SEVEN YEARS after the Grenfell Tower fire, and still lessons have not been learned. Survivors, the bereaved, and the community have yet to see justice served. Meanwhile, the conditions that led to the fire remain unchanged.
This year’s Labour Party conference commences in the aftermath of the final Grenfell Tower inquiry report. As trade unionists, it is our duty to fight for serious and meaningful action in memory of the 72 lives lost.
The night of June 14 2017 will never be forgotten by firefighters. Yet thousands of buildings are still wrapped in flammable cladding. We still face a crisis in building safety. Profit continues to be put before lives.
Decades of political decisions led to the disaster, gutting Britain’s fire safety regime.
Labour’s manifesto committed the incoming government to “take decisive action to improve building safety, including through regulation, to ensure we never again see a repeat of the Grenfell fire.”
To ensure a fire of this scale never happens again, the government must reverse the cuts, privatisation and deregulation that paved the way to tragedy.
We must unite as a movement to fight for a complete overhaul of the deregulatory agenda. Businesses have been allowed to self-regulate, prioritising shareholder profits at the expense of people’s safety.
This can be seen across all areas of decision-making relevant to the Grenfell Tower: from construction to risk assessment, failures in inspection and enforcement. Commercial interests and profit must be completely removed from any new system of regulation.
At the same time, political and democratic accountability have been stripped away. Local government and fire and rescue services have been hollowed out by cuts, while ministers have overseen a culture of complacency from the top down. Concerns of council and social housing tenants have been systematically ignored.
Many such warnings went unheeded before the Grenfell Tower fire, from the residents directly and from the Fire Brigades Union and other fire safety experts in response to other tower block fires.
For too long, working-class people have been treated as collateral by those in power. But where bosses seek to lock us out of the room, we must rally in numbers to deliver our demands.
