After Grenfell

Violence, Resistance and Response

Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins, Nadine El-Enany, Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins, Nadine El-Enany

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786804617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

On the 14th June 2017, a fire engulfed a tower block in West London, seventy-two people lost their lives and hundreds of others were left displaced and traumatised. The Grenfell Tower fire is the epicentre of a long history of violence enacted by government and corporations. On its second anniversary activists, artists and academics come together to respond, remember and recover the disaster. The Grenfell Tower fire illustrates Britain's symbolic order; the continued logic of colonialism, the disposability of working class lives, the marketisation of social provision and global austerity politics, and the negligence and malfeasance of multinational contractors. Exploring these topics and more, the contributors construct critical analysis from legal, cultural, media, community and government responses to the fire, asking whether, without remedy for multifaceted power and violence, we will ever really be 'after' Grenfell? With poetry by Ben Okri and Tony Walsh, and photographs by Parveen Ali, Sam Boal and Yolanthe Fawehinmi. With contributions from Phil Scraton, Daniel Renwick, Nadine El-Enany, Sarah Keenan, Gracie Mae Bradley and The Radical Housing Network.

1
Everyday Life and Death in the Global City

Dan Bulley

In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed. Last year I was dying of fear and I made long phone calls to Dede, to Elsa, even to Pietro, when I saw on television the planes that set the towers in New York ablaze the way you light a match by gently striking the head. In the world below is the inferno.

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

The response to the 9/11 attacks in New York has been wide, violent and long-lasting, including an unwinnable global war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands across the world. Despite the burning of Grenfell Tower bearing many similarities to that of the World Trade Center – an intense fire in a high-rise; victims forced to jump to their deaths; a confused emergency response; and the solidarity of a local community – the reaction to the two events has been markedly different (Edkins, 2019). For Grenfell, the response has been thoroughly domesticated. Both the causes of the fire and the ways of holding those responsible to account have been consistently kept within the confines of the UK as a state, society and legal system. As the MP and campaigner David Lammy puts it, the fire resulted from ‘a nation where the social contract between the state and the individual [has] broken down’; the response must be ‘putting those responsible for the horror in the dock of the Old Bailey’ (2017). What this ignores is the way that both events took place in global cities that pride themselves on drawing in and reaching out to the rest of the world. Whatever happens in London and New York has global origins and implications. When the ‘horrors of the rest of the world’ reach into ‘our’ cities, ‘our’ cities have also stretched out to produce those very horrors, both there and far beyond.

One way in which the response has been similar, however, has been the characterisation of both as exceptional events: 9/11 was quickly interpreted as a rupture in world politics (Booth and Dunne, 2002). In a different register, even a year on from what we know was a predictable and preventable fire, news agencies and media outlets continued to characterise Grenfell as a ‘tragedy’. Tragedy implies something beyond intentionality, something to which any response is inadequate as it escapes the ways in which we try to make sense of the world (Zehfuss, 2018: 37–38). A tragedy is unexpected and inexplicable, exceeding everyday life and business-as-usual. Such a characterisation of Grenfell effectively hides the fact that it was foreseen by residents (Platt, 2017). Far from the opposite of business-as-usual, the Grenfell Tower fire was the anticipated result of a long history of everyday decisions, errors, exercises of power and violence. This deadly blaze was the outcome of a more banal inferno in the world below.

The danger of accepting these two characterisations of Grenfell – as domestic and as exceptional – is that they are simplifying, restricting our ability to respond to wider causes and forces at work. Confronted with an exceptional tragedy, we search for a singular or collective villain, someone or something who is ultimately accountable. And as a domestic disaster, we look to the state and its legal system to hold them liable. In contrast, this chapter argues that as an everyday product of global political, economic and social forces, we need to supplement this with a much broader response. The chapter proceeds by first outlining how global politics and economics are always implicated in life and death in cities such as London. The second and third sections will tie this in to the Grenfell Tower fire, exploring how migration, racial segregation, the orthodoxy of international political economy and multinational corporations materially constituted it. The final section will conclude the chapter by turning to accountability and responsibility, demonstrating how these are even more refracted, complex and difficult to trace through an array of international corporations, institutions and networks than has been acknowledged in much of the existing journalistic and academic commentary. Faced with this, the promise of inquiries and manslaughter trials at the Old Bailey seem insufficient. In addition (not instead), a much broader and deeper response is required, reflecting our own complicity in global political and economic structures that allows, feeds upon and erases the everyday struggles of life and death.

