Fire to raise burning questions
LONDON – Helicopters are not unusual in London, but the intense buzzing from the sky at 5am roused me. From my balcony, I could see a huge plume of smoke billowing up from behind trees. It came from a blaze at Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey residential building, not far from where I live in West London. The authorities declared it a major incident as more than 200 firefighters battled the blaze with an unknown number of people trapped inside.
As the day went on, the scale of the horror became apparent. The death toll rose from six to at least 12, with scores of people needing hospital treatment and some in critical care. There were reports of people jumping from windows to escape the smoke and flames, and of a baby caught by a bystander after being dropped from high above.
It soon emerged that residents had previously raised questions about fire safety in the building, which was home to about 120 families. The Grenfell Action Group, a community organisation, had published a series of blog posts about their grievances with the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, the company that runs the building on behalf of the local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. One post from November, starkly titled “KCTMO: Playing With Fire,” chillingly suggested that “only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord”. The group’s complaints about fire safety go back to 2013.
Whether the borough listened to and acted on these warnings will be examined in the days to come. One thing the local government did do, reportedly, was have its in-house lawyer send a letter in 2013 to the blog’s author alleging defamation and harassment, and demanding the removal of several posts.
Most of the borough’s poor are concentrated in North Kensington, where Grenfell Tower and a majority of social housing stand.
The company that manages Grenfell Tower is a non-profit that is, in theory, run by and for residents of the thousands of buildings it manages in London. But only eight of the 15 board members are residents (the other seven are council appointed or independent), while repairs and maintenance are contracted out to a private company. The council, the ultimate owner of these buildings, has a close relationship with the management company, which the Grenfell Action Group sees as an unresponsive buffer. Residents’ concerns have consistently been ignored and suppressed.
These are turbulent times in Britain, and the fire touches on many of the issues that are riling people. Over the past decade, a series of events have demolished the trust citizens once had in officialdom: the financial crash of 2008, the scandal of parliamentary expenses and the chaos in government following the Brexit referendum.
Amid this dissatisfaction, voters in Kensington – a constituency once staunchly Conservative – elected their first Labour MP last week.
The Grenfell disaster looks like yet another of these “trust us, we’ll look after you” promises that officialdom fails to keep.
The question is as always, who has the right to know? Truly empowered individuals don’t have to wait passively to receive what information officials choose to give them. They can ask their own questions – and get answers.
The residents of Grenfell did not have that power. And this is what must be remedied, not just in Kensington and Chelsea but in every institution that calls itself democratic. This is the end of the “stay-put” citizen. – The New York Times
Heather Brooke is a professor of journalism at City University, London, and author of The Revolution Will Be Digitised.