The public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster revealed the contempt of multinational corporations, and the British government's neglect of the people it was meant to protect. However, argues Sam Glasper, the inquiry’s report fails to reveal how far 'racial capitalism' influenced the profile of those who lost their lives
On 14 June 2017, Grenfell Tower in London caught fire, leading to the deaths of 72 residents. The block, in the wealthy district of North Kensington, was owned and maintained by Kensington and Chelsea council. Several years previously, the council had ordered the Tower's refurbishment to 'improve the view' for residents in nearby luxury flats. As a result, Grenfell Tower was clad with a substance that acted as a conduit for fire.
When they revealed concerns about this cladding, Grenfell residents were ‘ignored and belittled’. In 2014, no action was taken, even when the London Fire Brigade declared the building's smoke ventilation system broken 'beyond repair'. In the aftermath of the fire, survivors' statements revealed that the building's fire doors were faulty or deficient.
A public inquiry (a government-mandated investigation with judicial authority) into the causes of the fire, and the emergency response, was set up to find answers. The inquiry took seven years, eventually publishing its report on 3 September 2024.
The report revealed that the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), the landlord for most of the flats in Grenfell Tower, was responsible for 'chronic and systemic failings' in fire safety management. It also found that the landlord did not take seriously the risk of another fire, and that the refurbishment firms knew the cladding would fail.
Despite the inquiry’s apparent scope, victims' ethnicity was mentioned only once, in the report's opening statements:
How Grenfell Tower came to be home to a disproportionately large number of socially disadvantaged people, many from ethnic minority backgrounds, is a question that lies outside our terms of reference
Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Phase 2 Report, 2024
Clearly, exploring vulnerability linked to race was too much for the government.
Residents accused the KCTMO of 'organised neglect'. One Grenfell resident told the inquiry that the landlord was an 'an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia' which failed its residents’ needs.
In the 1980s, Cedric Robinson encountered the phrase 'racial capitalism' in reference to South Africa’s economy under apartheid. He developed it from a description of a specific system to a way of understanding the general history of modern capitalism, which categorises certain people as deserving and others undeserving of capitalism’s benefits, based upon the colour of their skin. It is, he said, ‘a mode of classifying, ordering, creating and destroying people… through hierarchical systems of organised violence.’
Robinson noted that racism maintains the privileged classes in the lands of the coloniser, and supports the engines of capitalist domination. Race is therefore linked with class. Who benefits and who is oppressed under capitalist dynamics depends on their colour:
Race and class are intertwined and… constitute one problem or contradiction
Statement from South Africa's Cape Youth Congress, 1987
Class wars aren't just about disparities in wealth; they are also about differences in colour. The Grenfell victims died because they were not white. The disaster is as racial in character as Klan lynchings, National Front rallies and racially motivated police killings.
Grenfell residents were easy to neglect because they lacked money. At the inquiry, lawyers representing the survivors noted that:
The people of Grenfell Tower were a richly diverse, predominantly social housing community. Many of them would rightly object to being called poor. Yet they have all suffered poor treatment; and the cause of that lies in the poverty of how they were regarded
Outline opening statement on behalf of BSR: Bereaved, Survivors and Residents
Residents' treatment by government and private companies shows how being non-white and poor compounds disadvantage. Their race made them easy to stereotype as scroungers, indulged by soft-touch authorities with subsidised flats in London's most affluent borough.
Between 2012 and 2016, Grenfell Tower was given a new exterior to improve its appearance for the benefit of residents in nearby luxury apartments. Following the fire, the inquiry found that the cladding material used was highly flammable. Shockingly, it also discovered that the council’s safety and fire exit plans made no provision for disabled residents.
Prior to the fire, the council had repeatedly dismissed residents' grievances as the work of 'agitators'. In his article The Tower, Andrew O'Hagan described how, following the tragedy, residents 'seemed to be throwing accusations into the air like confetti at a whore’s wedding'. The Grenfell Action Group dismissed O'Hagan as a bigot and a snob.
British racial capitalism 'others' Black and minority ethnic people, who are more likely than whites to live in overcrowded, poor-quality housing. The British Conservative Member of Parliament Oliver Letwin claimed in a 1985 memo that poor whites – unlike poor Blacks – didn’t riot as a result of having to live in poor-quality housing. Letwin went on to support the deregulation of Britain's housing market, and backed dismantling EU fire safety regulations on cladding.
The poor treatment of Grenfell's residents, and the poor decisions that led to the fire, have their origins in Empire. The British working class began to emerge in the early 1800s, when Britain still practiced slavery. Poor white people in Britain began to be oppressed at the same time as people of colour in the colonies.
In white society, the wealth of Empire crosses class and gender lines. Even suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst enthused that 'It is a great thing to be the inheritors of an empire like ours.'
Today, those at the very bottom of society – the poor and non-white – are easy to 'other'. Despite being, variously, students, skilled workers and happily retired, all those who lost their lives in the Grenfell fire died because they were deemed undeserving.
Despite being, variously, students, skilled workers and happily retired, Grenfell’s residents were all deemed undeserving
Nabil Choucair lost his mother, his sister, her husband and their three daughters in the fire. 'We were fighting', he said, 'to get [the inquiry] to look at [racism] and they didn’t.'
Proper analysis of the racialisation of Britain's housing market would require the system to confront its intrinsic racism. It is unlikely its architects will declare themselves guilty.
