The forthcoming Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a
National Tragedy by Emma Dent Coad promises to be a powerful indictment of the
social relations that produced the Grenfell Tower fire and of the political
establishment that has denied justice to its victims ever since. Dent Coad
stands in a unique relationship to the events. She was elected Labour MP for
Kensington only four days before the fire of 14 June 2017, lived close to the
tower and had already spent years as a councillor opposing the policies pursued
by the Conservative-controlled Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The
publisher presents the book as both an act of witness and an examination of
what Grenfell reveals about Britain as a whole.
That starting point is entirely justified. Grenfell cannot
be understood as an isolated building failure or even as the product merely of
individual corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and corporate dishonesty.
Seventy-two people died in a disaster whose essential conditions had been
created over decades through deregulation, privatisation, attacks on council
housing, cuts to fire services and the subordination of elementary human needs
to property speculation and corporate profit. The final Grenfell Tower Inquiry
report acknowledged that every death was avoidable and documented extensive
failures extending through government, construction companies, manufacturers
and the institutions supposedly responsible for protecting residents.
The term that best describes these processes was supplied
nearly two centuries ago by Friedrich Engels: social murder. In The Condition
of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels used the concept to describe how
society knowingly places workers in circumstances that prematurely destroy
their lives and then permits those circumstances to continue. The concept
matters because it rejects attempts to separate individual catastrophes from
the social order that produces them. The World Socialist Web Site applied this
analysis to Grenfell immediately, and the Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire
address delivered at the Socialist Equality Party's August 2017 public meeting
traced the disaster through the interconnected processes of deregulation,
austerity, property speculation and the degradation of social housing. [wsws.org]
Evidence since then has vindicated that assessment. The
inquiry's final report found what the World Socialist Web Site described as
"systematic dishonesty" among companies connected with the
refurbishment, including efforts to manipulate testing, misrepresent data and
conceal the dangers associated with products used in the tower. At the same
time, government departments had failed over many years to respond adequately
to warnings about combustible materials on high-rise buildings. [wsws.org]
What makes Dent Coad's intervention potentially valuable is
that she approaches these processes not as an outside commentator but as
somebody who witnessed the extraordinary gulf separating two Kensingtons. On
one side stand enormous concentrations of property wealth, luxury housing and
some of the richest households in Britain. On the other are council tenants,
low-paid workers and families struggling for decent housing in what the
publisher itself describes as a broader housing crisis. The publicity for
Grenfell Britain explicitly connects the disaster to unsafe housing, empty
luxury developments and the continuing domination of housing policy by wealth
and privilege.
Grenfell exposed this class divide with almost unbearable
clarity. Residents had repeatedly warned of the dangers confronting them. The
Grenfell Action Group's warnings before the fire are now notorious. The failure
was therefore not principally one of insufficient knowledge. Those with
institutional authority possessed warnings and evidence, while those without
power were treated as troublesome obstacles. As the inquiry's own findings later
showed, avoidable danger coexisted with corporate cost-cutting and government
failure.
This is precisely why Grenfell cannot be reduced to the
language of "lessons learned". The facts point towards something far
more fundamental: a social order in which the accumulation of private wealth
takes precedence over the safety and dignity of working people. The facts Dent
Coad assembles point towards a conclusion the working class of Grenfell had
already reached by bitter experience.
The limits of the parliamentary perspective
The fundamental political problem posed by Dent Coad's
account, however, is the contradiction between the devastating character of the
evidence and the parliamentary Labour framework within which its author has
historically operated. Grenfell does not simply indict Conservative
politicians, corrupt companies or an unusually callous local authority. It
raises an unavoidable question about the Labour Party and the entire political
system through which capitalist interests have been defended.
Dent Coad's personal record of opposition to Kensington and
Chelsea Council deserves serious treatment. But individual sincerity cannot
resolve the historical problem Labour itself represents. Grenfell took place
after decades in which Conservative and Labour governments successively
deregulated the economy, expanded the power of private capital, facilitated the
financialisation of housing and subordinated local government to austerity and
market mechanisms. In its assessment of the inquiry report, the World Socialist
Web Site noted that the inquiry itself identified governmental failures
stretching through both Conservative and Labour administrations, while failing
to impose genuine political accountability on the leading figures responsible. [wsws.org]
Jeremy Corbyn's experience is decisive in this respect.
