Grenfell Was a Massacre by Spreadsheet
By ChiralJon - https://flickr.com/photos/69057297@N04/35353492476, CC BY 2.0, Link
A few days ago, on the 59th anniversary, I published an article about the day corporate greed and the National Coal Board murdered 116 children at Aberfan. It reminded me of the Grenfell Tower fire, which took place 51 years later, and I realised that nothing has changed. When it comes down to choosing money over working-class people's lives, governments and corporations will always choose money.
The Grenfell report came out in 2024. Seven years, 1,700 pages, and tens of millions of pounds to tell us what every single one of us already knew: 72 people were murdered for money.
The inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, summed it all up as an "unedifying merry-go-round of buck-passing," which is the poshest, most British way of saying "a complete and utter shitshow of lies, greed, and arse-covering."
Let’s be blunt. This was not a "decades-long failure." It was a choice. It was the same, fucking choice that led to 116 children being buried under a slag heap in Aberfan. It is the choice to put profit before people, to ignore the poor, and to protect the powerful. It is money over lives, and it is always working-class lives.
The report confirms it all. The manufacturers, Arconic, Kingspan, and Celotex, were 'unscrupulous.' That's one word for it. I'd call them venal fucks.
The report states they used "systematic dishonesty" and "deliberately manipulated testing systems."
Let’s translate that from polite inquiry-speak. They knew they were selling plastic-filled tinderboxes. They knew their safety claims were false. They knew their products were "disastrous" in a fire. And they sold them anyway. They faked the tests, lied to the industry, and "cynically exploited" the system, all to make a few extra quid.
But they didn’t do it in a vacuum. They had help.
They had the help of successive governments, so "ardent for deregulation" (a polite term for letting corporations do whatever the fuck they want) that they ignored warnings about this exact kind of flammable cladding for decades. They knew the danger. They did nothing.
They had the help of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, one of the richest councils in the country, which decided to "cut costs" on a refurbishment by wrapping a building full of its poorest residents in flammable plastic. They even had the help of the London Fire Brigade, which, despite the lessons from the Lakanal House fire years earlier, had a "chronic lack of effective management" and stuck to a "stay put" policy that was a death sentence.
And so, 72 people are dead. Overcome by toxic gas from insulation and cladding that never should have been on a building in the first place. The report came out. The recommendations are in. The Prime Minister apologised "on behalf of the British state." The victims' group, Grenfell United, rightly calls it what it is: "greed, corruption, incompetence and negligence."
Now we get to the real test.
The police say prosecutions won't even begin until late 2026 because of the "scale and complexity." I'll tell you what’s complex: understanding how the fuck, in a just world, the executives who lied on those safety tests are still sleeping in their beds and not in a prison cell.
This was not a fire. It was a massacre by spreadsheet. A tragedy calculated in profit margins. And just like in Aberfan, the people responsible, the ones who signed off the forms, who lied in the marketing, and who put money before lives, have not paid.
Not yet.
Don’t hold your breath.