This is the Tory summer of discontent
Anyone who worked on a newspaper in a metropolitan area anywhere in Britain in the early 1990s, or who was involved in urban politics at the time, will be familiar with the discussion that took place then on what to do with tower blocks that had become a danger to their inhabitants and a symbol of alienation and poverty.
In Glasgow, where I worked at the time as a young reporter, the regeneration that had been attempted in the 1980s spread into the “housing schemes”, that is the estates. The towering blocks festooned across the city were made of concrete and several decades of Glasgow weather had turned them dark grey and menacing. They swayed and rattled in the wind and rain. Why had they been built in the first place in the 1960s and 1970s? The old Victorian Glasgow tenement had at its best been communal, on the human scale, warm and friendly. At its worst the tenements were vertical slums. New tower blocks, often remote from the centre, were built at speed and turned out to be unpopular. The experiment had gone wrong.
The council in Glasgow, supported by the government, embarked on a programme of demolition, beginning to blow up what only 25 years previously had been deemed by most planners as the future of social housing. Government agencies wrapped all this into ambitious “enterprise strategies” and regeneration money was supplied, sometimes in return for the formation of housing associations, which would remove the centralised and failing council as the landlord and introduce some dynamism.
This was also happening in cities and towns across Britain, where similar problems existed.
Not every tower block went. Far from it. There are, it is estimated by the government, 4,000 such buildings of varying heights remain. In the New Labour years the regeneration work scaled up and it improved the appearance of our cities and, quite often, improved lives. Security was improved with the help of CCTV and entrance areas brightened. Energy efficiency became a factor too, particularly when an aim of public policy and regulation became to meet eco-friendly requirements.
The end result looked to anyone paying only passing attention – to which I plead guilty – as though it was all that bit better and nicer in some vague way. Like most middle class twits I would not have thought about living there – I only ever saw council blocks from a train window or from a car taking me to dinner or to a TV studio. There had been a massive regeneration programme undertaken by governments of both parties, hadn’t there? This was a success story, surely? A story of improvement, of social housing being improved with a bit of outsourcing and optimism.
If it occurred to anyone, other than concerned residents and fire safety experts, to ask what was underneath all that shiny cladding, or between the facing and the concrete 1970s wall, then we didn’t hear much of it before the disaster of the Grenfell Tower.
The situation is complex, even if the outcome is stark and simple – that is dead families. There are so many outstanding questions and I do not propose to even attempt to answer them here, save to say that suddenly everyone is an expert on cladding, much as amateur expertise in river dredging became required during the floods for every bloke in pub or campaigner pushing their pet theory. We are in the land of the instant expert plugged into Twitter.
There is a lot we need to find out. Why was this block not taken down and replaced with new social housing built on land nearby? Was the council too obsessed with encouraging building by developers for the wealthy? Why is one of the richest councils in the country so useless? Who knew what? Who decided to opt for combustible insulation if they did? The new Labour MP sat on the committee that approved the renovation it is said. Is that true? What does she know? Did fire cuts in London make a difference? What were the fire inspectors doing? What did the government know?
These questions swirl around and all need answers, which will take time to find. Simultaneously, the ghastly far left, emboldened by Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat dressed up as victory in the recent election, and feeling that revolution is nigh, is trying to stoke riots and exploit the genuine fury of survivors and relatives. I watched a march through London on Friday evening and it was dominated by Socialist Worker Party posters, the RGC and banners for student bodies at places such as SOAS. There is no question to which the answer is an SWP rally.
The anger of those involved is genuine, of course. The opportunism and cynicism of the Marxists – extolling the virtues of mass-murdering dictators – is quite another thing entirely. They speak of “street politics” as an alternative to democracy – because it excites them, I think. When I hear that term “street politics” I can only think of 1920s Germany.
So how bad is it going to get this summer? One note of caution, especially bearing in mind that the media and political establishment got the election wrong. The political-media nexus in a panic does seem to have gone off its collective rocker. Those questions do need answering, but this is not the apocalypse.
Most of the country is going about its business. A friend emailed on Saturday morning to point out that for all the fire is a tragedy, the media needs to get a grip. This weekend, tens of millions of Britons are cooking a meal, watching a film, having a drink, and probably reflecting that while the situation is a mess this is not the end times. I’m at the Stones Roses gig at Wembley.
Still, even so, if I was to guess, with the temperature through the roof in London, the Grenfell disaster amounts to a national turning point. This is the Tory equivalent of the “Winter of Discontent” in the late 1970s. This is the Tory Summer of Discontent.
Not only will the Tories – full of their brilliance a month ago, now not so much – probably have to find a new leader sharpish. At least 58 residents of that tower are dead. Their perishing will become a parable of austerity. It will haunt anyone in authority who outsourced and said price is all that matters. It will make the term property developer a term of abuse, worse even than journalist. It will make the concept of the short-term, the quick fix on the cheap, especially unpopular, even though the country has no more money than it had ten days ago.
The shift will compel the Tory party – or it should – to rethink how it operates from top to bottom. First, they must hold out against the Corbynism that would destroy Britain rather than build it up. For the Labour moderates this situation is equally difficult. A Marxist cabal has control of their party and millions of voters seem to actively like it or not care about the evidence that it never turns out well.
The aftershock will go on for years. And it will alter our politics profoundly, making it more tribal and more of a straight battle between those who think there is an endless supply of other people’s money and those who know that someone must make it first.
There is another point though. Making money is important but it is not enough. The Tory party and the centre-right more broadly has either forgotten or struggles to articulate a moral and ethical case. With that burnt out tower and its victims embodying the age, the anti-Corbynites who value freedom and property will need a lot more at their disposal than numbers.