Life, Death and the Everyday

The ‘everyday’ is so mundane because it is characterised by repetitions, some of which are cyclical and others linear (Lefebvre, 1987: 9–10). Whilst the linear refers to the ‘repetitive gestures of work and consumption’, the cyclical repetitions include those of night and day, work and rest, hunger and its satisfaction, life and death. The particular ways in which these repetitions are performed – the jobs we have; what we consume and how; the hours we work; the leisure activities available; what we eat; where we live and in what type of housing; how we die and when – are a product of various forces that are particular to time and place. Our banal everyday existence is not a naturally occurring, uniform phenomenon; it is a product of political and economic decisions which are rarely within our control, or even within that of the city or state in which we live.

It is commonly observed in academic scholarship that everyday life in cities such as New York, London and Tokyo is the result of global flows and movements that includes goods, services, labour, ideas, finance and capital (Dürrschmidt, 2000; Eade, 1997). Major cities have long been spaces in which these flows meet, cross and diverge – where the repetitions of the everyday are especially affected by global forces. Some cities also function with a capacity for commanding and controlling the flows of international finance, labour and capital, and this is what helps define truly ‘global’ cities (Sassen, 2001). Such global cities did not occur naturally, however. They are the product of decisions made primarily from the 1980s to deregulate Western economies, allowing the free flowing of capital across borders, privatising public services and prompting innovation in the legal, banking, business, financial services and insurance industries (Massey, 2007: 29–53). Due to the UK being at the forefront of this neoliberalising wave, London was able to take a significant role in commanding these global flows. This ability is also part of what draws more people in to London, from all over the world, further feeding the production of the global-urban, where the local and the global are closely entangled. In such an environment, the repetitions and material needs of everyday life – including food and drink, jobs, transport, infrastructure, health care and shelter – are met or not met, but are always affected by transnational movements (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 70–71).

However, whilst the global nature of everyday life in many cities is commonly accepted, far less attention is given to the global production of death. How we die and when appears a strangely local, private and apolitical affair – determined only by home-grown health politics, economics and inequalities. There are two obvious exceptions to this: when death is intentionally produced through the physical violence of war, massacre or terrorism; and when it is the outcome of spectacular environmental catastrophe. In the former case, such as 9/11, the London bombings of July 2005 or the Paris attacks of November 2015, there is a great deal of effort to externalise the death, to make its cause appear foreign, the unstable outside reaching in to our cities (Bulley, 2017: 147–155). In the latter case, such as the Asian Tsunami of 2004 or the 2010 Haitian earthquake, it is the lack of intentionality and human agency that warrants international attention and aid efforts (Zack, 2009: 1–5). But when premature death is more mundane, seemingly the result of individual, corporate or government errors, it is comfortably domesticated, more or less easily insulated in its causes and effects from the outside world. However, if everyday life in the global city is made possible by transnational forces, it is odd to think that the same does not apply to death. Even at the most practical, end of life care in the West is often provided by people from elsewhere, especially mobile women (Raghuram, 2016), and this fact is intensified in global cities. In London, 56 per cent of care assistants were foreign-born by 2004/2005, compared to only 11 per cent nationally (Wills et al., 2010: 42–43).

The ignorance of premature mortality is problematic because its patterns reveal important elements of the social, ethical and political world, mapping relations of class, (dis)ability, inequality, violence, gender and race (Therborn, 2013). I shall explore this in the next section, with specific reference to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC). Yet, whilst everyday death requires more attention, it is hard to characterise the deaths of Grenfell Tower residents as mundane and banal. As noted, this was a major event and was covered as such by news networks around the world. However, by treating it as a one-off event, we obscure the fact that it is the product of everyday global forces that come to ground in the global city. We domesticate it and search for responsibility and accountability at the national level. The next two sections will therefore concentrate on drawing out how routine, complex, transnational power relations operated within the locale of RBKC to engender this apparently singular event.

