Editorial: A catastrophic event

Abstract

Justice for Grenfell. Source: Paul Watt, 2017.‘It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord … and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders.’Grenfell Action Group (2016)‘Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance.’Judith Butler (2012, 148)‘For what may we hope? Kant put this question in the first-person singular along with two others—What can I know? and What ought I to do?—that he thought essentially marked the human condition. With two centuries of philosophical reflection, it seems that these questions are best transposed to the first-person plural … . Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it. What would it be for such hope to be justified?’Jonathan Lear (2006, 103)No one who observed the deadly fire in Grenfell Tower or its chaotic aftermath can doubt that it constituted precisely the catastrophic event that its residents feared. Beginning in the early morning hours of Wednesday, the 14th of June, the 24-storey public housing block in North Kensington, in inner west London, was rapidly consumed by an uncontrollable conflagration. The exact number of fatalities is still being tallied, but as of this writing, at least seventy-nine people have died. Scores of family members and neighbours are missing. Dozens of those who survived are in hospital. Hundreds of people were made homeless and have lost everything.The disorganised and inadequate response by local authorities and the Westminster government spurred protests that resembled a resistance movement. It quickly emerged that tenant and resident organisations, such as the Grenfell Action Group, had been calling attention to the risk of disaster in the building for years. The tower lacked a building-wide alarm or sprinkler system and contained only a single staircase for escape. Recent renovation work may also have contributed to the risk of fire. Rather than being heeded, tenants who raised these concerns were actively threatened by the council. Following the fire, reports suggested that when refurbishing the tower’s exterior cladding, the landlord, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, may have opted for substandard, in fact flammable materials in pursuit of cost savings. As this picture emerged, popular outrage grew. Increasingly it seems that the tower’s largely working-class residents had been living with a level of deadly risk that would never have been tolerated for their wealthier neighbours in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.