Fire has exposed a terrible, justifiable fury
Guilt over the Grenfell tragedy should lead to a mansion tax in Britain, says Jenni Russell.
As I write, a Day of Rage organised by British activists who hijacked the horror of the Grenfell Tower disaster to ‘‘bring down the government’’ looks like a damp squib.
That is a relief. But what worries me is that unless we recognise the fury that people at the bottom of the heap feel about the way they are treated, similar eruptions of rage will become inevitable.
I have never experienced anything like the uneasy combination of emotions evident around the raw black skeleton of Grenfell Tower last Saturday, three days after the fire. In the teeming, pedestrianonly streets, anguish, sorrow, warmth and deep generosity were movingly on display. Volunteers had set up little tables, offering bread, homemade cake, omelettes or fruit to every passer-by. Middle-aged couples were carrying heavy bags full of blankets or toys or baby food, looking hopefully for recipients.
Young men from the Muslim Burial Fund moved through the crowds, offering help with funeral fees to anyone from Grenfell, regardless of faith. Evangelical pastors preached and sang. A man from the Nation of Islam, backed by three burly men with folded arms, handed out cards promising a different route to salvation.
In front of the memorial wall, with its hundreds of anguished handwritten messages, photocopied photographs, tea lights and bouquets, a heavily tattooed man with tears in his eyes knelt, carefully tucking a card into a magnificent bunch of flowers. ‘‘To my dearest DAD,’’ it read.
But simmering just underneath the tangible personal warmth of one stranger to another was utter, helpless, understandable fury. Years of official neglect before the tragedy had been followed by days of official paralysis, cowardice and incompetence. A woman carried a placard: ‘‘We have donations but no direction.’’ One long-term council tenant, shaking with rage, said: ‘‘We’re treated like vermin.’’
Passionate speakers denounced the council and the government as murderers and class-cleansers, wanting to smash the poor. Angry local residents told me that they now trusted no-one in authority. Conspiracy theories spread: a woman in a headscarf told her companion it was suspicious that so many Muslims had been killed. In bitter conversations, people claimed that the government was scheming to hide a true death toll that ran to hundreds, that the council had deliberately set the tower alight to free the land for resale, that there were no official lists of the missing because only a few dozen survivors had got out of the tower alive.
I don’t think that Theresa May’s government, preoccupied by Brexit, terrorism and its own survival, understands the profound anger that the Grenfell deaths and the shoddy response to them have unleashed. This is not a crisis that will pass once the inquiry, inquests and rehousing have taken place.
No matter what the inquiry finds, the deaths have already illuminated a terrible truth: that the poor cannot count on the same rights to life, courtesy or safety as the middle class or the rich. The Grenfell residents, fearing death, could not make anyone powerful listen to them. When the tragedy happened, the same cruel indifference was magnified.
Desperate survivors needed to be nurtured, respected, seen and heard. It didn’t happen. Councillors and the council leader hid, refusing to face residents even at the town hall. Local volunteers, rich and poor, rushed to fill that gap. It wasn’t enough. Their presence has blunted the despair but not absorbed it.
‘‘The anger here is palpable, at any moment it could turn,’’ says a volunteer who has been working 18-hour days. This week has confirmed the impression of residents that they are left to live in trashy places and treated like trash even in disaster. his has resonated in towns and cities where Britain’s poorest are also living as the captive tenants of underfunded councils and their often unresponsive, contracted-out, unaccountable management organisations.
They too are fobbed off when they ask about fire alarms, or plead unsuccessfully for their heating to be repaired days before Christmas, or report crack dens or smashed doors.
These gulfs between lives are morally, politically, practically indefensible, and those closest to the situation know it. In Kensington the privileged have been working alongside everyone else in their community, and everywhere there is a determination to build on the bonds between schools, churches, mosques, residents’ groups.
Those personal links matter. But there must be real structural and political change as well. The problem is part attitude and part resources.
This is a moment when the politically unthinkable becomes possible; when guilt, horror and revelation drive initiatives.
Housing wealth is hugely undertaxed in Britain. A £10 million property that would be taxed at £40,000 a year in New York pays just over £2000 in Britain. The government should introduce some form of graduated mansion tax, starting with tripling or quadrupling council tax for houses over £1m or £2m, with the money raised going to build decent homes and fund respectful treatment for all.
It should add to that by imposing punitive taxes on properties bought by people not resident here.
Former prime minister David Cameron always said his donors wouldn’t wear a mansion tax. But tragedies change minds and create political space. May must act. A shamed Britain can’t tolerate divisions like these, especially as we head, steadily impoverished, for the Brexit door.
— The Times
TThe deaths have already illuminated a terrible truth: that the poor cannot count on the same rights to life, courtesy or safety as the middle class or the rich.