The religion of property is to blame for the deaths of those at Grenfell

I didn't want to be regarded as a 'grief tourist', but I wanted to experience Grenfell free from abstraction, media dissemination and political narratives.

As I exited Shepherd's Bush Station, locals were immediately gathering signatures for an inquest, NOT an inquiry. As you depart the manicured Westfield Shopping Centre, you cross over the imposing A3220, which acts like a highway buffer zone. As you cross, you enter a different world, characterised by sprawling tower blocks, fused intermittently with affluent closed areas, random boutique houses, and scattered chunks of low rise social housing. It's a sociologist's patchwork quilt.

To get a real sense of the sporadic class divisions here, please watch the BBC's "The Secret History Of Our Streets -- Portland Road", a really fine piece of work. In a revealing exchange, Henry Mayhew states (with my emphasis):

"There is nothing at the end of that line I have any involvement in"London is a series of villages and my village ends at that line"THEIR village is that way".

Mayhew is a stereotypical wealthy inhabitant of the borough, a blue-blooded banking heir whose ancestors originally "teamed up with the Rothschilds" to establish what would become Barclays banks. He candidly states that his inherited fortune "paid for everything I am, and everything I do". Asked why he bought a house in the area, he said "property is thee British investment" and he couldn't "let sentiment stand in the way of a good deal".

Unsurprisingly, inhabitants of the borough have an acute sense of class-consciousness and segregation. It is the most unaffordable borough in London for rentals, combined with the highest rate of out-of-borough homeless placements at 69%. The house price boom here is largely attributed to financial sector bonuses, ironically fuelled in no small part by public bailout money. Not to mention the foreign buyers, who are immediately parachuted into luxury to use Kensington's properties as "tax havens" without any government restrictions. These buyers knowingly smirk when interviewed as they stick to the charming fiction, "we came here because we love the British culture".

This extreme wealth disparity is rubbed in the faces of poorer residents. This is the context in which this fire occurred: a final straw, after generations of final straws, by New Labour and Conservative governments alike.

The Towering Inferno news images were shocking enough, but the true ferocity of the fire is beyond belief. A once imposing structure looks brittle and vulnerable. Light shines through where it shouldn't, as though the core of the building itself has vaporised. Window frames have mutated and buckled like nightmarish twisted fangs, sucked violently inwards towards bedrooms and living rooms. The tower looms eerily like a reaper, silently gazing over the community. With every casual glance upwards, locals see the lost silhouettes of friends and family in the charred darkened windows. As Paul Lewis suggested, it stands as a monument to the worst of human selfishness and indifference, a class war grave.

During my visit I found myself surrounded by missing person posters. As I read the heart-wrenching pleas for information, a group of very young local musicians played sombre reflective music with stringed instruments. Locals looked on reflectively as candles flickered on the pavement. One young boy stood next to me and said, "I can't let myself look at these, I'll just cry again". He then suddenly skipped off with his friends to play, like someone had un-paused a DVD. The posters had obviously been pictures of his friends. It was a reminder that obsessions with death tolls during such tragedies, sometimes obfuscate the vast underlying emotional destruction that expands well beyond the dead themselves and lingers in the minds of those that witnessed so much.

Seeing and hearing this, I remembered a loathsome man laughing with his friends on the train that morning. He said gloating to his gaggle of lackeys, "Don't worry, they won't be able to identify any of 'em anyway -- they're all illegal immigrants!". Anyone who has read Owen Jones' book 'Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class', will be familiar with this phenomenon. Communities have been dismissed as nothing more than anti-social problems to be managed by police, like the undeserving poor of the Victorian era, a live action theatre production of the TV show Shameless. After years of this tabloid conditioning that has helped legitimise poverty of a failed economic order by presenting it as deserved, it is unsurprising such ugliness froths to the surface from some during such tragedies.

To some, it seems, these aren't people deserving of unconditional compassion. They talk of them like abstract characters in a drama to be suspicious of. There has been a tangible adoption of a cold detached logic used against the victims at times. People dismissing their demands for estimated death tolls, as though they were the unreasonable demands of a militant union -- talking down to traumatised people like ill-informed children. People are just looking for certainty in chaos. All in a context of engineered state anarchy, where the impotent and indifferent authorities have finally been exposed. This is juxtaposed to poor communities, spontaneously organising themselves and taking ownership of a shocking situation. When I was there, people were distributing home-cooked food, advertising free counselling and art therapy sessions -- anything they could do. Meanwhile, Kensington Borough Council, which once boasted of its operating surplus of 274 million pounds, offered people a tenner!

An unlikely source in Russian TV said of Grenfell:

"Those who lost their homes are trying to survive... Politicians are trying to save their careers."

The government's refusal to take any responsibility should not come as a surprise: they have been hell-bent on outsourcing all responsibility to the private sector since day one. George Monbiot compared the Tory approach to the Disraeli Doctrine, "Never apologise, never explain".

However, after the damning revelations in BBC's Panorama and the incredible wealth of warnings given to government Ministers by the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group, this diversion tactic will rightly meet its end. In one particularly damning piece of correspondence, the Parliamentary group warned:

""should a major fire tragedy, with loss of life, occur between now and 2017 in, for example"a purpose built block of flats, where the matters which had been raised" were found to be contributory to the outcome, then the group would be bound to bring this to others' attention."

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