Justice for Grenfell cannot be achieved outside of a frontal assault by the working class on the wealth and power of the financial oligarchy and its political defenders.
By focusing almost exclusively on the London Fire Brigade’s actions on the night, Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s inquiry deliberately transfers blame away from the real culprits.
Morris’s jailing is a vicious act of class justice aimed at suppressing opposition and protecting those responsible for 72 deaths in the Grenfell Tower inferno two years ago.
What is confirmed by the Met’s announcement is that the Grenfell Tower Inquiry is a filthy manoeuvre by the Conservative government, convened with the sole purpose of protecting the guilty from legal retribution.
The plan to deflect and contain workers’ demands for justice with a public inquiry could never have gotten off the ground had it not been for the Labour Party, particularly its then leader Jeremy Corbyn and prominent local MP Emma Dent Coad, who insisted there was no alternative.
According to the National Audit Office, there are an estimated 258,000 people living in the 4,771 buildings over 11 metres requiring urgent remediation. Even that figure is an underestimation.
People made decisions they knew risked working-class lives, and they were happy to do so because they considered those lives valueless next to the profits to be made.
The victims of Grenfell Tower died as the result of an act of social murder whose architects were companies aiming to cut costs in their refurbishment of the 24-storey building. Their accomplices were successive Conservative and Labour governments.
No guarantee of assistance has been provided, with council officials at pains to stress that the Spectrum Building residents are not council residents.
It soon emerged that the reason for the rapid spread of the fire was that two floors were covered in similar flammable cladding to that which caused the Grenfell Tower inferno in 2017, which took the lives of 72 people in an act of social murder carried out by the authorities.
Since the inquiry was announced seven years ago, the Socialist Equality Party has warned it was nothing more than a cover-up orchestrated to deflect blame from those responsible for 72 preventable deaths.
The suffering and illness of a significant number of the Grenfell firefighters makes even more the filthy moves by the authorities and Grenfell Inquiry to scapegoat them for the disaster.
Firefighters and fire service control staff across the UK, members of the Fire Brigade Union (FBU) are currently voting on whether to take strike action in pursuit of a pay claim. Firefighters and control staff are being offered a sub inflation pay cut offer of five percent. The last national firefighters strikes was in 2003.
The Office of Government Property issued a “Safety Briefing Notice” in September warning of the potential dangers of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in buildings which is “life-expired and liable to collapse”.
Over five years since 72 people died in an act of social murder, not a single person in corporate and political circles responsible for turning the building into a death trap has been prosecuted.
Five years later, the main issue to be addressed is why not a single person in political or corporate circles has been brought to justice for this heinous crime.
Despite testimony revealing the criminal wrongdoing of manufacturers and builders, and the corruption and negligence of government officials, not a single prosecution has been brought forward nor a significant piece of legislation adopted.
Jason Beer, QC, speaking on behalf of the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, essentially presented the Conservative government’s defence. He sought to portray housing ministers as innocent victims of the construction industry and local officials.
An inferno on the scale of Grenfell is a constant threat with so many residential buildings still enveloped in deadly flammable cladding.
Even if the response of the London Fire Brigade could be characterised as inadequate, testimony on October 28 made abundantly clear how and why its performance on the tragic night had been seriously compromised.
Whatever shortcomings on the part of the London Fire Brigade, the efforts of the inquiry to scapegoat them after their budgets had been cut to the bone, faced with a criminally-unsafe building in which many in corporate and political circles had conspired to save money and maximize profits, is filthy.
With blanket immunity granted to all those associated with facilitating the disaster until the entire process finishes, demands are being made for immediate prosecution of those already revealed as culpable.
This footage, by artist Constantine Gras, constitutes vital evidence of KCTMO’s contempt for residents, and of the residents’ fight, long before the fire, for justice and the social right to decent, safe housing.
To this day, not a single person or organisation responsible in political and corporate circles has been brought to account for this terrible crime.
