Grenfell – what should happen now?

Six urgent priorities that should follow the Inquiry

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tube train runs on a raised track, in the distance is a tower block wrapped in white material with a green heart on it.

I remember standing at the base of Grenfell Tower on the morning of the 14th June 2017, talking with firefighters, gathering clergy to act as emergency volunteers, praying with evacuees from the surrounding blocks, as the building still smouldered. At the time the question on everyone’s lips was: how could something like this happen in sophisticated twenty-first century Britain?

Now we know.

In one sense the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell tower fire told us nothing new. Few people who have followed the Inquiry over the last six years will have been surprised by its conclusions. What is new is to see the dreadful catalogue of ‘incompetence dishonesty and greed’ laid out in excoriating detail for all to see.

So what should happen now? At least six things must be on the agenda:

Combustible cladding on remaining buildings around the country should be removed as soon as possible. Government estimates suggest there are 4,600 buildings around the country with unsafe cladding. Less than one third of them have had their remediation completed, and work is yet to start on half of them. And, astonishing as it may sound, this is now more than seven years after Grenfell. Cladding that is illegal on new buildings can still remain on existing ones. Developers and owners who are responsible for this state of affairs should be made to pay for the remediation rather than passing those costs on to leaseholders, or delaying remediation for technical and bureaucratic reasons. Institutional resistance to this, as outlined recently by Michael Gove, someone who from my dealing with him on Grenfell, was one of the better politicians to deal with this issue, has to be overcome with urgency.
Prosecution of those who have been identified in the inquiry as bearing responsibility for the fire should also be brought as soon as possible. The police investigation suggests that it will be a number of years before court cases take place. The victims of this tragedy have already had to wait seven long years and now face the prospect of another three or even more years until justice is served. That is too long.
Those named and shamed in the report should examine their own hearts. Some remorse and apology has been evident from some, but not enough. Many still deny responsibility despite seven years of evidence-gathering. This is not a matter of revenge, but an indispensable step towards justice for everyone. Those named have presumably carried a burden of guilt over these past years. The Christian doctrine of repentance, confession and absolution tells us that there is a relief in finally admitting culpability, bearing the penalty, and finally, once all this has happened, receiving a measure of absolution.

We might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

The companies involved often have big pockets and the bereaved and survivors are ordinary people without the resources to pay expensive legal fees. The government should set aside a sum of money to enable victims, if they wish, to bring a civil case against those accused in the report. Arguably this should have happened many years before to speed up the process of justice.
A wider debate needs to take place in our society as to how we place love for neighbour at the heart of national life. A libertarian individualism which focusses on personal fulfilment and a view of freedom as doing what we like as long as we don’t harm others, rather than freedom to do the good has led us to this point. What would it mean in company law, for example, for each business or institution to have to explain how it is seeking the genuine welfare of its staff, clients and customers, not as an add on in their ESG agenda, but as the primary purpose of the organisation?
We need a spiritual renewal. Toleration rather than persecution of the neighbour was a good legacy of the Enlightenment, but it is not enough to build a well-functioning society. We are commanded not just to tolerate our neighbours but to love them. And this only be justified if my neighbour has ultimate transcendent value. The new atheism was an act of cultural vandalism, undermining faith in God, an objective basis for each human life, and having nothing to replace it with. As Nick Cave recently put it: “People need meaning. And secular society has not come up with the goods.” This is why religious traditions including Christianity have tended to link love for God to love for neighbour. What that spiritual renewal looks like is hard to tell, and yet we have perhaps seen a stirring of it in recent times.

If something approaching those six things happened, then we might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

Article

Comment

Politics

Race

7 March 2024

4 min read

Claims of institutional racism let politicians off the hook

They need to be mindful of something else baked into our institutions.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A TV roundtable discussion with five people against a backdrop of Parliament.

Politicians and pundits discuss the Lee Anderson issue.

Racism charges have recently divided very neatly along political lines. Tearing chunks out of each other at the Despatch Box, prime minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer have both bet their houses by playing the race card on each other.

