2022 Introductory note:
This is another piece of previously published work which originally appeared on the now defunct Spectrum Online political zine. This one was a reaction to the Grenfell fire of June 2017 and was written in one sitting. I recall I was hot and pissed off. I'd walked to the river at Richmond and sat people-watching while drinking beer. The fire had occurred two or three days earlier and was the latest horror in what seemed like a Spring of endless darkness. I felt despondent and decided the choice was between diving into the next bottle or heading home and putting it down in black and white; I chose the latter.
My exposition here, which rereading I can appreciate for its vitriol, nevertheless was floated on a still latent notion of possible redemptive change. In this resides my naivety. I write here as if in intimate acquaintance with rock bottom, and yet the following four years would cast this series of security and social disasters in an almost nostalgic light. We had yet to face the interminable months of Brexit wars and my optimism for the Corbyn project - at this point at its zenith owing to the 2017 election result - would be slowly eviscerated by a combination of friendly fire and one of the most relentless media/establishment onslaughts Britain has ever witnessed. I have a bad habit, common I imagine amongst those with past involvement with the far Left, of reading too much into popular reaction in the immediate aftermath of a significant event.
It did seem in that week that something had snapped in the country; that the loss of Theresa May's Parliamentary majority, and the apparent endorsement of Corbyn's Labour, opened up a glimpse of a future (outside the EU) which wouldn't be a deregulated Gammonist tax haven with flag-shagging as its national sport. The Grenfell fire and the national outrage it evoked looked like it could be the last straw. It wasn't to be. After two years of cold civil war over the meaning of Brexit the nation was exhausted. I know I was. The slogan "Get Brexit Done" and Boris Johnson's matey mop-top grimace looked to a significant proportion of former Labour voters in the North of England like a bankable punt to get Britain back on the rails. Now BoJo is going and I could write a similar piece about the sickness and degeneracy of his Premiership. That imaginary epitaph, which I did write for his predecessor would however not contain the outrage mixed with messianic optimism which I display here. Still too Liberal. Still not looking reality in the face. That will come with the Pandemic.
The photographs were taken during my 2 x 10mile walks around Kensington and Chelsea in August 2017 to collect sound and image material for a "sound portrait" of the borough. Three months after the fire the tributes were still there.
2017 text
It seems fitting right now that a new series of Twins Peaks is appearing on our screens. David Lynch's most well known production about a small town in the North of the United States, traumatised by the slow revealing of its dark underbelly could be a metaphor for Britain in2017. The original series began with the murder of a local homecoming queen; an act which on the surface appears totally out of place amid the scenes of bucolic small town life; a darkness that could only have been visited upon the community from outside. Eventually the surface is broken to reveal that what appeared wholesome, functional and everyday was built upon layers of corruption, violence and lies. The darkness which seemed to have come from outside is discovered to be rooted at the very foundations of the town itself. In the last few weeks something similar may be happening in Britain.
Two terrorist attacks, one surprise election result and one horrific tower block fire have left Theresa May's beleaguered premiership teetering on the brink. More important than that; more important for the possibility of lasting radical change, is the feeling, palpable in the country, that some hitherto unknown darkness, which the powers that be have spent the best part of two decades telling us was outside, out there" trying to destroy our way of life", is in fact right here. It runs through everything, from the transformation of London into a vast foreign investment portfolio, to the filthy money and weapons moving back and forth from Western governments to the Middle East, from the cuts to public services and the doctrine of austerity, to the acts of mass murder in Manchester and London, and of course this week in one of the richest places on earth, the abandonment of the country's poor to death by fire in their own homes.
It started
after the Manchester Arena bombing when the role of the intelligence services
and Theresa May's Home Office in maintaining an extreme anti-Gaddafi faction
(The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group) was revealed, and that the then home
secretary had allowed bomber Salman Abedi to travel age 16 to fight in Libya and
to return unhindered. ().
Only a few weeks prior she was seen virtually kissing the hands of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud while agreeing a multi-billion pound weapons
deal with the Wahhabist state that is currently using those weapons and others
supplied by the US to pulverise parts of Yemen back into the Middle Ages,
creating the world's most serious food crisis, which the UN has described as a
"man-man humanitarian catastrophe". Those weapons she told Parliament
back in September 2016 were important to "keep people on Britain's streets
safe".
The polls were already closing as we entered June. The Prime Minister's robotic and evasive non-performances could scarcely be defended by her own party, while Jeremy Corbyn was seen addressing thronging crowds wherever he went and seemed at ease among ordinary people drawn to his program of an end to austerity and renewed investment in public services. An arrogant and skeletal manifesto followed from the Tories which few cabinet ministers had even seen before being asked to defend. May's bunker mentality extended to her own party. Like the aging Emperor Claudius she relied on a few personal advisors for her connection to the real world. When called out on the blatant U-turn over the so-called dementia tax she steadfastly denied anything had happened. Like her speech in front of Downing St the day after the election, she seemed to occupy a different logical space to the rest of mankind. Strong and stable - the mantra with which she called the election, began to look at best deluded, if not mildly deranged.
Then on June 2nd, six days before the polls opened, another atrocity. The van and knife attack at London Bridge instead of playing into the government's rhetoric on security and stability seemed to have the opposite effect. Labour grabbed the initiative, focusing the public debate on cuts to police numbers during Theresa May's time at the Home Office. And again there were noises on the periphery about the State's role in doing deals with countries known to finance terror organisations. In the same week Donald Trump heralded the isolation of Qatar by its neighbours for just this reason and then sold $12bn of weapons to them. In an irony that few noticed, the Shard of Glass, a vast middle finger of capitalist domination that looms over the once Dickensian area around London Bridge, is majority owned by the Qatari state and was constructed as part of a large project of "regeneration" which saw many old established businesses forced out by compulsory purchase orders and soaring rents.
