Home is the place we go to feel safe. Or at least it should be. Parents should have the right to put their children to bed, secure in the knowledge that everyone will wake up in the morning. Every human being should have a warm, dry place of refuge to call their own, a way to shut out their worst fears. But when fear came raging through Grenfell Tower in the middle of the night, there was no refuge and there was no place of safety.
The stories are unbearable: the people screaming at the windows, the parents throwing their children from several floors up in the hope they would be saved, the distraught final phone calls made by those realising there was no way out. But above all, the colossal betrayal of vulnerable people’s trust by the state, and not just in west London.
There will be people lying awake in high-rise council blocks around the country tonight, worrying that they might not be safe either, but grimly aware that they can’t afford to move. The survivors of this fire will presumably be rehoused by the same council that consigned them to Grenfell Tower and they won’t have much choice either, because that’s what poverty means: being forced to rely on a state that is at times terrifyingly unreliable. It is hard right now to think of a more literal representation of the words “poverty trap” than the charred remains of that tower’s upper floors.
Yet nothing in Theresa May’s visit to the site, where she was accused of avoiding shocked and angry residents, suggested she grasps the magnitude of the shock or the sense that this could be a tipping point in national life.
The echoes of 9/11 are haunting, but so are the parallels with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the faltering official response to the flooding of New Orleans exposed a hidden vulnerability and anger beneath the surface of American life. Searching questions followed about how one of the richest and most powerful nations on the planet could have rendered itself so incapable of helping its own people. While London has been luckier – its emergency services seem to have done everything one could possibly expect and more, while ordinary people rushed to donate clothes, food, water and money – something of the same sense of a citadel crumbling lingers.
Kensington is synonymous with wealth and privilege, even if Londoners knew long before Labour unexpectedly captured the seat at the general election that it was home to great deprivation, too. But still, nothing symbolises urban ingenuity and a capital city’s thrusting virility like high-rise buildings, and who would have imagined that they were not safe? We were meant to have learned the lessons of the great human tragedies that pockmarked the 80s, at least enough to stop the most avoidable of them happening again.
The Zeebrugge ferry disaster opened eyes to the need for private companies to be held more forcefully to account for any negligence leading to loss of life. The catastrophic failure of policing at Hillsborough was a wake-up call that if the private sector could not always be trusted with our lives, neither sometimes could the state. Yet, waking to news of this fire, it felt as if we had gone back to the 70s. How could people still die in this horrific fashion in one of the world’s richest capital cities?
If we have learned anything from previous disasters, it is not to jump immediately to conclusions. There will rightly be a public inquiry. But the questions it must answer are already evident. How could a building designed to stop fire spreading fail so dismally? When residents complained of what they saw as dangerous breaches of health and safety in the tower, how exactly did the council and the private landlord to which it had contracted out management of the tower, Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, respond? Could or should lessons have been learned, particularly by then housing minister, and now Downing Street chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, from previous smaller fires in tower blocks? Did successive governments cave in too easily to profiteering landlords lobbying against tighter regulation, and, crucially, what bearing did years of local authority budget cuts have on any of this?
The firefighters who risked their lives to save others are rightly now the heroes of the hour. But there are many other unsung people – planners and building regulations inspectors, fire safety experts, lowly officials toiling in local authority housing departments – who also have the potential to save lives by doing their work carefully and well, and whose jobs are particularly vulnerable when budgets are tight, precisely because they are normally invisible.
It would be no nobler for the left to make cheap political capital from this fire than for the far right to exploit the Manchester bombing. But terrorist attacks have forced the left to examine its liberal conscience and struggle with difficult choices. The deregulatory, shrink-the-state faction on the right will now have equally hard questions to ask of itself. It’s not politicising a tragedy to try to make sense of it, which in this case means asking some searching questions about how decades of social housing policy have brought us here.
The closest thing to a national debate over housing during the last election was a row over whether elderly owner-occupiers should be able to pass their homes on to their children. Yet nothing unites Londoners, even those who have made a bomb from property, like the uneasy feeling that something has gone very wrong with the housing market; and now that feeling is spreading across the country.
Insecurity stretches from the top, where even well-paid young professionals can barely get a foothold in the nonsensically overpriced capital, down through those renting privately from often slapdash landlords, or languishing on social housing waiting lists, to rough sleepers and the thousands of poor souls estimated to be illegally jammed 10 to a room in jerry-built garden sheds. More than one in four privately rented homes are now officially deemed “non-decent” – in poor repair, or containing serious hazards – and heaven only knows how many of them are a disaster waiting to happen, if on a smaller scale.
The poorer you are, the less choice you have and the greater risks you run: dodgy wiring, black mould, seedy landlords seeking sex in lieu of rent.
The higher rents and prices rise, the more people are trapped in the grim conditions at the bottom of the pyramid, and while social housing was supposed to provide an escape route for the poorest and most vulnerable it is evidently failing to do so. So let that burning pyre in the heart of west London stand as a reminder of something that should never have been forgotten: the moral responsibility the state bears to help those who cannot help themselves.