Starmer claims the Conservative Party wallows in Islamophobia, having withdrawn the whip from its former deputy chairman for stating publicly that Islamist extremists control the Mayor of London. For his part, Sunak, yah-boos back that Labour didn’t have a runner in the Rochdale by-election, after suspending its candidate for peddling an anti-Israel conspiracy theory.

Rochdale was duly won by the famously pro-Arab former Labour MP George Galloway. Sunak wants us to hold that Labour is as antisemitic as it was under Jeremy Corbyn.

So there we have it. Labour is antisemitic and the Tories are Islamophobic (not a good word, but the currency of the moment). Pick your prejudice and vote accordingly at the general election.

Whatever the validity or otherwise of these claims, it’s in the interest of both parties to accuse their opponents of being rotten to the core with these attitudes. It doesn’t really work for them to claim that Sunak personally is an Islamophobe or Starmer an antisemite.

This has to be about the whole political parties over which they preside. It’s really about institutional racism. So when a Conservative MP, Paul Scully, has to apologise for calling some parts of Birmingham and London “no-go areas” for non-Muslims, it’s taken as a reflection on Conservatives as a whole.

Similarly, it’s an insufficiency to criticise particular journalists for their reporting bias; a former BBC director-general has to call the entire corporation “institutionally antisemitic.”

The apartheid governments of South Africa were systemically racist, the Conservative and Labour parties – and the BBC which reports on them – are not.

I have a big problem with these generalisations. The political parties contain racists of both kinds, antisemitic and Islamophobic, as well as very many members of no racism at all (thankfully). And I happen to know from personal experience that the BBC operates an informal policy of equal-opportunities bigotry – there are as many Islamophobes as there are antisemites in the organisation, though together they amount to a small minority (again thankfully).

There is, consequently, no institutional racism in these places of work, though they are all rich in the employment of racist individuals because, alas, so is the world.

Institutional racism was a term coined in the Sixties, but it really only gained traction as an indictment of the Metropolitan Police in 1999’s Macpherson Report into the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence.

I was uneasy with that terminology then and remain so now. Police officers are (or can be) racist; the constabularies for which they work are not. If they were so, they would train their officers to be racists – and they didn’t and do not.

Their training may have been rubbish in all sorts of ways, but there is a world of difference between omission and commission. The apartheid governments of South Africa were systemically racist, the Conservative and Labour parties – and the BBC which reports on them – are not.

Our politicians might be mindful of that, whatever their faith or none. And they might like to note some of the imperatives of its teaching

Two matters stem from this. The first is simply that individuals are responsible for racist attitudes, not the organisation for which they work, although those organisations have a duty to call out racists in their midst.

The other is to recognise what we are, institutionally and systemically. The UK’s uncodified constitution has two Churches established in law, the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The monarch is the supreme governor of the former, as well as head of state.

That is simply the way it is and, this side of disestablishment of the Church, it follows that (in England and Scotland at least) we live in a Christian country, however few of its inhabitants now attend its churches. In short, Christianity is baked into our systems and institutions.

Our politicians might be mindful of that, whatever their faith or none. And they might like to note some of the imperatives of its teaching: care for the afflicted in the story of the Good Samaritan; the welcome of strangers in the report of the Syrophoenician woman who seeks crumbs from the table; the love of neighbour; Paul’s universalism.

This (and much else besides) is meant, in law, to define who we are. We might expect an elected servant of the state such as Lee Anderson, the Tory suspended from his party for claiming a Muslim power grab of London, or Azhar Ali, the Labour candidate similarly booted out for claiming that Israel conspires to murder its own citizens, to know something of the national creed that defines our parliamentary democracy.

That parliament doesn’t contain institutionally racist parties, any more than the BBC or our police forces are systemically racist. Rather, we should hold individuals to account, whoever they are. Because, ultimately, claims of institutional racism let individuals off the hook. Institutional Christianity does not.