There is a “very strong emerging narrative: that Jeremy Corbyn got it right by turning up and sharing the grief of the victims” in the Grenfell Tower disaster, says Ross Clark in The Spectator. Conversely, “Theresa May got it horribly wrong by restricting her visit to contact with the emergency services”. But I’m not sure I agree. Corbyn “may already have overplayed his hand” by trying to “turn the tragedy into a morality play about rich and poor”. Take his call for “properties of absentee property owners to be requisitioned in order to rehouse survivors of the fire”.
Many people will share his anger at the problem of properties left unoccupied by absentee landlords. “I share it too.” But it’s deeply inappropriate to bring the issue up at this time. Not even “through the wildest imagination” can one claim that absentee landlords have anything to do with this disaster. Exactly what is responsible – “the possible role of the cladding, the lack of a sprinkler system, the lack of a fire escape and the appalling advice for people to stay in their flats and wait to be rescued” – needs to be examined in great detail in a public enquiry. But trying to turn this into a tale about rich and poor “stinks”.
Not at all, says Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. “The true causes of the failures go far wider. They lie in the way Britain is run.” The fire is a damning indictment of a country that still “murders its poor”, 170 years after activists such as Friedrich Engels began exposing the appalling number of deaths and injuries that the industrial revolution was inflicting on the working class. Yes, we must have an inquiry to establish exactly what happened, but “we can draw our own conclusions about whether well-heeled renters in a luxury tower would have received the contempt dished out to Grenfell’s council tenants after they published detailed reports on their homes being firetraps”.
Grenfell is a “spectacular example of social violence” of the kind that usually occurs out of sight in this age of austerity: “of people losing their cash income for not being disabled enough, of families turfed out of their homes for having more than two kids or a bedroom the state deems surplus to requirements”.
The march of “spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing” has transformed the state from something that supposedly exists to protect and support its citizens into “a machine to make money for the rich” – some of whom are indeed those well-heeled property owners who live close to the tower. “One courtesy we should pay the victims of Grenfell is to drop the glossy-brochure euphemisms. Let’s get clear what happened to them: an act of social murder, straight out of Victorian times.”