The Report into the Grenfell Tower disaster was been published. In all twelve volumes of exhaustive detail- Volumes Two and Three give 240 and 194 pages of often harrowing accounts (including photographs) of people’s lives through the fire of 14th June 2017. It is clear that the tragedy was the result of 50 years of de-regulated capitalism, allowing avoidance of safety provisions and often downright dishonesty (in effect wrapping the Tower in petrol). A Capitalist “free market” economy can successfully include many people as workers and consumers- usually enough to ensure a democratic majority in its favour. But it cannot supply the needs of everyone- it ceases to be profitable if it tries (revealed most clearly, perhaps, in the provision of good, safe housing). Inevitably therefore it leaves many “outside”, as it did those of Grenfell Tower. The history of the Hillsborough disaster and (more recently) the Post Office make any real accountability a distant hope.
Keir Starmer may have removed Margaret Thatcher’s photograph from Number 10, but her ideology is still dominant, as it was through the 1997 Labour government of Tony Blair. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe say: “The Left should start elaborating a credible alternative to the neoliberal order, instead of simply trying to manage it in a more human way”. But that seems unlikely to come from the present UK government, whether from conviction, or because they believe themselves to be imprisoned by a public opinion which will reject any such “alternative”.
Our reading was from Acts chapter 15, describing the conflict in the early Church about the requirement of circumcision for non-Jewish believers in Christ. For many Jewish Christians at the time that rite was a necessary “badge” of inclusion. But the Church rejected that option, and voted for greater inclusion (only to betray that insight some three hundred years later, when it became the “established” religion of Rome and began to exclude Jews).
Perhaps the modern equivalent in Britain is to claim the label of “cultural Christianity” (see Madeleine Davies’ article in the New Stateman, below). “I go to church, I vote Conservative, what can be more English than that”, protested an elderly Ukrainian in 1980s Shepherds Bush when questioned about his history before coming to the UK. For many politicians, being “British” seems somehow bound up with being “Christian”- is this a “circumcision” for our time?
In economic terms, being “included” requires that you should have “employable” skills, and willingness to work, or enough income to be regarded as a valuable member of society. Without those, you are in danger of becoming a reject, dependent on the “charity” of the community, a charity which is often in very short supply or even denied altogether. Such were the people of Grenfell Tower, and many others like them.
Weblinks:
The full Grenfell Tower report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/publication-of-the-grenfell-tower-inquiry-phase-2-report
Volumes Two and Three: GTI – Phase 1 full report – volume 2.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66d822c9a399e0dcf5200b31/Grenfell_Tower_Inquiry_-_Phase_1_report_-_volume_3.pdf
Laclau and Mouffe: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/1158-hegemony-and-socialist-strategy
Madeleine Davies: https://anglicanmainstream.org/the-rise-of-cultural-christianity/
On 7th April 1933 the Nazis introduced into German law the Aryan Paragraph as part of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”, which led inexorably to the Holocaust. Soon after its introduction Dietrich Bonhoeffer, described in a lecture and published article the ways he believed the Church was called to respond to state policies:
“This means a threefold possibility of action the church can take in relation to the state: firstly (as we have said) questioning the state as to the legitimacy of its action, i.e. making the state responsible. Secondly, serving the victims of state actions. The Church is absolutely committed to the victims of every social order, whether they belong to the Christian community or not. ‘Do good to everyone.’ (Galatians 6:10). In both these ways the Church uses its freedom to serve the free state, and in times of a change of law the Church must by no means evade these two tasks. The third option is not only to bind up the wounds of the victims under the wheel, but to throw itself into the spokes of the wheel itself. Such action would be directly political action of the Church and is only possible and required if the Church sees the state as failing in its function.”
If Bonhoeffer is right, what is the responsibility of the Church today, in a situation where the State of Israel consistently suppresses the rights and the freedom of Palestinians, and crushes any challenge, peaceful or violent, to its actions; and our own government in effect continues to give support to that policy?