Abstract
For too long there has been a notable absence of accessible writing on the specific housing conditions that many poor minority ethnic Londoners experience, despite their overrepresentation in social housing. Regrettably, it took a horrifying fire and the death of seventy-two people to change this.
After Grenfell: violence, resistance and response is one of the first books published since the inferno at the 24-storey block of flats at The Lancaster West Estate (Grenfell Tower) in 2017, and by no means should be the last. The incident represents the acme of neoliberal structural violence waged against working-class people over the past forty years in Britain. The laissez-faire local authority, in cahoots with private developers, renovated the tower in cheap flammable cladding between 2015 and 2016; a process which many feel was done in order to make the tower less of a ‘blemish’ in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), the richest borough in the country. But, this cost-cutting has cost lives, thus we wait with bated breath to see what, if any, justice the Public Inquiry will serve.
After Grenfell is an ambitious collection of co-edited essays, which asks what happened at Grenfell? Why did it happen? Who was affected? How can we situate all of this within Britain’s evolving political economy over the past century? But, it also seems to me that there is, too, an unwritten or implicit revisiting of the 1870s discussion of The Housing Question, specifically over the potential transformative role housing can play in struggles against (neoliberal) capitalism.
Though this revisit is somewhat stifled by the book’s unresolved synthesis of race and class, with the former receiving greater scrutiny than the latter. Emphasis is placed on the legacies of colonialism, the hostile environment and immigration policy in a large number of the contributions. Important though such forces are, more explicit and thorough content on issues such as housing financialisation and deregulation, managed decline, as well as the influence of state-led gentrification and the disposability of working-class people residing on land that the government would like to seize, could have strengthened the collection.
Despite this lack, the book is a compelling read, with ten chapters on: housing activism and community responses; the role of the media in representing victims; a history of housing policy; migration, the city and racist anti-immigrant laws; as well as photographic essays and poetry.
In the preface, scholar-activist Phil Scraton poignantly reminds us that, in order for Grenfell to not become a spectacle, and for us to not become mere voyeurs, we must act now. For to sit silently would not only allow this horror to go unpunished, but, Scraton argues, it would sanction a casual accusatory and condemnatory discourse to emerge from the far Right which uses the dead as a soapbox from which to spew a Brexit inspired, xeno-racist commentary on ‘illegal immigrants’.
What we allow, and what will force us to ‘channel grievances into organised and coherent action’ is examined in International Relations scholar Dan Bulley’s chapter, which argues that what happened at Grenfell should shake us out of a long durée of passivity, while also implying that ‘capitalist realism’ 1 is a lived reality.
Bulley shows that the causes of the fire (the works carried out by contractors and subcontractors at Grenfell) and the ‘causes of those causes’ (the failure of local and central government politics) are entangled in a messy network of politically-backed global corporatism feasting upon the dispossessed. But, what he does really well is untangle the multinational composition of London, from its people to its corporations, by looking at how the processes of neoliberal market deregulation and destabilised labour conditions imposed on ‘developing countries’ in the Global South by international capital, resulted in mass migration to London’s council estates. To estates like Grenfell Tower, where other hallmarks of neoliberalism: privatisation, market competition and cost-cutting resulted in the death of at least seventy-two people.
However, for lecturer in law Nadine El-Enany, there is an obvious genealogy to the Grenfell Tower fire that starts, not at the onset of neoliberalism forty years back, but instead, in Britain’s imperial history some 200 years ago. This is what she calls the ‘colonial logic of Grenfell’. Contextualised at first in an analysis of British immigration laws aimed at limiting the arrival of black and brown populations at the end of empire, El-Enany goes on to cogently argue that the ones who did settle were never geographically or spatially assimilated into the wider white population, rather they were cordoned off, excluded and sent to live 24-storeys up in towers like Grenfell. That is why, today, children who live above the fourth floor in high-rise blocks are more likely to be black or Asian, 2 and their parents, with concerns about the safety of their housing, are more likely to be ignored and dismissed on the grounds that ‘they are lucky to be in this country’. This short essay argues Britain is a domestic colony, ‘marked by spaces of colonial control and exclusion’.
In subsequent chapters, experts in the law Sarah Keenan and Gracie Mae Bradley build upon El-Enany’s arguments in their exploration of the government’s more recent immigration laws passed in 2014 and 2016, the latter producing a ‘hostile environment’ with internal borders, requiring a range of public services to run immigration checks before granting access. It is this policy that worried many survivors of the fire who were afraid to seek any official legal help on the grounds that they might be detained or deported – prompting community and campaign groups to call for immigration amnesty.
