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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

After Grenfell

Following years of interviews and evidence, and after repeated delays, the families, bereaved and survivors of Grenfell fire have, at last, obtained an official account of the causes of Britain’s deadliest residential fire since the Second World War. The blaze that roared through the tower block in one of the poorest parts of Kensington & Chelsea, the wealthiest borough in London, took the lives of scores of people and devastated the local community.

Some years ago, when the Corbynistas were at the helm of the Labour Party, the Kensington Labour Party Research Unit published their own report which said “the borough of princes, Sultans, plutocrats and billionaires” was actually the most unequal borough in Britain’. How, in what one Councillor called “the richest borough in the universe”, with three billion pounds in reserves, could 72 people burn to death in a fire which, even in the earliest days, was blamed on ‘cheap cladding’?

The borough has the highest life expectancy in the country, but across the borough the gap in years lived is a massive 27 years. Even more shocking, since 2010 – when a decade of austerity began to pay for the 2008 banking crash – average life expectancy in Golborne Ward where the tower block stood, fell by six years, the worst decline in the country.

On Wednesday, the final 1,700-page report of a six-year public inquiry into the fire was published. The report, as Matt Wrack the leader of the Fire Brigades Union says “demon- strates beyond doubt that central government’s deregulation agenda cost lives.

Decades of ministerial failure to regulate the building industry gave the green light for businesses to prioritise profit over human life”.

The report makes over 80 recommendations, which the FBU will assess in detail over the weeks to come. But the union wants much more than that. The fire-fighters rightly highlight the need for national standards set by a statutory advisory body on fire policy, giving a voice to firefighters and control staff and drawing on the best expert advice.

It also exposed a deliberately created system that provides genuine health and safety for the rich but not for the poor. Endless chains of sub-contracting and downgrading of chec ks made a tragedy like Grenfell virtually inevitable, and the only surprise was the horrific form in which it came.