“[The Grenfell fire] shook people’s sense of the country they lived in”
By Andy Moxley
Almost eight years to the day after the horrific tragedy of the Grenfell tower fire in the West London area of North Kensington, Netflix has released a new documentary titled Grenfell Uncovered. The film not only underlines the event itself through devastating images and videos of the towering inferno, but also the resultant years-long fight for justice still not delivered, the vicious media disinformation campaign and the pattern of corruption, manipulation and fatal wrong-doing that led to the biggest housing catastrophe in British history. It is a glowing and angry tribute to the 72 that lost their lives during the fire, along with the hundreds more injured and psychologically scarred by the catastrophe.
From the beginning, the documentary summons within the viewer not only a deep sorrow but also a sense of white-hot indignation through a combination of 999 calls and interviews with residents, firefighters, journalists and scientists focusing on the level of disbelief at the level of disaster that unfolded. Interspersed with lovely but also heartbreaking personal accounts, it illustrates its point of the systemic nature of the disaster and resultant lack of justice.
This begins with the role of all major media outlets in the immediate aftermath in the racist scapegoating of a resident as initially responsible, to its almost immediate debunking as scientists uncover the real culprit – the company Arconic’s ‘aluminum composite material’ (ACM) cladding used in Grenfell’s construction, which included ingredients such as the petroleum-based polyethylene. This was a material banned in use for housing in several countries due to its high flammability, but became one of the most popular building materials in the UK during the 2010s because of its lack of similar laws. Its use contributed to not only the intensity and quickness in the spread of the blaze, but also undermined the fire brigade’s ability to respond.
The question is then posed – how did this material described at a conference ten years earlier as akin to “sticking a petrol tanker to the outside of a building” end up there?
Corruption fuels deaths
Despite warnings from repeated failed tests within Arconic itself that illustrated it burned ten times as quickly and produced seven times as much heat as normal cladding, the company continued to produce and sell it. At the same time, the Con-Dem government ignored calls for reforms to fire and safety regulations in the wake of a similar 2009 blaze in a high rise residential building. The fire claimed six lives in South London’s Camberwell area, due to the government’s deregulation agenda. This meant that by the time of Grenfell, the advice to ‘stay put’ for residents in case of such a fire was still in place, massively escalating the body count.
The council felt Grenfell’s facade made the neighborhood look more run-down. As part of a plan to ‘beautify’ the building, the decision was made to overclad the building. The original recommendation of the architects to use normal zinc cladding was ignored. Instead, the deadly ACM cladding was used in the council’s corner-cutting search for the cheapest possible contracting for the project, which was completed in 2015. In the documentary, it’s estimated that this fatal change saved the council perhaps all of £5,000, equivalent to about £40 per flat in the tower. The grim implication is that this ultimately becomes the cost of 72 lives.
The aftermath: justice delayed is justice denied
It goes on to illustrate the lack of support for the survivors or any response from the government and council in the immediate aftermath. Then Prime Minister Theresa May, who is interviewed in the documentary, gives a mealy-mouthed apology for not meeting with the community members at the time of the tragedy. Of course the real reason was to avoid the consequences in the community of her government’s complicity in the catastrophe.
This same pressure ultimately led to the launching of a public inquiry, which was useful in that it identified a number of key institutional failures that led to the disaster. There was damning evidence of an active cover-up from companies involved like Arconic and several other corporations, who knew in advance of the danger of the products and purposely withheld the information. Disgustingly, if not surprisingly, all of these entities seek to shirk responsibility and lay the main fault elsewhere.
The documentary ends with the results of the report on the inquiry published in September of last year ,which produced 58 recommendations as a result. Despite this, the conclusion of the film leaves the viewer with an eerie feeling that not only has Grenfell not received justice, but despite all the formalities and words, little has really been done. The end sequence features images of the response of different institutions (often quotes loaded with bureaucratic mumbo jumbo) flashing across the screen interspersed with a Justice for Grenfell rally.
It reminds us of the fact that nobody has ever truly been held accountable, much less prosecuted. Moreover, as the film also points out, despite the beginning of implementation of the inquiry’s recommendations, hundreds of thousands of people in the UK still live in buildings with similar problems. In a report released in September 2024, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) found that of the 4,770 buildings with similar dangerous cladding, only 29% of those have had work completed, and more than half of them have had no work done at all.
Housing under capitalism: a for-profit disaster
Grenfell Uncovered is an incredibly moving programme that should be watched by all working-class people, not just to understand the tragedy of Grenfell but because of how it lays out the overlay of so many different systemic factors in creating the disaster.
In many ways, the end of the documentary is where a broader understanding of how it happened can begin. While there are many specific factors, the broader context is a system that sees housing as a commodity rather than a right – one where profit is prioritised over lives. What’s more, an approach of ‘go along to get along’ is employed by all institutions – from corporations to government bodies – as long as it keeps the wheels of commerce rolling. It is not until there is either mass outrage that things potentially can change, and only then if there is significant organisation from working-class people to affect it.
Dangerous conditions don’t just exist in building materials. Indeed, the lack of supply of adequate and affordable housing costs means unsafe conditions prevail even where paper regulations exist. A 2023 report by The Guardian estimated that almost 160,000 people in England were living in overcrowded and illegal non-HMO housing situations in pursuit of cheaper rents, often with squalid conditions and little protection from life-threatening accidents and without any sort of safety oversight.
It also estimates there was a 46% increase between 2011 and 2022 in such arrangements as the housing crisis (especially in places like London) becomes more acute. And that’s if they can get housing at all. UK homeless charity Shelter estimates that as of December 2024, 354,000 people in England were homeless – a 14% increase versus the year before. In London, where this is sharpest, 1 in every 47 residents are homeless. It also disproportionately impacts minority ethnic communities. Under capitalism, human life is cheap in comparison with profits.
The question of safe, affordable and abundant housing cannot be solved by the capitalist system. In a remarkable bit of foresight, Marxist thinker Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet entitled The Housing Question in 1872. In it, he outlines that housing under capitalism, being a commodity based on the market, will always end up with ‘shortages’, unsafe conditions, and so on as the capitalists treat housing as just another way to make money. Thus there is no incentive to create a mass of more housing or affordable and safe housing, all of which will drive down the ability to make profits off of housing itself. It becomes part of a vicious cycle, where the amount and type of housing is not dictated by need but through wild speculation through the financial markets. In the UK, this has had the concrete effect of increasing the price of housing five-fold since the 1980s.
We should all stand with the Grenfell survivors, take up their struggle and link it to the demands of housing which is safe and affordable. Throughout history, the strength of the working-class movement has been able to make massive leaps forward in this regard. This was seen, for instance, in the mass construction of social housing in Britain in the post-World War II period.
However, ultimately until housing is regarded as a right and not a commodity — that is, until there is a system that is based on human need and not profits – what capitalism gives with its right hand it will take away with its left. A socialist plan for housing production, distribution and maintenance is the only way to enable this, and that can only be achieved with a revolutionary transition to democratic control and management of the entire economic system by the majority of society, the working class.
