These contradictions acquired their most terrible expression
on 14 June 2017, when the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people. Grenfell was
not an inexplicable accident that suddenly descended upon an otherwise
functioning social system. It exposed before millions of people the
consequences of decades in which council housing, building regulation, local
government and public services had been progressively subjected to austerity,
privatisation, outsourcing and the requirements of the market. The catastrophe
revealed, with terrible clarity, the social consequences of a political order
in which the living conditions and safety of working-class residents were
repeatedly subordinated to financial considerations.
This social landscape gives Emma Dent Coad’s One
Kensington its considerable importance. A Labour councillor in Kensington
and Chelsea from 2006, Dent Coad was elected MP for Kensington in the general
election of 8 June 2017, only days before the Grenfell catastrophe. The tower
stood at the end of her road. Her book consequently occupies an unusual
position between eyewitness testimony, political memoir and an indictment of
one of Britain’s wealthiest local authorities. Its strongest passages provide
an invaluable account of the arrogance, indifference, and class contempt
working-class residents encountered while trying to secure safe housing and
decent public services.
But the book also contains a fundamental contradiction. The
evidence Dent Coad accumulates points toward an indictment of the social order
itself. At the same time, her political conclusions remain largely within the
framework of Labourism, parliamentary reform, and improved local government. One
Kensington comes repeatedly to the threshold of a socialist explanation of
the conditions that produced Grenfell, only to retreat from the conclusions
demanded by its own evidence.
A record of class contempt
The most compelling sections of One Kensington
concern the everyday operation of class power. Dent Coad describes not merely
incompetent administration but an entire political culture in which social
tenants and working-class communities were increasingly seen as obstacles to
redeveloping enormously valuable land. North Kensington residents lived in the
same borough as billionaires, international investors and owners of
extraordinarily expensive properties, some of which were rarely occupied. Yet immense
accumulated wealth did nothing to guarantee decent housing, secure public
services, or provide basic social protection for everyone living in the
borough.
This is precisely why the personal attitudes of Conservative
councillors cannot adequately explain the inequalities documented in the book,
however contemptuous those attitudes may have been. Kensington's extreme
inequalities express the workings of the property market itself. The
extraordinary rise in London land and housing values turned residential
property into a major vehicle for accumulating and preserving wealth.
Working-class communities therefore occupied homes standing on land that became
increasingly attractive to developers and investors. Under these conditions,
the language of “regeneration” acquired a definite class meaning: council
estates could be represented as obsolete, existing communities disrupted and
public land opened to forms of development from which those communities derived
little or no benefit.
Dent Coad is particularly effective when demonstrating how
these processes appeared at street and council level. Her background in
architecture and housing gives her account an understanding of the relationship
between planning decisions and social inequality. Food poverty, overcrowding,
deteriorating estates and divisions in health and life expectancy appear
throughout the book not as abstractions but as features of everyday existence
within a borough internationally associated with extreme wealth. The result is
a powerful documentary charge sheet against both Kensington and Chelsea Council
and the broader social priorities it embodied.
Grenfell transformed that charge sheet into something still
more serious. The working-class residents who repeatedly raised concerns about
their homes were not suffering from a simple failure of communication between
government and governed. Their experience demonstrated how little weight their
needs carried when measured against the financial, commercial and political
priorities governing housing. This is why Grenfell must be understood not only
as administrative negligence but as a class question.
Grenfell and social murder
Friedrich Engels famously employed the concept of “social
murder” in The Condition of the Working Class in England to describe
circumstances in which existing social relations knowingly condemn working
people to premature death. The concept remains indispensable to understanding
Grenfell because it moves discussion beyond the narrow search for a single
catastrophic mistake. It directs attention towards the accumulated political
and economic decisions that created the conditions in which catastrophe became
possible.
Grenfell emerged from a historical process encompassing
deregulation, outsourcing, the degradation of council housing, the
fragmentation of responsibility and the increasing subordination of
construction and housing to commercial interests. Individual decisions plainly
mattered, as did questions of corporate and institutional responsibility, but
those decisions were taken within a society dominated by the capitalist market.
The tragedy cannot therefore be explained simply by saying that Kensington and
Chelsea happened to be run by unusually callous Conservatives.
This is where the evidence presented in One Kensington
begins to exceed the author's own political framework. Dent Coad's account
describes a system operating according to recognisable class interests, but her
proposed political remedies remain centred upon reforming the institutions
through which that system operates. The contradiction becomes increasingly
difficult to ignore as the book proceeds.
The limits of the parliamentary perspective
Dent Coad's political horizon remains fundamentally that of
Labour reformism. The principal enemy is Conservative-controlled Kensington and
Chelsea, while the alternative is sought through community campaigning,
progressive councillors, better MPs and the election of a Labour government
committed to different priorities. The enthusiasm surrounding Jeremy Corbyn's
leadership forms an important part of this perspective. Yet Corbynism itself
showed the limits of trying to channel mounting social opposition through the
existing Labour and parliamentary apparatus.
