A record of class contempt
The forthcoming Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a National Tragedy by Emma Dent Coad promises to be a powerful indictment of the social relations that produced the Grenfell Tower fire and of the political establishment that has denied justice to its victims ever since. Dent Coad stands in a unique relationship to the events. She was elected Labour MP for Kensington only four days before the fire of 14 June 2017, lived close to the tower and had already spent years as a councillor opposing the policies pursued by the Conservative-controlled Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The publisher presents the book as both an act of witness and an examination of what Grenfell reveals about Britain as a whole.
That starting point is entirely justified. Grenfell cannot be understood as an isolated building failure or even as the product merely of individual corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and corporate dishonesty. Seventy-two people died in a disaster whose essential conditions had been created over decades through deregulation, privatisation, attacks on council housing, cuts to fire services and the subordination of elementary human needs to property speculation and corporate profit. The final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report acknowledged that every death was avoidable and documented extensive failures extending through government, construction companies, manufacturers and the institutions supposedly responsible for protecting residents.
The term that best describes these processes was supplied nearly two centuries ago by Friedrich Engels: social murder. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels used the concept to describe how society knowingly places workers in circumstances that prematurely destroy their lives and then permits those circumstances to continue. The concept matters because it rejects attempts to separate individual catastrophes from the social order that produces them. The World Socialist Web Site applied this analysis to Grenfell immediately, and the Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire address delivered at the Socialist Equality Party’s August 2017 public meeting traced the disaster through the interconnected processes of deregulation, austerity, property speculation and the degradation of social housing. [wsws.org]
Evidence since then has vindicated that assessment. The inquiry’s final report found what the World Socialist Web Site described as “systematic dishonesty” among companies connected with the refurbishment, including efforts to manipulate testing, misrepresent data and conceal the dangers associated with products used in the tower. At the same time, government departments had failed over many years to respond adequately to warnings about combustible materials on high-rise buildings. [wsws.org]
What makes Dent Coad’s intervention potentially valuable is that she approaches these processes not as an outside commentator but as somebody who witnessed the extraordinary gulf separating two Kensingtons. On one side stand enormous concentrations of property wealth, luxury housing and some of the richest households in Britain. On the other are council tenants, low-paid workers and families struggling for decent housing in what the publisher itself describes as a broader housing crisis. The publicity for Grenfell Britain explicitly connects the disaster to unsafe housing, empty luxury developments and the continuing domination of housing policy by wealth and privilege.
Grenfell exposed this class divide with almost unbearable clarity. Residents had repeatedly warned of the dangers confronting them. The Grenfell Action Group’s warnings before the fire are now notorious. The failure was therefore not principally one of insufficient knowledge. Those with institutional authority possessed warnings and evidence, while those without power were treated as troublesome obstacles. As the inquiry’s own findings later showed, avoidable danger coexisted with corporate cost-cutting and government failure.
This is precisely why Grenfell cannot be reduced to the language of “lessons learned”. The facts point towards something far more fundamental: a social order in which the accumulation of private wealth takes precedence over the safety and dignity of working people. The facts Dent Coad assembles point towards a conclusion the working class of Grenfell had already reached by bitter experience.
The limits of the parliamentary perspective
The fundamental political problem posed by Dent Coad’s account, however, is the contradiction between the devastating character of the evidence and the parliamentary Labour framework within which its author has historically operated. Grenfell does not simply indict Conservative politicians, corrupt companies or an unusually callous local authority. It raises an unavoidable question about the Labour Party and the entire political system through which capitalist interests have been defended.
Dent Coad’s personal record of opposition to Kensington and Chelsea Council deserves serious treatment. But individual sincerity cannot resolve the historical problem Labour itself represents. Grenfell took place after decades in which Conservative and Labour governments successively deregulated the economy, expanded the power of private capital, facilitated the financialisation of housing and subordinated local government to austerity and market mechanisms. In its assessment of the inquiry report, the World Socialist Web Site noted that the inquiry itself identified governmental failures stretching through both Conservative and Labour administrations, while failing to impose genuine political accountability on the leading figures responsible. [wsws.org]
Jeremy Corbyn’s experience is decisive in this respect. Corbyn’s election as Labour leader generated enormous expectations among workers and young people who saw his leadership as a chance to reverse decades of Blairism, austerity and war. Yet the political orientation remained centred upon transforming the Labour Party and achieving social change through Parliament rather than constructing an independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Grenfell itself exposed the consequences of this orientation.
