The catastrophe of London’s skeletal Grenfell Tower is a symbol of what austerity born of Thatcherism did to Britain. It’s almost too obvious but still, let’s study it.
The cosmetic embodiment of social anxiety, the tower was the Modern Poverty version of the black silk top hat of cruel Victorian London, alarming to contemplate but also a reminder of what humans can do when they gather and smugly reassure each other that they are in the right.
In 1797, John Hetherington was the first Englishman to wear a top hat, “a tall structure having a shining lustre calculated to frighten timid people.” He was taken to court for scaring children.
In the same way, council house towers like Grenfell — in the raggedy part of one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the world — are markers that strike fear into voters. May I never live there, they think.
There stands the tower, pale and enclosed at its base but turning blacker and more hollow as the eye rises, and there it will remain while investigators hunt for DNA among what might be bits of human bone. Why was it built in the first place and why did it burn so quickly?
Council housing in Britain was generally built to clear Victorian slums and provide reasonable housing, particularly after the eternal-seeming poverty and rationing that followed the Second World War, the war that economically finished off Great Britain and shot the U.S. into wealth and world supremacy.
Such housing was well-intentioned but built on the cheap and ill-maintained, just as Toronto public housing is now. It was designed for the working classes but left to the ultra-poor as Margaret Thatcher quickly sold much of it off at a discount under “right to buy” and failed to replace it. The new cladding allegedly done for green efficiency was probably done to make poverty less noticeable, serving the same purpose that cheap clothing does now.
The clad Grenfell Tower looked relatively glossy. But as the Guardian reports, the contract to refurbish the building was altered to save a mere half-million dollars, with aluminum cladding used instead of resident-approved fire-resistant zinc cladding. Poor installation may have added to the problem.
Management by the local and very wealthy Kensington and Chelsea council had the work done on the cheap. How could it have been otherwise?
For decades, neo-liberalism has demonized taxation and public spending. Pre-burning, British Prime Minister Theresa May told an impoverished British nurse in a public forum that there was no “magic money tree” to raise her salary.
But there is. It’s taxation. A nation agrees on the level of tax it is willing to pay to create a place it is more or less happy to live in.
For two generations, the right has harped on the horrors of tax. It won. Britain and the U.S. see the private affluence and public squalor once predicted by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. In Canada, we see less of it but the pressure is constantly on.
My favourite example in Toronto has always been now-Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong holding up a sign in 2014 protesting expensive new public toilets. He had a point. Surely people would prefer private toilets. I do. If they’re caught short — as everyone might well be, including the perfectly nice if deluded Minnan-Wong — it’s arguably more efficient to provide cheap traumatic toilets.
And that was the purpose of Grenfell Tower, built cheaply and repaired worse. There will always be people, more or less, unable to fend for themselves — I do think even Thatcher understood that — but if society must give them shelter, make sure the shelter’s nasty. Say what you want about the tenets of Thatcherism, but at least it’s an ethos.
That London council worshipped the god of cheap. It understood that if it spent proper money on repairing Grenfell, its huge cash reserves would dwindle and taxes might rise. The public — however house-rich and cash-poor Londoners might be — has been trained to object to that.
As with a house, you get the society you pay for. Homeowners who renovate with fake stucco and cheap panels are postponing the day of reckoning when the stains build up and the rain comes in. It’s a false economy.
I won’t use the word “shame,” as it’s smug and undefinable. But I want taxpayers to understand that good things cost more money. So pay it.