Corbyn's election as Labour leader generated enormous expectations among
workers and young people who saw his leadership as a chance to reverse decades
of Blairism, austerity and war. Yet the political orientation remained centred
upon transforming the Labour Party and achieving social change through
Parliament rather than constructing an independent revolutionary movement of
the working class. Grenfell itself exposed the consequences of this
orientation.
The World Socialist Web Site repeatedly warned that Labour's
participation in the government-established Grenfell Inquiry risked
subordinating popular demands for justice to institutions incapable of
providing it. A 2018 report on a Justice4Grenfell meeting noted that Dent Coad
participated alongside figures from the trade-union movement in pressuring the
official inquiry and existing institutions. Another WSWS assessment in 2019
argued that Labour and its allies were legitimising an inquiry that could not
itself establish criminal liability. [wsws.org]
The issue was never whether individual Labour politicians
genuinely sympathised with the bereaved or regarded the conduct of the council
and corporations with disgust. The more fundamental question was whether
justice could be secured through the very state institutions responsible for
maintaining the economic and political structures that produced Grenfell. It
could not.
The 2019 general election supplied another bitter lesson.
Dent Coad lost Kensington after having secured the historically Conservative
constituency in 2017. But Labour's defeat cannot seriously be explained simply
through electoral arithmetic. Corbyn's leadership retreated repeatedly before
Labour's right wing and refused to mobilise the enormous movement that had
emerged around his leadership in a political struggle against the party's
Blairite apparatus. The result was not the transformation of Labour into an
instrument of socialist politics but the preparation of conditions for restoring
the party's openly pro-business leadership. Grenfell therefore poses the
question that parliamentary reformism cannot answer: what happens when the
institutions the working class is told to appeal to are themselves structurally
integrated into the defence of capitalist property and political power?
After the Inquiry: Where is the justice?
The publication of the final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report
in September 2024 demonstrated the dimensions of this contradiction. It
identified extensive failings and corporate wrongdoing, yet years after the
disaster, criminal accountability had still not followed. The Grenfell Tower
fire public inquiry's final whitewash noted that the inquiry had no power to
determine criminal or civil liability and that, when the report appeared, the
Metropolitan Police had not arrested or charged anyone in connection with the
disaster.
The subsequent After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are
the arrests? drew out the political implications. Its central argument was that
Grenfell involved identifiable decisions made under conditions in which profit
and commercial advantage were treated as more important than working-class
safety. The inquiry documented regulatory failures, corporate dishonesty and
the ability of private businesses to exploit a weakened regulatory regime, yet
justice remained deferred. [wsws.org]
This continued under the Labour government elected in 2024.
The final inquiry report appeared under Keir Starmer's premiership. Starmer
apologised on behalf of the British state and said that the disaster should
never have happened. Still, the response did not overturn the basic conditions that
had allowed political responsibility to be evaded. The WSWS noted at the time
that the government promised to consider the inquiry's recommendations, while
accountability through prosecutions remained unresolved.
There could be little more devastating evidence of the
inadequacy of the proposition that institutional exposure automatically
produces justice. Grenfell has been investigated, reconstructed, analysed,
documented and memorialised. Parliamentary statements have been delivered.
Political apologies have been issued. Thousands of pages of inquiry evidence
have entered the historical record. Yet the fundamental issue raised by the
bereaved and survivors from the outset remains. Justice has not followed
automatically from truth. Nor has the housing crisis that gave rise to Grenfell
disappeared. Indeed, the publicity for Dent Coad's forthcoming book makes
precisely this argument. Grenfell Britain is promoted as asking why, if
Grenfell failed to change everything, the conditions surrounding housing
inequality and insecurity remain embedded in British society.
This is the question the book must ultimately confront. But
the answer cannot finally be found by demanding that the existing political
establishment behave differently. The persistence of the conditions exposed at
Grenfell is not simply a failure of political will. It expresses social
interests.
Grenfell and the logic of capitalism
Housing under capitalism possesses a fundamental
contradiction. For the working class it is a basic social necessity. For
capital, it is property, an investment, an asset class, and a source of rent,
interest, and speculative wealth. In London this contradiction reaches
grotesque proportions. Homes exist simultaneously as places where human beings
must live and as financial instruments whose profitability may depend on
restricting supply, increasing rents, or maximising land values.