The World Socialist Web Site repeatedly warned that Labour’s participation in the government-established Grenfell Inquiry risked subordinating popular demands for justice to institutions incapable of providing it. A 2018 report on a Justice4Grenfell meeting noted that Dent Coad participated alongside figures from the trade-union movement in pressuring the official inquiry and existing institutions. Another WSWS assessment in 2019 argued that Labour and its allies were legitimising an inquiry that could not itself establish criminal liability. [wsws.org]
The issue was never whether individual Labour politicians genuinely sympathised with the bereaved or regarded the conduct of the council and corporations with disgust. The more fundamental question was whether justice could be secured through the very state institutions responsible for maintaining the economic and political structures that produced Grenfell. It could not.
The 2019 general election supplied another bitter lesson. Dent Coad lost Kensington after having secured the historically Conservative constituency in 2017. But Labour’s defeat cannot seriously be explained simply through electoral arithmetic. Corbyn’s leadership retreated repeatedly before Labour’s right wing and refused to mobilise the enormous movement that had emerged around his leadership in a political struggle against the party’s Blairite apparatus. The result was not the transformation of Labour into an instrument of socialist politics but the preparation of conditions for restoring the party’s openly pro-business leadership. Grenfell therefore poses the question that parliamentary reformism cannot answer: what happens when the institutions the working class is told to appeal to are themselves structurally integrated into the defence of capitalist property and political power?
After the Inquiry: Where is the justice?
The publication of the final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report in September 2024 demonstrated the dimensions of this contradiction. It identified extensive failings and corporate wrongdoing, yet years after the disaster, criminal accountability had still not followed. The Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry’s final whitewash noted that the inquiry had no power to determine criminal or civil liability and that, when the report appeared, the Metropolitan Police had not arrested or charged anyone in connection with the disaster.
The subsequent After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are the arrests? drew out the political implications. Its central argument was that Grenfell involved identifiable decisions made under conditions in which profit and commercial advantage were treated as more important than working-class safety. The inquiry documented regulatory failures, corporate dishonesty and the ability of private businesses to exploit a weakened regulatory regime, yet justice remained deferred. [wsws.org]
This continued under the Labour government elected in 2024. The final inquiry report appeared under Keir Starmer’s premiership. Starmer apologised on behalf of the British state and said that the disaster should never have happened. Still, the response did not overturn the basic conditions that had allowed political responsibility to be evaded. The WSWS noted at the time that the government promised to consider the inquiry’s recommendations, while accountability through prosecutions remained unresolved.
There could be little more devastating evidence of the inadequacy of the proposition that institutional exposure automatically produces justice. Grenfell has been investigated, reconstructed, analysed, documented and memorialised. Parliamentary statements have been delivered. Political apologies have been issued. Thousands of pages of inquiry evidence have entered the historical record. Yet the fundamental issue raised by the bereaved and survivors from the outset remains. Justice has not followed automatically from truth. Nor has the housing crisis that gave rise to Grenfell disappeared. Indeed, the publicity for Dent Coad’s forthcoming book makes precisely this argument. Grenfell Britain is promoted as asking why, if Grenfell failed to change everything, the conditions surrounding housing inequality and insecurity remain embedded in British society.
This is the question the book must ultimately confront. But the answer cannot finally be found by demanding that the existing political establishment behave differently. The persistence of the conditions exposed at Grenfell is not simply a failure of political will. It expresses social interests.
Grenfell and the logic of capitalism
Housing under capitalism possesses a fundamental contradiction. For the working class it is a basic social necessity. For capital, it is property, an investment, an asset class, and a source of rent, interest, and speculative wealth. In London this contradiction reaches grotesque proportions. Homes exist simultaneously as places where human beings must live and as financial instruments whose profitability may depend on restricting supply, increasing rents, or maximising land values.
