CROOKED companies dishonestly presenting their products as safe. Corporate incompetents engaged in a merry-go-round of buck-passing.
Regulators unwilling or unable to hold the businesses under their purview to account.
Tory ministers–always supported by the Liberal Democrats, let us not forget–obsessed with slashing regulation regardless of consequences.
A Tory council which could not care less about its tenants and the safety of vulnerable people.
And politicians of all parties who over decades ignored opportunities to address the risk of fire in housing construction.
If you were to script a play or a novel about the essence of neoliberalism, the report of the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 could be used unamended.
It is an indictment of an industry which put its own profits above ever other consideration, marketing products it knew to be unsafe.
It is an indictment of politicians who saw it as their mission not to serve the electorate but to clear away any impediment to business making as much hay as possible, often in the hope of a lucrative post-politics career.
It is an indictment of regulators whose passivity was a come-hither to the worst actors in the construction industry globally.
It is an indictment of the corrosive attitude nurtured since the 1970s which has marginalised the poor, the migrant, the social housing tenant, turning them into a political afterthought when not being actively demonised.
Above all, it is an indictment of a system which daily and hourly, as a core function of its nature, prioritises the making of profit above any social or democratic consideration.
To the extent that post-war governments had placed some restraints on this system, had modified its operation to mitigate potentially ruinous social outcomes while leaving its essence intact, they have been swept away over the last four decades.
So you have companies without a trace of conscience, politicians without any sense of the public good, local authorities without any objective beyond penny-pinching, regulators without any will to enforce remaining rules, all in the blind service of capital accumulation.
And then you have a calamity, with 72 dead, which could eminently have been avoided had any player involved consulted anything other than their wallets.
Martin Moore-Bick, chair of the inquiry, attributed the disaster to “incompetence, dishonesty and greed.” He is right. But it is presumably above his pay grade to name the fourth horseman of this apocalypse–neoliberal capitalism.
Heads should roll and there will rightly be a clamour for the prosecution of those who practised the most egregious deception.
Lawyers for Grenfell United had branded the companies most involved in the provision of unsafe materials as “little better than crooks and killers” and the inquiry report seems to endorse this view.
We are now told that it may be more than two years before prosecutions may be brought, or nearly a decade after the fire itself.
That is a shamefully long time for survivors and bereaved families to wait for justice, and it must be hoped that an Establishment that dithered and delayed in the long lead-up to the inferno, and has acted none too swiftly to make safe similar hazardous blocks, may now move more expeditiously.
And the report must surely be the signal for the overdue withdrawal of former Tory minister Eric Pickles, interested only in reducing regulation, from public life.
But whoever ends up facing justice, it is capitalism that is in the dock for the Grenfell fire.
Its enablers and cheerleaders are the greatest criminals of all. The extirpation of their influence once and for all would be the most fitting memorial to the dead.