Why are Grenfell victims pleading for humanity? This council should resign | Seraphima Kennedy

If you were at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s first public council meeting since the fire at Grenfell Tower last week, you would have heard the testimony of Sandra Ruiz. “I’m not a survivor,” she said, “I’m speaking on behalf of my niece – 12-year-old Jessica Urbano, who is no longer with us.” Sandra wrote to the incoming council leader at the beginning of the month, on Jessica’s birthday, asking for “humility and humanity … that you go out and meet the families”. As of Wednesday, she had neither met the council leader nor received a response. “As the member of a family of someone who has deceased,” she said, “a simple acknowledgment to an email would have gone a long way.”

You would have heard the story of Mahboubeh Jamalvatan from 10 Grenfell Tower. “They say they understand you,” she said, gesturing to officials, “but the truth of the matter is that they don’t.” Holding up her now useless house key, she asked: “Every time I look at this, I wonder, what’s the difference between us human beings? What does humanity mean?”

And there was Ed Daffern, of the Grenfell Action Group, who mentioned concerns he raised with the head of the housing scrutiny committee in 2010. “We told you: if you build this building [Kensington Aldridge Academy], you will be putting the fire safety of Grenfell Tower at risk.” That email was copied to his MP, to the leader of the council, “and to you, Elizabeth Campbell,” he said, looking at her directly. “You ignored us.”

In the stories emerging from Grenfell Tower, there is a continuing narrative thread about who speaks, who listens and who is heard. The phrase “we hear but we do not listen,” was repeated throughout council’s four-hour public meeting on Wednesday evening. A quote from a Conservative party councillor, it’s an admission of the majority party’s failure to engage in meaningful consultation.

Before survivors told their stories, the majority Conservative council elected Elizabeth Campbell as leader despite opposition from a minority Labour group calling for commissioners to be sent in. Speaking over boos and calls for her resignation, Campbell – who admitted that she had never been inside a tower block in her 11 years as councillor despite living less than a mile from the famous World’s End estate – promised immediate cultural change; to use the council’s reserves to purchase housing for survivors; to build 300 more homes in the next five years, and to work with residents to ensure they had meaningful input into regeneration plans. She acknowledged their suffering, called their stories “heartbreaking”, and apologised for the council’s failure to help residents in the aftermath.

Words are one thing, actions another. Kensington and Chelsea disgracefully failed to either run this meeting smoothly or to provide an empathetic space for survivors who had been invited to give voice to their experience. Several found themselves locked out of the council chamber until security guards were instructed to let them in. As they banged on the door, Conservative councillor Matthew Palmer was seen on camera mouthing: “Don’t let them in.”

Inside the chamber, people could hear knocking on the door. “We’re traumatised,” one man said. “We’ve come from the fire. We don’t want to hear people knocking. It’s inhumane.” Seconds later, I watched Jennifer Nadel, a visibly shaken local Green party candidate slump back into her seat in the Great Hall, after battling with security to allow survivors into the meeting.

The gentleman she helped into the chamber was an elderly man who later addressed the meeting. He expressed his pain at having survived the fire when he found out children had died. “I have had a life,” he said. “We plead with you for humanity. Please be human. Please.” Holding up a piece of the cladding, he said that he would be unable to let it go until residents had closure. “I’m stuck. I can’t do anything. We need accommodation. We can’t rebuild our lives.”

That survivors are still asking for common humanity and to be seen as human in matters concerning them reminded me of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life. To have a life is to be engaged in political processes and contexts, to make decisions, to be heard. To have only the clothes you stand up in, memories, and the key to a flat that no longer exists might be interpreted as bare life: the biological fact of existence, nothing else, a kind of internal exile. When I asked Beinazir Lasharie, a Labour councillor in the borough why she thought security had been so tight at the meeting, and why her colleague had not wanted to let survivors into the room, she said: “They keep making mistakes in terms of humanity, not letting people in to sit down, and treating them like animals ... They have all of these procedures but they have no respect.”

Survivors highlighted failings before and after the disaster, including a chain of seemingly minor decisions that point to a systemic crisis, a catalogue of multiple bureaucratic failings whose cumulative impact has enacted an unforgettable violence on the local community.

There’s a kind of banality here, a failure of process and content – and, yes, a failure of humanity. Campbell’s first speech as leader demonstrated a far greater degree of empathy than any of her predecessors, and her choice of language is important. A “heartbreaking” disaster suggests a situation in which people are helpless. It suggests passivity, a lack of agency and a lack of culpability. The idea that residents need help rather than their rights suggests a lack of understanding of the legislative framework.

This linguistic othering might seem trivial, but in this context it is important. It signifies a separation between “us” (those who design services and wield power) and “them” (those who rely on services, and have limited access to power). It is easier to sign off on dangerous cost-reducing refurbishments if neither you nor anyone from your social class will be affected by eventualities. It is easier still if you do not see service users as fully human. In the public sector, as we have seen, this can be the difference between life and death.

“There’s a certain kind of thinking,” writes Profe Lyndsey Stonebridge, leader for the Humanity in Human Rights network at the University of East Anglia, “that glides over atrocity. You’d think Grenfell was struck by lightning rather than being the product of breathtaking bureaucratic incompetence, the same bureaucracy that has rendered itself blind to living – and now dead – souls.”

The Conservative majority council cannot help but take part in the kind of semantic othering of their own neighbours that reveals an imbalance of power within the community and within the body politic. Nothing showed that more than the mayor’s comments after two hours of survivors’ testimonies: “Thank you for your stories. Now let’s get on with the meeting.’

They can hear but cannot listen. They can walk the streets but they cannot see the tower blocks in which their neighbours live.

The crisis at Grenfell Tower did not start last month. It began years ago, in a complex chain of mystifying bureaucratic decisions that culminated in a total failure of services when they mattered most. It began in a council in which those wielding power do not rely on local services and do not see those who do as fully human. That the newly elected leader of the council cannot see this implies both she and her leadership team lack the capacity to effect true cultural change.

Campbell has previously said it will take “a generation” to heal divides in this borough. In the words of local campaigner Eve Wedderburn: “It will not take a generation, it will take regime change.”

Quite right. Stand down.