As I watched the mass exodus of MPs from both sides of the house who chose to leave rather than stay for Keir Starmer’s brief statement on the Grenfell inquiry report this week, I was reminded of a similar act of disdain by a previous member of parliament.
Eric Pickles, one in a long line of David Cameron’s ministers in charge of housing, was questioned about the role deregulation had played in the Grenfell disaster as part of the inquiry. In response, he asked tetchily how long it was going to take, because he had a busy schedule. Perhaps foreseeing how badly this might play in public, he calmed down long enough to insist that Cameron’s bonfire of red tape had played no part in his department’s failure to rewrite inadequate building regulations.
The inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, found otherwise. Citing documents and evidence from those inside the housing department, he wrote: “Lord Pickles was not only aware of, but supported, that (deregulatory) approach, including the application of the policies to the Building Regulations.”
This refusal to acknowledge the truth by people high up in government is what Karim Mussilhy, who lost his uncle in the fire and is vice-chair of the survivors and bereaved organisation Grenfell United, was talking about when he told us for our National Theatre play: “The system isn’t broken. The system was built specifically this way to keep us where we are and them where they are.” The us he was talking about are the people of Grenfell, the surrounding area and others who live in social housing; the them is the government, both local and national, which treats people in social housing as lesser beings whose warnings can be casually ignored while corporates – the builders and manufacturers of flammable materials – are given licence to lie and to cheat.
In the years I spent compiling my play, which was drawn verbatim from residents’ testimonies, I had the privilege of hearing what some of the people of Grenfell had to say. Although they had no way of knowing that the cladding and insulation that covered the refurbished building would burn like petrol, they had known for a long time that many things were going badly wrong. They told me about a council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its managing agent, the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), that treated them as if they should have no voice in the way that they lived. They drew a picture of one of the richest boroughs in England ignoring them because they lived in social housing. They talked about fire doors that fell off their hinges, fire extinguishers long past their sell-by date, new windows that didn’t fit, windowsills scorched by the mere dropping of cigarette ash, boilers relocated to block hallways in order to save costs, and the random changing of floor numbers – which confused their visitors and, they worried, might confuse firefighters. But before they talked to me they had already complained vociferously to a council that simply ignored them.
As long-term resident Edward Daffarn, co-writer of a Grenfell blog, said when I asked him about the way he was being called a prophet of the fire: “The fire was a logical conclusion of a borough council that was failing to scrutinise a landlord that was failing to implement health and safety. So although the horror of what happened could never be imagined, it was a prediction rather than a prophecy.” And in the words of another Grenfell survivor, Turufat Yilma, talking about having shown a TMO official how badly her new windows fitted: “We knew and they knew, and that’s the saddest part.” Failure by the authorities to act on this knowledge killed 72 people, none of whom, according to the inquiry, should have died.
In the days after the fire, the survivors and bereaved were left to fend for themselves. The same government – both big and small – that had failed before the fire seemed frozen in its immediate aftermath. It was the survivors who found the strength and the ability to gather together in the community centres to draw up lists so they could figure out who had lived and who had died. And it was the people of that community, and of the wider communities, who provided the housing, the food and the clothing that sustained the victims in those first few terrible days. That same community came up with the green heart that represents Grenfell, and organised a silent walk that was held on the 14th of each month for a year and which now takes place annually.
To walk alongside that community was, in first months, to share some of the terrible grief at the loss of those 54 adults and 18 children. Footsteps tapping the pavement while cars stopped moving and onlookers stopped talking. A march of dignity and of remembrance. But as the years have rolled by, and nobody has been charged, the atmosphere of the marches has begun to change. Though the marchers are still silent, the posters they carry now call more strongly for justice. So much evidence and still no charges, they proclaim, citing the builders, Rydon, and the insulation and cladding manufacturers, Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan, all of whom have now been implicated by the inquiry as being part of a system of incompetence, dishonesty and greed that fuelled the disaster.
And then, in this year, another change: the 2024 silent march started with speeches by the younger generation, the us who have grown up in the shadow of the burnt-out tower. They made it clear that they would be silent no longer out there in the world, because what Grenfell has exposed about our society is that money, class, and whiteness still speak louder than the truth.