UK / Housing
Grenfell Fire Disaster

Grenfell is political. The right can’t make that fact go away ... Tory MPs attacked John McDonnell’s comments. But this disaster has destroyed the belief that politics has nothing to do with everyday life

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Grenfell is political. The right can’t make that fact go away ... Tory MPs attacked John McDonnell’s comments. But this disaster has destroyed the belief that politics has nothing to do with everyday life


Pedestrians walk past a sign that reads 'Justice For Grenfell' ... ‘Grenfell residents’ warnings were deliberately ignored.’ Photograph: Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images

As night follows day, so must politicians accuse other politicians of playing politics. I am referring to the attempt by the right to close down the politicisation of the Grenfell disaster: the suffering of the lost and the survivors in this fire, they say, must not be appropriated or “exploited” by the Labour party.



John McDonnell’s comments at Glastonbury – he said that decisions “made by politicians over decades murdered those families” – have been attacked by Tory MPs including Andrew Bridgen and Nadine Dorries. Bridgen told the Daily Mail that Labour was using Grenfell victims as “political pawns”. Dorries said McDonnell should have “let the dust settle, bodies be identified and given people time to grieve” before he started playing politics with people’s suffering.

This is enough, apparently, to constitute “a backlash”. It assumes that those most deeply affected by Grenfell have no voice themselves and are somehow passive – rather than listening to what they are saying. Which is of course very political.

The disregard for people’s voices is not new. Their warnings were deliberately ignored. Their fears were not worth the small amount needed for fire-resistant cladding. As more and more tower blocks are found unsafe, this indeed is a national emergency. Housing – actual housing – not property has been in a state of emergency for some time. It is how inequality manifests itself directly day to day. It renders invisible what we prefer not to see but Grenfell, a black tower of death, is unmissable. There is silence as one approaches on a train, then anger and grief as it comes into view.

But this emotional reaction is also to be policed. Is all this just a Dianification of disaster, asked the Mail on Sunday commentator Dan Hodges in an attention-seeking tweet. This is the familiar idea that distress is always hysterical. This is yet another way of trying it to depoliticise discourse. Anger is deemed somehow an overreaction, a simplification. Wait till the complex causes of this fire are properly explained to you. Although, instinctively, the multiple and complex causes of this fire – economic, cultural and racial – were immediately understood.

The results of austerity have already been documented in individual deaths of people who die waiting for benefits. Grenfell has been described as “social murder”, a phrase from Friedrich Engels that describes the appalling conditions that result in the deaths of working-class people. Certainly, decisions made by “business-friendly” politicians of both parties meant that tower blocks could be wrapped in combustible cladding that the market was only too happy to supply.

Warning about loopholes in regulation go back to a fire in Garnock Court in Irvine in which one person died in 1999. Nonetheless, both Labour and Tory governments have campaigned to pare down regulations. The 2005 regulatory reform (fire safety) order meant no government inspection was necessary for buildings to be certified as complying with fire safety standards, and instead there would be self-policing. Existing building regulations were defended even after the Lakanal House fire in 2009, in which six people died. David Cameron, like many, said that further regulation would be a burden on industry.

Being business–friendly, rather than tenant or even human-friendly, is a political choice. The collateral damage of those decisions lies in the ash of Grenfell. Yet the word “murder” is considered incendiary, even though it was the police who talked about possible manslaughter charges after the fire.

The attempts to close down the space for politics around Grenfell are happening in subtle and not so subtle ways. Referring to it always as “a tragedy”, as though it were a natural disaster, is one way. Another is to leave everything to charity and goodwill, as though the state has no responsibility in the matter. Clearly we can see it does, as it will have to rehouse those displaced or evacuated. The government is not being generous by providing extra money to do this. This is its job.

The politicising of Grenfell, though, is not coming from politicians – it is coming from the bottom up, because people can see with their own eyes what has been happening. They blame successive governments and a way of thinking that saw their lives as worth very little. The prioritising of saving a few thousand pounds over saving many lives was a political choice.

Rightwing ideology, currently in crisis, insists that politics takes place in a safe space, a well-defended zone away from the everyday. Everything else that happens is just the natural order of things.

This fire and its aftermath has consumed these foolish notions. Politics is about power, who has it and in whose interests it is wielded. The freedom of the market and the freedom from red tape meant people were trapped in a flaming building. No one is “playing politics” here except those desperately trying to police the boundaries of acceptable emotion and acceptable politics.

Grenfell is as political as it gets. To deny that is an insult to the dead and an assault on the intelligence of the living.