ONE year on, it’s still hard to grasp the full impact of Grenfell. The greatest pain, grief and anger are felt by those who lost loved ones. 

But their feelings are shared by many others. The atrocity is a reminder of the brutality of capitalism. 

Working-class communities everywhere know their lives are held cheap by the system. 

Justice for Grenfell won’t be reached through the empty words and crocodile tears of the Establishment or its public inquiry. 
Real justice means changing our entire attitude to housing in general and council housing in particular. A future Labour government has the potential to do that, but not with the policies currently being pushed by some in the party.

In his foreword to Labour’s recently published housing green paper (Housing for the Many), Jeremy Corbyn rightly describes Grenfell as a symbol of failed housing policy.  

But the proposals in the document threaten to repeat mistakes of previous Labour governments. There are things to be welcomed, like a commitment to scrap the bedroom tax, hold ballots on estates threatened with demolition, suspending right to buy and protecting permanent secure tenancies for council tenants. 

But overall there’s a worrying lack of conviction on key issues and no compelling vision to persuade people that housing will really be different if Labour’s in power.

The fundamental flaw in the green paper is the failure to unambiguously support council housing. The pledge to lift borrowing restrictions on councils so they can start building again is a step in the right direction.  

But as with other aspects of the green paper, it’s hedged by potential compromises. As Martin Wicks has argued in the Star (June 11 2018), it’s equally important that the arcane “historic debt” that hamstrings local councils is written off, particularly if, as the green paper wrongly proposes, local authorities are to compete with housing associations for funding.  

There’s also a clear implication that a Labour government would be equally happy for councils to “commission” new homes rather than build them.  This is a dangerous fudge that keeps the door open to the kind of disastrous policies Haringey Council was pursuing before local campaign pressure forced a rethink.  

While quite rightly ditching the government’s ridiculous definition of “affordable housing,” the paper presents another one that could become equally discredited, this time by deliberately blurring the lines between different types of “social housing.”    

Instead of backing Jeremy Corbyn’s clear statement that a Labour government should build 100,000 council homes a year, shadow housing minister John Healey is muddying the waters.  

The green paper presents five different varieties of “affordable” housing. This is overcomplicated, potentially divisive and prone to manipulation by politicians and developers. 

This slicing and dicing of housing provision approach is heavily influenced by Sadiq Khan’s emerging policies in London and the US model. It runs the real danger that investment doesn’t go where it’s needed most.

But these pre-emptive caveats reflect the very modest spending commitment the green paper is making to housing investment. A total of £4 billion, restoring funding to the 2010 level, is simply inadequate.

The underlying fault line is that some people in the Labour Party remain in thrall to the private development industry and the housing association lobbying machine. They refuse to accept that the market is the cause of the housing crisis, not the solution.  

We’ve had decades of local councils trying to cut deals with developers and using our deeply flawed planning system to build the homes we really need. It hasn’t worked.  

Healey and others appear to have a particular blind spot around the role of large housing associations (HAs). Whatever their noble origins and fine words, these are organisations that are playing an increasingly pernicious role.  

Around the country, there are numerous examples of HAs raising rents, failing to carry out repairs, demolishing estates — something too many councils, including Labour-controlled ones, are also doing — and attacking their workers’ pay and conditions while their managers receive six-figure salaries.  Despite having received billions in public subsidy, big HAs are now building more homes for the private market than for social rent.  

The green paper offers only muted criticism of HAs and nothing beyond vague statements to suggest a Labour government will insist that they operate in a more transparent fashion and return to their founding objectives.  

This needs to be spelled out. If they don’t comply, they’ll receive no more public money or land.  

The myopia of some Labour politicians on housing is partly explained by their fear of challenging the ideological supremacy of home ownership.  

But it’s not true that council housing can only be restored at the expense of other policies. On the contrary. It’s essential to see different housing sectors as part of a greater whole, something the green paper fails to do.  

For example, there’s no reference to reforming private renting. It’s as though the super-exploitation of private tenants is unconnected to the scarcity of council housing when, in fact, they’re directly related.

It feels that, instead of being as proud of it as we are of the NHS, some in the Labour Party are embarrassed about council housing and calling it what it is — and this links back to Grenfell.  

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the reason the tower was covered in flammable cladding material was how the block looked. When combined with out-of-control private contractors, poor management and historic underinvestment, a death trap was created.  

But the tragedy would have been avoided if residents had been listened to. They weren’t because council tenants have been denigrated, stigmatised and treated as lesser citizens for decades.  

As Marjorie Mayo has said, council and other social housing tenants have been subject to a similar “hostile environment” to that visited on overseas workers.  

Instead of trying to dilute Jeremy Corbyn’s explicit commitment to council housing and the people who live in it, Healey should be echoing it.    

It’s good that the green paper prioritises fire safety, but this also highlights a wider problem with the party’s current role.  

The thousands of people still living in unsafe homes shouldn’t have to wait for a Labour government to come and save them. 

The Tory government has reneged on its pledges to carry out essential fire safety work after Grenfell. When it finally made a commitment, it said outrageously that the money would come from the affordable housing budget.  

The Labour Party should have led an immediate campaign to demand that people are not left in danger and that we are not faced with an invidious choice between safe homes and no homes.  
Labour needs to represent us in between elections, not just when it wants our votes.  

Housing is an issue where a national campaign could link the party to the daily concerns of working-class communities and cut across the forces of racism and reaction that are seeking to exploit them.

This would be a much better use of time and money than, say, a pop concert!

To make that connection, Labour needs to be presenting clear arguments for radical housing reform now, but it also needs to get seriously involved in the many grassroots housing justice campaigns happening around the country.  

The trade union movement needs to do the same. It’s happening in isolated cases, but we need a concerted, co-ordinated strategy to build a national movement demanding decent, truly affordable, energy-efficient and safe homes for all. That’s how we create a genuine memorial to Grenfell.

Investing in new and existing council housing is a necessary but insufficient way of decisively changing housing policy direction and would win popular support.  

The housing crisis is now affecting millions of people, directly or indirectly — not all of them natural Labour supporters. But winning the argument for council housing can’t be taken for granted.  

Alongside other municipal and public services, council housing’s been under sustained attack for decades.  

A whole generation, including many of those suffering most from its shortage, has only known council housing in retreat.  

The green paper talks about making “affordable homes [sic] a best choice not a last resort.” To do that entails a bold, ambitious vision that truly values council housing in a way set out by John Boughton in his recently published book Municipal Dreams. “Council housing is not, in any meaningful sense, ‘subsidised.’ Construction loans are repaid and, in most cases, the homes themselves become an asset, not only to those who live in them but a financial — and income-generating — asset to the local authority.”

Housing has become the rope in a tug of war between the left and right of the Labour Party. The policies in the green paper will only tinker around the edges of the endemic housing crisis under capitalism.  

We need something that really challenges the failed market model and offers a future when working-class people don’t die because of their housing but can live in a society where a home is an inalienable right.