Description
The Grenfell Fire Tower of 14 June 2017 was a reminder of the contemporary urban condition in Britain, characterised by extreme inequality of wealth and tenure. This paper takes issue with the mainstream narrative about the fire as an “incident” or a “technical failure” and seeks instead to situate it within the context of post-Empire Britain by putting race at the centre of analysis. My argument is that explaining how the Grenfell Tower fire occurred requires addressing the long-term politico-historical conditions that determined the distribution of precarity along racialised lines—exacerbated by shorter term neoliberal policies—and the mechanisms through which this racialisation is erased. Empire has been the prime instrument for the constitution of ideas of nationality and citizenship domestically, and race—defined as a mode of hierarchically ordering the world—lent itself perfectly to this project. As a constitutive element of the modern state, race needs to be the fundamental lens through which the political, social and economic condition of contemporary Britain need to be understood. This paper will analyse how race has shaped the post-war provision of welfare with regards to housing. The exclusion of newly settled colonial immigrants from social housing determined a spatial geography of precarity that was exacerbated by subsequent, allegedly colour-blind, neoliberal policies, particularly the right-to-buy, privatisation of housing provision and deregulation of building regulations. The erasure of race from public discourse is, I argue, what prevents the accurate understanding and tackling of contemporary housing inequality.