Public housing represented, however partially and inadequately, an intrusion of social need into this logic. This is why its destruction became a central component of the neoliberal offensive associated with the Thatcher governments and why subsequent administrations never reversed that offensive. Council estates sitting upon enormously valuable London land occupy territory whose potential exchange value is regarded by developers, banks and investors as being squandered when it provides secure and affordable accommodation to working people. Grenfell stood at the geographical centre of this social antagonism.
The disaster therefore cannot be answered by regulatory rearrangement alone, necessary though rigorous safety regulation unquestionably is. Regulations operating within a society dominated by private profit are under continual pressure from the corporations they regulate. Housing remains shaped by the power of landowners, banks, developers and construction conglomerates. Local authorities operate amid financial constraints imposed from above. Governments of every political colouration insist that the commanding heights of economic life must remain privately owned.
This is why the concept of social murder remains indispensable. It shifts attention from individual wickedness towards the social structure that continuously reproduces conditions in which preventable suffering becomes normal. That does not absolve individuals or corporations of responsibility. On the contrary, those responsible for criminal conduct must be held accountable. But prosecution, however necessary, cannot by itself eliminate the economic system that generates the same conflict between private profit and social need in another form.
What is to be done
The great merit of Emma Dent Coad’s proposed indictment is therefore also the source of the political questions it must raise. If Grenfell demonstrates the consequences of corporate greed, political cowardice and class privilege; if successive governments allowed conditions to emerge in which working-class lives could be subordinated to commercial interests; if official investigations can document devastating evidence without automatically producing justice; and if the housing crisis persists after all the pledges that Grenfell must never happen again, then what conclusion follows?
Britain cannot need merely better politicians administering the same economic system. The necessary conclusion is a break with Labourism and every conception that the machinery of capitalist government can gradually be transformed into an instrument for abolishing the power of capital. The working class requires its own independent political movement, organised internationally and armed with a socialist programme. In Britain, this means building the Socialist Equality Party as the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International and developing independent organisations of working-class struggle that can challenge the authority of the trade-union and Labour bureaucracies.
Housing must cease to be organised primarily as a vehicle for private accumulation. The major property interests, construction conglomerates and financial institutions upon which the housing system depends must be brought under democratic public ownership and workers’ control. Housing construction, maintenance and fire safety must be planned according to social need and scientifically established standards, not the profitability requirements of investors and contractors. Vast social resources must be directed towards building high-quality council housing and making existing homes genuinely safe. That would not constitute an administrative modification of capitalism. It would mean an attack upon capitalist property relations themselves.
Grenfell’s residents did not lack warnings. They did not lack intelligence. They did not lack determination. They did not lack evidence. Long before the fire they understood the danger facing them, and after the catastrophe survivors, relatives and residents refused to allow the dead to disappear beneath official condolences and public-relations exercises. What they lacked, and what the working class continues to lack, is political power.
Grenfell’s enduring significance lies here. The tower stands not merely as the site of a terrible disaster but as an indictment of an entire social order. No inquiry report can resolve that indictment, because the decisive question lies beyond any inquiry’s jurisdiction: which class controls society, and in whose interests are its immense resources organised? The answer to social murder is not another promise that capitalism will regulate itself more carefully. It is socialism.
Bibliography
Dent Coad, Emma. Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a National Tragedy. London: Verso, forthcoming 8 June 2027. The publisher description presents the book as an examination of Grenfell’s legacy and Britain’s continuing housing crisis. [penguinran…mhouse.com]
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
Scripps, Thomas. Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire. World Socialist Web Site, 22 August 2017. [wsws.org]
Scripps, Thomas. After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are the arrests?. World Socialist Web Site, 12 September 2024. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry delivers its final whitewash. World Socialist Web Site, 4 September 2024.
Stevens, Robert. Labour and unions seek to corral social anger over Grenfell fire behind official inquiry. World Socialist Web Site, 20 June 2018. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell fire anniversary used by pseudo-left to boost Labour and Corbyn. World Socialist Web Site, 17 June 2019. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower to be dismantled: Why is there still no justice?. World Socialist Web Site, 11 February 2025. [wsws.org]
