A broken society

IT IS likely that few people in Britain had ever heard of Grenfell Tower on Tuesday last week. Now, and forever more, this unremarkable block of flats in west London will be synonymous with the disaster that consumed it.

The fire that broke out in the small hours of Wednesday morning spread quickly and uncontrollably to every floor of the 24-storey building from the fourth up. Fire alarms appear to have alerted few residents to the horror around them. The first many knew of the blaze was the smell of smoke. Emergency services were on the scene with admirable speed and acted with astonishing bravery.

Some residents on the upper floors, unable to escape through the black, acrid smoke could not be rescued either. Eye-witness accounts of people jumping – and of children being dropped in desperation – many metres from burning rooms are hard to bear. The final death toll is likely to be considerable.

Yet inevitably we must ask how this catastrophe could come about in modern Britain. London, as politicians and business folk perennially remind us, is one of the great cities of the 21st century, the economic powerhouse of the UK. How is it then that a recently renovated apartment block housing hundreds of people could become a raging inferno in a matter of minutes – and could provide insufficient means of escape to those inside?

Residents say they had warned of safety concerns, including the risk of fire. It appears that there was no integrated fire alarm system in place and no water sprinklers.

Last week, the constituency in which rich and poor rub shoulders but barely see one another became a symbol of the Conservatives’ fall from grace, as Kensington – that bastion of blue Toryism – turned to Labour. In the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower disaster, politics will be put aside. But when the dust settles, and the ash, 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.