The Grenfell Tower Fire: ‘Stay Put’ and Eliminationism

Abstract

The Grenfell Tower disaster, in which at least seventy-two people were killed, has been considered to be a potent symbol of the elimination of the racialised working class, who are already victims of social cleansing and gentrification. The history of disasters shows that the ‘stay put’ strategy at Grenfell Tower has historically been used as a social strategy to keep the racialised working class in tower blocks in emergencies rather than encouraging them to spontaneously evacuate. Although the science of tower block fires is complex, the use of equivocal language in addition to ‘stay put’ leads to probabilistic eliminationism amongst the racialised working class in a tower block fire. What happened at Grenfell Tower was congruent with a political strategy of probabilistic eliminationism.