I'd just gotten back to London in June 2017 when Grenfell Tower caught fire and burned all night, killing 72 of its residents. On June 17th, four days later, we visited a friend who lives nearby and spent time at the already very large memorial (hence the photo).
In a few weeks, we knew the causes more or less: the council had bought flammable cladding because it was cheaper, and turned the building into a torch waiting for a match; they followed no fire protocols, another likely cost saving; responsibility had been deregulated and outsourced; repeated resident complaints and warnings had been deliberately ignored. The white council government of the richest borough in Britain continuously ignored a tower of people of color in its midst by cloaking it in magic incinerator metal. It was an obvious case of malpractice issuing from structural racism that the government was rendering an unspeakable fact years before it seized on the menace of critical race theory.
Today is the 5th anniversary of the fire. There have been no official findings of cause, no convictions, or even indictments. What has emerged, as the Financial Times piece put it, is "a disregard for safety within parts of the construction industry and a compromised regulatory regime that allowed Britain to become a dumping ground for dangerous goods."
I'd been following the decline of British higher ed since the fee tripling and central funding cuts implemented by the Cameron-Willetts regime in 2011. But Grenfell was the moment when I decided Britain's decline would be obvious to everyone, and that something would happen. I didn't think of it as a point of no return. Now I do.
The Johnson government isn't failing on a few issues where its defunct Thatcherism or right-wing backbenchers are holding it back. It is failing on every front.
Just on Saturday:
- Farming: the government is not replacing EU subsidies lost to Brexit, and has cut them 20% this year.
- Food policy: the government is diluting the Dimbleby Report, authored by the Tory co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, rejecting "expanded sugar and salt taxes" to fund fruit and vegetable consumption by low-income families. The obesity crisis will continue and probably worsen.
- Immigration: a high court judge ruled the plan to deport migrants to Rwanda to be legal. This plan is an obvious self-inflicted humiliation to Britain's international reputation, such as it still is, combining casual cruelty, neocolonial dumping in Africa, bumptious illegality, and financial incoherence, all wrapped in Monty-Python absurdist packaging. Even the crown, in the person of Prince Charles, has been unable to suppress its disgust. And yet first flight is to leave today, with 8 migrants.
- Northern Ireland: the government is nullifying large parts of its own treaty with the EU to extend its denial of the reality that it put a custom barrier between Great Britain and the island of Ireland.
- Education: more strong applicants are being excluded from their first choices of university, even as marketization has degraded the distinctive alternative universities like Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, and SOAS.
- Research funding: UK universities have all but given up on managing to stay in the 95 billion euro EU framework program that they wanted to keep in spite of Brexit.
- Economics; the government has no actual plan either to "level up" the North or to expand the economy or to create high-wage, high-skill jobs. It is responding to warnings of widespread food and fuel poverty by promising tax cuts.
Intelligence requires foresight, which means seeing the bad effects of what you are about to do before you do it, and not years later, when it's way too late. But the failure of Brexit, the lethal Covid response, the attacks on cultural institutions, migrants seeking refugee status, universities, Black dissent--all the old unforgotten enemies going back to empire--has only hardened the government persisting in the obviously stupid on the basis of dim political calculations that their own people don't credit. And the hard-core TOry reprobates drive the discourse, which is familar from the U.S., which also has oriented its entire political system around the coddling of its most backward elements.
The actual British people aren't like this. The gap between governments and people is rightly described as wide. And yet these people as voters did put this government in and show no sign of mass repentance and change.
Meanwhile they may turn the burned tower into a 24 story garden. We do remember the dead and the creativity of the local responses to the living. I dearly hope the latter can spread.
