'Social Murder & Neoliberal Necro-Politics': Lowkey On The Deadly Grenfell Tower Fire

Five years ago, shortly before 1AM, a fire went off in a tower block in West London. It took over 24 hours to bring the fire under control. Seventy two people were killed. One of the witnesses of the fire was rapper and organizer Lowkey, who reflects on the day both to me and in a song, which we play at the end of the video. "I saw all that in front of me. Someone I'd know since he was 14 years old, died, with his entire family, including his little brother, at the age of 4. The cladding from the building was in my hair and all over my body. " For Lowkey, this wasn't just a tragic accident. This was "social murder." And it was caused by "deregulation of the construction industry, which was a bipartisan orthodoxy of neoliberal necro-politics from Labor to the Conservative Party led to a point where you had flammable cladding put on not.homes, but also hospitals, cinemas. schools across the country. But in this particular building, Grenfell Tower, the fire there spread across the building at a really unnatural speed that went in different directions because the five millimeters of polyethylene in the center of the cladding spread it across the building and 72 people died.

And as I say, those people were my neighbors. And so in a situation like that, you are definitely given a choice. Either you can see the ways in which invisible violence becomes visible and neoliberalism kills people. You can start to grapple with what neoliberalism has meant in a material way for people across the country and those around them. Or you can just try and shut your eyes. But, you know, as I say, when the cladding is in your hair and people are screaming for their lives in front of you, if I wasn't radicalized by them, not only the fire, but the state rollout. You have to remember our political system is not one that can assimilate the social justice that would be required for us to see people held accountable for Grenfell.

Our state is something that can actually deal with the careful management of social injustice. Meaning, that we were heavily surveilled as a community, following the fire, meaning that much will come out about what the British state did to keep social order following this mass death, which took place on our doorstep."

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