It opens with birdsong in the dark. It ends with brightly lit blank screen. In between, we look out from a helicopter, flying across London before arriving at the destination we know we have come to see, yet dread seeing, the burnt corpse of Grenfell Tower, around which the camera circles, again and again.
Steve McQueen’s new short film Grenfell is more memorial than documentary. There are no people in it and no words. Its heart is the building, blackened, blistered, mute and obscene.
The muteness of the film echoes the muteness that has befallen Grenfell. It is not that nothing has been said about it. A six-year inquiry has picked through the debris of the tragedy in distressing detail. From articles to plays, much has been written about the fire. Yet, given the enormity of what has been exposed, the tragedy also remains peripheral to the national conversation. “The state has managed to control the narrative,” as one community activist put it.
In his book Show Me the Bodies, a harrowing yet indispensable account of the tragedy, the journalist Peter Apps writes that, as he woke up on the morning of 14 June 2017 to images of the inferno, “my first thought was ‘it’s happened’”. He knew it was going to happen. Perhaps not that day, and perhaps not at Grenfell. But that it was going to happen.
How did he know? Because everyone involved – developers, engineers, politicians, journalists, residents – knew. That very week, Apps had been working on a long investigation into cladding safety for the magazine Inside Housing. Seven months before the fire, the Grenfell Action Group had written of the “terrifying thought” that “only a catastrophic event”, with a “serious loss of life”, would force the authorities take their fire-safety concerns seriously.
The story of Grenfell, and of how the warnings were swatted aside, is also the story of how Britain is governed. It is the story of a corporate world that displayed, in Apps’s words, “an almost psychopathic disregard for human life”. Companies rigged tests, concealed results, obtaining misleading safety certificates and knowingly marketed potentially deadly products. “What. We lied?” texted an employee of Kingspan, some of whose insulation was used on Grenfell. “All we do is lie in here,” responded another.
It is the story of regulators who would not regulate, too often accepting that safety was not “economically viable”. Having someone too zealous in charge of fire-safety regulations, wrote a civil servant, Brian Martin, would not “necessarily be in the best interests of UK Plc”. Many of the bodies responsible for regulation or certification were privatised, making them more beholden to their “clients” and reluctant to push too hard.
It is the story of politicians ideologically hostile to regulation. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government swept away virtually all building regulation, promising instead, in the words of her minister Michael Heseltine, “maximum self-regulation” and “minimum government interference”. In plain English, leave companies to manage their own affairs. Even this did not go far enough for David Cameron, who in 2012 made a New Year pledge to “kill off the health and safety culture for good”, launching a new swath of regulation cuts, including to fire safety inspections.
Most of all, it is the story of how warnings were ignored because any disaster was likely to happen only to poor people. Be thankful for what you have, was the attitude. When, in 2016, residents of Grenfell complained about the disastrous nature of refurbishments, the chair of Kensington and Chelsea’s housing scrutiny committee wrote that they were receiving “essentially a £100K [per flat] gift from the state” so he was not “massively sympathetic”. He later acknowledged to the Grenfell inquiry that the council had “lacked a little humanity”. It is a contempt for the poor filtered through decades of official discussion of social housing.
There has been much talk recently about the “new elite” driven by a “woke” agenda and deaf to the views and needs of ordinary people. This is not the place to enter this debate, though it’s a more complex issue than has so far been rendered. I am, for instance, both critical of identity politics and sceptical of framing social issues in terms of “the woke v the unwoke”.
But if you really want to understand what the elite is, how it operates and its disdain for ordinary people, nothing exposes it more starkly than the Grenfell story. Part of the problem with much of the “new elite” debate is that the obsession with the new often serves to obscure the reality of the old conduits of power.
“I cannot help but feel that had our community lived in a different part of the borough, on the more affluent side”, Hanan Wahabi, who escaped the inferno in June 2017 but lost her brother and his family in the tower, told the inquiry, “had we been from a different class, had we been less ethnic, the response in the aftermath would have been immediate.” Her words capture a truth not just of the aftermath of the fire but also of the decades leading up to it and of the years since.
Almost six years after the fire, what truly aggravates the local community is that so little has changed. The official inquiry into the fire has proved particularly frustrating. On the one hand, most survivors, relatives and activists appreciate the way it has helped expose the depth of corruption and mendacity. On the other, many also see it, paradoxically, as having been an obstacle to justice. “We were promised the inquiry would not get in the way of justice,” observes an advocate for the Grenfell Next of Kin group, “but six years on, no one has been held accountable and no one has faced criminal prosecution.”
Nor has much changed for those who still live in the area. The anger of residents of the Lancaster West Estate, at the heart of which stood Grenfell Tower, about their living conditions and their treatment by the authorities, was palpable in a meeting with councillors this month.
Most in the community appreciate Steve McQueen for “using his platform to help tell our story”. The real question, though, as one resident put it, is “What next?” “Six years on,” she observed, “it feels like we are starting again from the beginning.”
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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