The election result, despite leaving the Conservatives as the largest party felt like a renewal; a vindication of ideas and a form of politics that many thought had been lost to cynicism, Neoliberal individualism and more recently the fallout from Brexit. Instead Labour's leader stands tall at the head of a movement which since the election result has swelled the ranks of his party beyond 800,000. Rather than Brexit, immigration, stability or even security, the public discourse was dominated by the issues of austerity, cuts to public services and a genuine feeling - for the first time in decade - of a real choice at the ballot box. The Prime Minister was visibly crestfallen , reduced to repeating the same broken phrases from the campaign, before submitting hers and her government's future to the creationists, anti-abortionists and religious zealots of the Democratic Unionist Party. Now Grenfell Tower has happened.
I switched on the radio as I do every day on my 5am drive to work and for the third time in as many weeks I immediately gauged that sombre professional BBC tone that is their hallmark at times of tragedy. This, at the end of weeks of shocks and reversals seems to bring everything together into one brutally tragic denouement. The poorest people in the richest borough in the country, suffocated and burnt to death in their homes after being threatened with legal action for publically raising fire safety concerns. An unaccountable quango inflicting "beautification" upon their building for the benefit of the surrounding rich; work that seems likely to be the cause of this unprecedented fire.
The terrible sight of the tower engulfed in flame and the harrowing stories of those within are mirrored by the unrestrained anger of the survivors and general public. For the first time in my memory such an event was covered immediately from the perspective of politics, class and inequality. Despite that, animosity from the residents towards the media is clear, with even the doting Jon Snow of Channel 4 News getting a hard time on the ground. Again and again the same grievances are heard in interviews; cuts, gentrification, abandonment, inequality and stigmatisation by the media.
The image of Theresa May at her private audience with a select few senior fire and police officers may be defining for her. Watching the coverage you become aware that separations so many of us are used to taking for granted are collapsing. The sort of scenes of anguish we're used to seeing in Alepo or Bangladesh, here in one of the richest places on earth. The sort of testimony of trauma we're used to hearing translated. Weeping women pace the streets carrying pictures of loved ones missing in the inferno. In the era of Globalisation, argued Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire, there is no longer any geographical separation between first and third worlds, they exist together side by side. The greatest poverty amid the greatest riches, the greatest suffering amid the greatest prosperity. People made homeless by the fire and their supporters have stormed the offices of Kensington and Chelsea council, demanding help and justice.
Something has been emerging over the last month, confirmed by the electoral slap delivered to Theresa May's Conservative and Unionist Party and their arrogance in expecting a fearful, compliant electorate to hand them a landslide. People aren't buying it anymore, and there is a sense that the repeated blows of tragedy during this time of political choice has had the effect of focussing attention on the state of Britain like never before. But more than that, what may be coming to consciousness for the first time in British society is the connection between things; the common substance linking all these events. Let us call the devil by its name: The Market. Not the market as talked about by the classical economists of the 18th and 19th century, not even the free market talked about in relation to exiting the EU. This is the Market not as something that exists, but as an idea, something transcendent and ineffable against which everything else is evaluated. This is the Market as first cause and first principle from which all human conduct should be measured. Indeed, from the idea of Market comes a whole anthropology of what the human being is and what a human society should look like. Not the political animal of Aristole but homo economicus. Not the community of equals striving to build the Just City but a network of freely contracting individuals, rationally calculating according to their own self-interest.
It is from commitment to this idea of the Market that successive governments have sold off Britain's public services, attempting as much as possible to make Britain mimic that idea. It is from the idea of the Market that Britain takes money from corrupt undemocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia and Qatar in exchange for weapons, despite their known involvement in the funding and dissemination of Islamist extremism. It is from the idea of the Market that police numbers are cut making it harder to detect and prevent that same terrorist extremism. It is from the idea of the Market that council housing is sold off or run down to make way for lucrative private developments that (in London in particular) are beyond the reach of those on ordinary wages. And it is from that same idea of the Market that so much of this new private housing stock is sold to foreign investors and left empty while homelessness spirals and the poorest have to live in dangerous, decrepit rented accommodation. Finally it is from the idea of the Market that the welfare state should be transformed (where it is not destroyed)in concert with profit seeking private companies into a apparatus for coercing people into the appropriate market behaviour, which equates to a life of precarious living, "bullshit jobs" (to borrow David Graeber's phrase) and permanent uncertainty.
At every level from major corporations and transnational organisations like the IMF, World Bank and the EU, to national governments and on down to local councils, the same idea, the same first principle of governance is applied and used to guide decisions and orientate human action. This is the almost metaphysical thread that runs through globalisation. It is only in the Neoliberal era, when the State was weaponised against Welfare and the unions, and the separation between public and private, State and free enterprise has all but collapsed, that the idea of the Market was able to become the totalising global principle it now is.
There is no single name for what I'm describing. Globalisation has been the common term but I prefer to use the expression One-World Governance. Everywhere it is transforming human life, bringing inequality, breaking up communities and breaking down forms of solidarity that don't adhere to the idea of the Market. This is the form-of-life, hierarchically ordered that today holds sway across the world. Until recently the violence that this system brings with it has been mostly kept at the periphery. Since the global crash in 2007 that separation too has now collapsed. Whether it is life permanently under the threat of terrorism, or amid the tragedy and ruins of Grenfell Tower, life under One-World Governance is a unfolding catastrophe. Change is undoubtedly in the air and the centre ground has all but vanished. Sides are being taken, battle lines drawn. Even if the tragedies of the last month do lead to lasting change it will take a shift of global proportions to redirect humanity from the course it is currently on.
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