are culpable for the mass deaths at Grenfell,
including the owners/decision makers at major contractor Rydon, cladding
manufacturer Arconic, Irish insulation provider Kingspan, manufacturer of foam
insulation, Celotex, the Conservative Party-run Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea (RBKC), and its Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation
(KCTMO) which managed the tower".[1]
One of the most important parts of the book is how Apps
writes about the night of the fire, as told through the experiences of the
people involved. According to one writer: "They put a human context to the
tragedy: the lives, loves, challenges, dreams of those who died or whose lives
were changed forever by what happened".
Still, after six years since the fire, nobody has been
charged, let alone jailed. As Peter Apps correctly states, "Grenfell can
feel like a past story—it's not. It's something that needs to be kept in the
public eye if we want to see the companies responsible held to account.
Grenfell didn't have to happen. This was a problem people were worried
about—adding combustible materials onto the outside of buildings. The book
brings together the story about how a tower block in one of the richest parts
of the richest cities in the world clad a building in material chemically
similar to petrol."
Apps book shows that The Grenfell Tower Fire resulted from
profiting, negligence and a lack of regard for people living in social housing.
A raft of construction companies, regulators, the Tory-led council and the
government, have blood on their hands.
As the Marxist writer Frederick Engles once wrote, "When
one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we
call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury
would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of
proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural
death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or
bullet when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under
conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of
the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the
inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and
yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as
the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against
which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees
the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one since the
offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."[2]
While Apps doesn't entirely agree with the concept of social
murder, his book is well worth the read and would seem to have sold widely and
deservedly so.