The problem is not that better councillors, stronger
regulations or more socially conscious MPs would make no difference. Reforms
improving housing conditions and building safety should obviously be supported.
The deeper question is why such elementary requirements continually collide
with powerful economic interests. A council may regulate property development
more aggressively than another; Parliament may enact improved building
standards; governments may impose stricter requirements upon landlords and construction
companies. Yet none of these measures abolishes the underlying contradiction
between housing as a basic human necessity and housing as private property, a
financial asset, and a source of profit.
Dent Coad's political conclusions largely ignore that
contradiction. Conservative mismanagement consequently becomes the explanation
for conditions that developed under governments of both major parties. The
Blair and Brown governments did not overturn the market transformation
initiated under Thatcher. New Labour accommodated the essential economic
framework created in the preceding decades, extending private-sector
involvement in public services while accepting the market's dominance over
housing and land.
Corbynism and the unanswered political question
The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015
expressed a genuine movement to the left among workers and young people after
decades of austerity, war, privatisation and declining living standards. This
social movement played a major role in Labour's unexpectedly strong performance
in the 2017 general election and in Dent Coad's remarkable victory in
Kensington. A constituency synonymous with wealth and Conservative power
returned a Labour MP, apparently demonstrating the potential for a radical political
realignment.
But the subsequent defeat of Corbynism exposed the fatal
weakness of its perspective. Rather than building an independent political
movement against the Labour right and the social forces it represented, Corbyn
insisted that the Labour Party could be reconciled around a parliamentary road
to reform. Repeated compromises strengthened his opponents while disorienting
his supporters. Dent Coad's loss of Kensington in 2019 by just 150 votes formed
part of the broader defeat.
For One Kensington, this experience should have
raised the most fundamental question: if the Labour Party could not be
transformed even under conditions in which hundreds of thousands joined or
supported it in the expectation of radical change, what basis remained for believing
that the working class could achieve a fundamental social transformation
through Labour parliamentarianism? The book never seriously answers this
question. Instead, Labour's defeat appears principally as a political setback
rather than evidence requiring a reassessment of the party itself.
From indictment to socialist programme
One Kensington nevertheless deserves to be read. Dent
Coad's eyewitness evidence, accumulated detail and anger over the treatment of
working-class residents give the book lasting value. She records a borough where
immense concentrations of wealth existed alongside poverty, overcrowding and
insecurity, and she shows the extraordinary distance between official rhetoric
about community and the experiences of those forced to negotiate the
institutions supposedly responsible for protecting them.
But the power of that testimony makes the weakness of the
political conclusions still more apparent. The central question is not whether
Kensington and Chelsea could be administered more compassionately. Clearly it
could. Nor is it whether stronger building regulations, competent housing
management, more council housing and genuine democratic accountability are
urgently required. They are. The decisive issue is why these basic social
requirements repeatedly conflict with the interests of private property.
Safe and decent housing for all cannot ultimately be
guaranteed while housing remains subordinated to profit and speculation. The
construction industry, major developers, land and essential building-material
production cannot remain instruments of private enrichment. At the same time,
society is expected somehow to guarantee that human need takes priority over
financial return. The major corporations dominating these sectors must be
placed under public ownership and democratic working-class control. At the same
time, housing itself must cease to function primarily as a commodity and
speculative asset and become a guaranteed social right.
Such measures inevitably raise the question that One
Kensington avoids: political power. They cannot be realised merely by
replacing bad administrators with good ones while preserving the economic
relations determining what local and national governments can do. They require
the independent political organisation of the working class based on an
international socialist programme directed against capitalism itself.
The working people of North Kensington were never lacking
courage. They were never lacking warnings, intelligence, solidarity or
organisation. Before Grenfell, residents repeatedly tried to make their voices
heard; afterwards, bereaved families, survivors, and the wider community showed
extraordinary determination in demanding truth and accountability. Their
tragedy was not the absence of community activism. It was the absence of a
political movement capable of transforming that social anger into an
independent struggle against the class interests responsible for the conditions
they confronted.
That is ultimately the contradiction at the heart of One
Kensington. Dent Coad provides an insider's indictment of a profoundly
unequal society, and much of the evidence she presents is devastating. But her
politics remain tied to the institutions and the Labour Party through which
that society has been administered. Her evidence points beyond municipal
reform, parliamentary manoeuvre and hopes for another Labour renewal. It points
to the need for independent political mobilisation of the working class and the
socialist reorganisation of society. The book takes the reader to that
threshold, but it does not cross it.
Bibliography
Dent Coad, Emma. One Kensington: Tales from the Frontline
of the Most Unequal Borough in Britain. London: Quercus, 2022; paperback
edition, 2023.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in
England. 1845.
Grenfell Tower Inquiry. Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 1
Report. London: HMSO, 2019.
Grenfell Tower Inquiry. Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2
Report. London: HMSO, 2024.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the
Communist Party. 1848.
[1]
One Kensington: Tales from the Frontline of the Most Unequal Borough in
Britain, by Emma Dent Coad, Quercus, 2022; paperback edition, 2023.