The Radical Housing Network (RHN), a collection of thirty-plus housing groups and campaigns working across London, providing support, advice and hands-on intervention to residents in a range of circumstances tell us more about their work at Grenfell in their chapter, ‘Grenfell was a fire that shocked us all in its horror, but did not entirely surprise’, since the Grenfell Action Group (GAG) – the collective of concerned residents who foretold the catastrophe – had joined RHN in 2014. Despite this prophesy, RHN convey the urgent mobilisation required from residents (supported by campaign groups) in the aftermath of the fire, particularly when faced with the cunning rightwing media which attempted to exploit internal organisational differences and new demands made by the wider community living around the tower. A feature of any community struggle, as RHN reminds us – Grenfell was no exception.
The ‘extraordinary visibility’ foisted on the community at Grenfell by the mainstream media, is unpacked further by researcher Anna Viola Sborgi in ‘Grenfell on Screen’, who highlights the injustice felt by those who had long been ignored by a press not interested in social housing safety concerns, but now looking for sensational headlines.
In contrast, many grassroots documentaries (and music) had been made after the fire, which sought to reframe the community on their own terms by disrupting the notion of homogeneity, which often had the effect of presenting them as an ‘indistinct whole’. That is why ‘narratives from the ground’ have been welcomed, presenting the individual life stories of survivors, challenging the stigma of living in a tower block and, inadvertently, eliciting a powerful connectedness among those across the UK who have been brought up on ‘the block’. 3
Moving off screen and into the courtroom, legal academic Patricia Tuitt is critical of the contracted legal terrain on which the state is attempting to administer ‘justice’ to the Grenfell survivors. With little recourse to legal aid, what other options have the survivors been left with other than to comply with the public inquiry, she argues. For Tuitt, if such an inquiry is the only route to justice, then a panel of more ethnically diverse adjudicators should be appointed, in order to reflect the racial and religious diversity of the former residents. (Especially since it was precisely the victims’ status, ‘race’ and ‘religion’ which allegedly contributed to the authorities’ lack of interest in their safety concerns before the fire.)
In cultural sociologist Monique Charles’ chapter, we begin to really get a feel for the cultural diversity at Grenfell and the surrounding area, where she brings to life the spirit of community through an examination of past and present struggles in RBKC. These range from setting up a Carnival in celebration of the newly arrived Caribbean population in 1959, measures taken to protect the destruction of homes and land in the 1960s (and a library in 2018), to more recent engagements made by those in the arts, including support offered by rappers ‘from the ends’ during the Grime4Corbyn campaign and the Bush Theatre’s free-leasing of space to residents and care practitioners in the immediate aftermath of the fire in 2017. Charles tells how ‘external pressures [have helped to] forge allegiance, culture, knowledge, resistance and subversion’.
Finally, the backbone of this book is provided in two separate chapters by geographer Nigel de Noronha and community-activist Daniel Renwick. The former is extremely informative, offering a meticulous account of housing policy, starting back in 1915 when, as he describes, the ‘militant working-class’ demanded state investment in affordable homes after the first world war, all the way up to 2018, where we are reminded that, once again, more demands are needed in order to stop the global ruling class (old and new) from reversing the right to adequate housing and reinstating a regime where homes for the many are viewed merely as tiny sites of economic extraction for the few.
There is a subtle yet sharp analysis of the differential treatment experienced by immigrant populations in housing over the years (from Windrush generation to EU migrants), though de Noronha rightly never attempts to swap a class for a race analysis, instead he expertly integrates the two.
Renwick, however, takes a stronger position on class in his discussion of what community activism is like when ‘organising on mute’. By this he means the state’s institutional indifference towards the poor who are forced to mobilise in silence. Renwick makes tangible his intimate knowledge of the community he is fighting alongside, stunningly describing their resistance as ‘genteel and inclusive’ and echoing A. Sivanandan’s notion that there is politics in stories ‘truthfully told’. Here is someone who clearly understands what everyday state contempt for working-class communities looks and feels like, and explains with searing clarity the reality of being a social housing tenant in a city that is systemically dispossessing and clearing out its poorer inhabitants at Grenfell and beyond. But not only is this the most moving chapter, the level of research and political analysis makes this a seminal piece.
In the afterword, Professor of International Relations Robbie Shilliam heeds Renwick’s words that no ‘theory-of-Grenfell’ should be made in academia; instead, he states: ‘communities-under-pressure’ need practical help.