Public housing represented, however partially and
inadequately, an intrusion of social need into this logic. This is why its
destruction became a central component of the neoliberal offensive associated
with the Thatcher governments and why subsequent administrations never reversed
that offensive. Council estates sitting upon enormously valuable London land
occupy territory whose potential exchange value is regarded by developers,
banks and investors as being squandered when it provides secure and affordable
accommodation to working people. Grenfell stood at the geographical centre of
this social antagonism.
The disaster therefore cannot be answered by regulatory
rearrangement alone, necessary though rigorous safety regulation unquestionably
is. Regulations operating within a society dominated by private profit are under
continual pressure from the corporations they regulate. Housing remains shaped
by the power of landowners, banks, developers and construction conglomerates.
Local authorities operate amid financial constraints imposed from above.
Governments of every political colouration insist that the commanding heights
of economic life must remain privately owned.
This is why the concept of social murder remains
indispensable. It shifts attention from individual wickedness towards the
social structure that continuously reproduces conditions in which preventable
suffering becomes normal. That does not absolve individuals or corporations of
responsibility. On the contrary, those responsible for criminal conduct must be
held accountable. But prosecution, however necessary, cannot by itself
eliminate the economic system that generates the same conflict between private
profit and social need in another form.
What is to be done
The great merit of Emma Dent Coad's proposed indictment is
therefore also the source of the political questions it must raise. If Grenfell
demonstrates the consequences of corporate greed, political cowardice and class
privilege; if successive governments allowed conditions to emerge in which
working-class lives could be subordinated to commercial interests; if official
investigations can document devastating evidence without automatically
producing justice; and if the housing crisis persists after all the pledges
that Grenfell must never happen again, then what conclusion follows?
Britain cannot need merely better politicians administering
the same economic system. The necessary conclusion is a break with Labourism
and every conception that the machinery of capitalist government can gradually
be transformed into an instrument for abolishing the power of capital. The
working class requires its own independent political movement, organised
internationally and armed with a socialist programme. In Britain, this means
building the Socialist Equality Party as the British section of the
International Committee of the Fourth International and developing independent
organisations of working-class struggle that can challenge the authority of the
trade-union and Labour bureaucracies.
Housing must cease to be organised primarily as a vehicle
for private accumulation. The major property interests, construction
conglomerates and financial institutions upon which the housing system depends
must be brought under democratic public ownership and workers' control. Housing
construction, maintenance and fire safety must be planned according to social
need and scientifically established standards, not the profitability
requirements of investors and contractors. Vast social resources must be directed
towards building high-quality council housing and making existing homes
genuinely safe. That would not constitute an administrative modification of
capitalism. It would mean an attack upon capitalist property relations
themselves.
Grenfell's residents did not lack warnings. They did not
lack intelligence. They did not lack determination. They did not lack evidence.
Long before the fire they understood the danger facing them, and after the
catastrophe survivors, relatives and residents refused to allow the dead to
disappear beneath official condolences and public-relations exercises. What
they lacked, and what the working class continues to lack, is political power.
Grenfell's enduring significance lies here. The tower stands
not merely as the site of a terrible disaster but as an indictment of an entire
social order. No inquiry report can resolve that indictment, because the
decisive question lies beyond any inquiry's jurisdiction: which class controls
society, and in whose interests are its immense resources organised? The answer
to social murder is not another promise that capitalism will regulate itself
more carefully. It is socialism.
Bibliography
Dent Coad, Emma. Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a
National Tragedy. London: Verso, forthcoming 8 June 2027. The publisher
description presents the book as an examination of Grenfell's legacy and
Britain's continuing housing crisis. [penguinran...mhouse.com]
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in
England. 1845.
Scripps, Thomas. Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire. World
Socialist Web Site, 22 August 2017. [wsws.org]
Scripps, Thomas. After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are
the arrests?. World Socialist Web Site, 12 September 2024. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry delivers
its final whitewash. World Socialist Web Site, 4 September 2024.
Stevens, Robert. Labour and unions seek to corral social
anger over Grenfell fire behind official inquiry. World Socialist Web Site,
20 June 2018. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell fire anniversary used by
pseudo-left to boost Labour and Corbyn. World Socialist Web Site, 17
June 2019. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower to be dismantled: Why is
there still no justice?. World Socialist Web Site, 11 February 2025. [wsws.org]