The Global Production of North Kensington

Reflecting on the changing nature of North Kensington, former local resident Ed Vulliamy (2017) describes a constantly changing space formed by successive waves of migration. He describes how much of the area was settled and even built by Irish in the nineteenth century, later supplemented by refugees from Franco’s Spain in the 1940s. Over subsequent decades, many others fleeing wars of independence (e.g. Bangladeshis in the 1970s), ethnic cleansing (e.g. East African Asians in the 1970s) and failed uprisings (e.g. the 2011 Arab uprisings) would find refuge in the area. In the 1950s, North Kensington received the Windrush generation, supplying the labour that literally allowed the city to reproduce itself (many found work in the NHS) and circulate its labour and goods and services (London Transport was another major employer). This multicultural mix would be supplemented by white Bohemians seeking alternative lifestyles in the 1960s. As housing became increasingly commodified in the 1980s, however, property speculators began to regenerate the area, raising rent and property prices. What Vulliamy calls a ‘social cleansing’ led to hundreds of families leaving altogether, whilst others were pushed further north into social housing around Latimer Road and Golborne ‘if they were lucky’.

Movement into RBKC and London more broadly, however, did not stop with these rising property prices. Indeed, the neoliberal orthodoxy of political economy of which property speculation was a part may have started in the UK and North America, but its biggest impact was felt by ‘developing’ countries in the Global South, which were forced by international organisations to adopt a deregulating market economy, friendly to business and hostile to stable labour relations and permanent employment. The result was a massive increase in movement from South to North, with people seeking greater socio-economic security and post-colonial governments happy to offload surplus labour (Wills et al., 2010: 2–17). Global cities, with their constant need for a cheap labour supply, their transient and settled migrant populations and willingness to turn a blind eye to migration status, proved a ‘natural’ destination. They facilitated everyday life, allowing work and leisure alongside people in a similar situation, while the anonymity of global cities made them an accommodating choice. However, in wealthy boroughs such as RBKC, the only environment where housing could be found was the more deprived wards, such as Notting Dale, to which the foreign-born and less affluent residents had already been pushed.

Given this history and present, it is hardly surprising that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire moved to the area from all over the world: Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Syria, the UK and possibly Nigeria (The Guardian, 2018).¹ Many of the victims and survivors were a tiny proportion of London’s 3.2 million border-crossing people, nearly half of whom reside in the mere 319 square kilometres of differentially deprived inner London (Rienzo and Vargas-Silva, 2017: 4). It is crucial to bear this variable deprivation in mind in demonstrating the global production of the Grenfell fire. After all, RBKC as a whole has one of the most diverse populations in the UK; more than half of its people moved to the UK from elsewhere. Yet whereas nearly a quarter of RBKC residents were born in North America and Europe, this proportion is halved again for Notting Dale – the Ward that includes Grenfell Tower. In contrast, Notting Dale has twice the proportion of people from the Caribbean and African regions (Baker, 2012: 3; RBKC, 2014: 4). Compared to the wider borough, Notting Dale’s population is raced substantially darker.

These figures are mirrored by the deprivation statistics, with Notting Dale consistently appearing twice as socio-economically deprived as RBKC and London overall (RBKC, 2014: 6). What emerges in the borough’s Strategic Needs Assessment is a graphic mapping of the area (see Figure 1) in which the south and centre are described as ‘Aspiring and Affluent’, whilst four northern wards are designated an overwhelmingly ‘Endeavouring Ethnic Mix’. The latter term refers to a region with a high proportion of Bangladeshis (relative to more affluent Indians), with a majority of social housing (71 per cent), where ‘overcrowding is more prevalent, and public transport more commonly used to get to work’ (RKBC, 2014: 6). Though a mode...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface – Phil Scraton
• Introduction – Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany
• 1. Everyday Life and Death in the Global City – Dan Bulley
• 2. Organising on Mute – Daniel Renwick
• 3. Before Grenfell: British Immigration Law and the Production of Colonial Spaces – Nadine El-Enany 50
• 4. Struggles for Social Housing Justice – Radical Housing Network, Becka Hudson and Pilgrim Tucker
• 5. A Border in Every Street: Grenfell and the Hostile Environment – Sarah Keenan
• 6. Grenfell on Screen – Anna Viola Sborgi
• 7. Law, Justice and the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell Tower Fire – Patricia Tuitt
• 8. From Grenfell to Windrush – Gracie Mae Bradley
• 9. Housing Policy in the Shadow of Grenfell – Nigel de Noronha
• 10. ComeUnity and Community in the Face of Impunity – Monique Charles
• Afterword: The Fire and the Academy – Robbie Shilliam
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index