Not Manchester. Not the LONDON BRIDGE attack. It is the GRENFELL TOWER FIRE that has torn Britain apart and EXPOSED THE RIFTS dividing the nation.
Recent months have given the British plenty of reason to be knocked off kilter. In March, a terrorist struck in the shadow of Big Ben. Last month, a suicide bomber blew up concert-going children and their parents in Manchester. Two weeks ago, jihadis plowed a van into London Bridge pedestrians before going on a stabbing rampage through a busy pub district.
If anything, the attacks hardened British resolve, as people headed back out to pubs and concerts in a spirit of defiance and took to social media to mock the notion that a few miscreants with knives could leave their nation reeling.
But where bombs and vehicles and knives failed, a horrific fire this week in a London apartment block has succeeded in opening a deep divide in British society. On Friday, working-class Londoners outraged at the loss of life in the Grenfell Tower fire — 30 confirmed dead and dozens missing — took to the streets. They heckled Prime Minister Theresa May, calling her a coward as she visited survivors, stormed a town hall and, as dusk approached, gathered outside the charred apartment block, demanding justice and accusing authorities of negligence.
“We need answers and we need answers now,” one man said through a megaphone. “This should not be happening in the United Kingdom, this should never happen.”
A high-rise housing hundreds of families should not go up like a tinderbox, not anywhere and certainly not in an industrialized country with the best technology at its disposal. But the fire has exposed that in London, blocks apart, live two different worlds.
Labour MP David Lammy, who lost a friend in the fire, said the tragedy is proof of the disintegration of the safety net that protected the country’s most vulnerable. “This is a tale of two cities,” he told Channel 4 News. “This is what Dickens was writing about in the century before the last, and it’s still here in 2017. It’s the face of the poorest and most vulnerable.” He said his friend, a young artist named Khadija Saye, died with her mother, trapped on the 22nd floor of the Grenfell. “It breaks my heart that that’s happening in Britain in 2017,” he said.
The Grenfell Tower is in North Kensington, a district ranked among the 10 per cent poorest in England. Completed in 1974, the 24-storey building provided subsidized housing to roughly 600 people in 120 apartments. But it is not far from posh mansions that sell for millions, many bought by foreign owners who rarely inhabit them. In fact, overall the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is London’s richest, and its less fortunate residents have long felt they were an afterthought.
Some have accused the borough of seeking to squeeze the poor out. In 2015, a tenants’ rights group accused the borough of “social cleansing” when it proposed buying affordable housing for the poor outside city limits. John Elledge of the New Statesman reports that the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea was the third worst in England in increasing its housing stock, adding just 1 per cent between 2004 and 2014. “It is — let’s be charitable about this — not obvious that RBKC has gone out of its way to meet its duty of care to its poorer residents,” Elledge wrote Friday.
Authorities can’t say they weren’t warned. Last November the Grenfell Action Group warned that apartment blocks in the neighbourhood were firetraps. They said residents had received no proper fire-safety instructions and were informed by a notice in the elevator to remain in their apartments in the event of a fire. “The Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord,” it wrote on its blog, warning later of “an incident that results in serious loss of life.”
An exploding refrigerator is believed to have ignited the fire, but fire safety experts suspect its rapid spread was aided by cladding that had recently been installed on the building’s exterior.
The borough spent a reported $4.4-million on cladding and replacement windows so it would look nice to passersby, one resident told The Guardian. “But you don’t come and fix some fire alarms or put some sprinklers, and people die.”
The investigation of a 2016 apartment block fire found that foam inside cladding fuelled the fire’s spread. London fire chiefs wrote to borough councils warning them of the danger, but nothing was done. Arnold Turling, a member of the Association of Specialist Fire Protection, said he warned a conference three years ago of the dangers of cladding that is not sufficiently fire retardant. He called the Grenfell fire “entirely avoidable.”
It is the sense of negligence, that the lives of the poor are not worthy of the same protection as the rich, that is fuelling the anger in London’s streets. Much of it has been directed at May, whose precarious hold on government after the June 8 election has been shaken further by the fire.
On Thursday she was severely criticized for visiting the site but failing to meet with survivors, talking instead to firefighters. In an exchange captured on video by reporters Friday, one resident took Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the House of Commons, to task for the prime minister’s fly-by visit. “At least she could have met the victims, at least. Corbyn, Corbyn’s a good man, and he met them,” the man said, referring to the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “He came and met the people.”
When May sought to make amends Friday, visiting families of the missing at a church, she was chased off, with people shouting at her to go home.
May is discovering that not all moments of national tragedy are equal. Because terrorism strikes randomly, it is easy for anyone to picture themselves or a loved one as a victim. And when the driving force is religious fanaticism based in a distant land, there is no easy outlet for anger. But the people of London know the fire that consumed Grenfell Tower would never have happened in one of the new luxury buildings a few kilometres away, equipped as they are with the sprinklers and fire protection their wealthy residents demand. And when the grieving and displaced seek out who is responsible for the deadly disparity, they can find them much closer to home.
In an editorial this week, The Independent wrote that it is in London where the disparity between the country’s haves and have-nots is most pronounced. “When the dust settles, and the ash,” the newspaper wrote, “we must consider whether this tragedy is not only a personal nightmare for all who are directly affected but is also an emblem of a broken society.”