Abstract
AbstractFocusing on the aftermaths and consequences of the Grenfell Tower fire, this article reveals the factors which combined to produce a fire that could have such devastating effects. Further, it delineates the discrete ways in which distinct types of harms – physical, emotional and psychological, cultural and relational, and financial and economic – continue to be produced by a combination of State and corporate acts and omissions. Some of these harms are readily apparent, others are opaque and obscured. It concludes by showing how failures to mitigate these factors constitute one manifestation of the more general phenomenon of ‘social murder’.
Highlights
While research, writing and activism around the phenomena of corporate and State crime have burgeoned since they first reached mainstream academic attention in the 1960s, such crimes remain relatively obscured by the crimes of the usual suspects
In indicating the ways in which a combination of State and corporate acts and omissions resulted in a fire producing a range of social harms, I bring to the fore how ‘home’ can be the site of State-corporate criminality and harm
It is not just that the area within which Grenfell Tower sits is absolutely and relatively poor – but, as Emma Dent Coad’s (2017) report indicates, it is getting poorer. According to this collation of data by the local MP, since 2010 the poor in the constituency have got poorer, the rich richer, and inequality in the most unequal area in England has widened – for example, in one ward, average life expectancy had declined by six years from 2010 to 2017 (Coad 2017, p.1). It is in this context that we can better understand both the conditions in which residents of Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West Estate lived and, most crucially, their relationships with Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) Council and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) to which the Council had transferred the management of the Borough’s entire council housing stock, 9,700 homes, in 1996 (Boughton 2017)
Summary
While research, writing and activism around the phenomena of corporate and State crime have burgeoned since they first reached mainstream academic attention in the 1960s, such crimes remain relatively obscured by the crimes of the usual suspects. It is in this context that we can better understand both the conditions in which residents of Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West Estate lived and, most crucially, their relationships with RBKC Council and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) to which the Council had transferred the management of the Borough’s entire council housing stock, 9,700 homes, in 1996 (Boughton 2017).
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