Mournful militancy

On June 14, 2017 a fire broke out in a tower block in North Kensington, West London. It quickly spread. The residents’ organization based in the flats had frequently raised safety concerns about the building’s upkeep and maintenance, and expressed anxieties about the poor quality of renovations undertaken there. Their concerns were routinely ignored. The rapid spread of the fire is thought to have been due to the cheap cladding added to the exterior of the building, designed to cut costs but also, it has been speculated, to make cosmetic changes to the building’s appearance so as to make the surrounding area more attractive to prospective property buyers. This was an atrocity that could have been avoided. The local authority’s emergency response to the blaze was also insufficient. Seventy-two people are known to have died in the fire. Though the residents of the building were mostly working-class people living in social housing provided by the council, the tower was located in the Royal Borough on Kensington and Chelsea, one of the richest in the country. The fire starkly and tragically revealed deep structural inequalities—classed and racialized—in British society. The fire was an extreme though by no means isolated example of the brutal consequences of an affluent and callous ruling class more interested in hiding, moving, or ignoring poor people, whose immiseration and exploitation their wealth and status depends upon, than in eliminating or even ameliorating poverty.