’Social Murder & Neoliberal Necro-Politics’: Lowkey On The Deadly Grenfell Tower Fire

Five years ago, shortly before 1AM, a fire went off in a tower block in West London. It took over 24 hours to bring the fire under control. Seventy two people were killed. One of the witnesses of the fire was rapper and organizer Lowkey, who reflects on the day both to me and in a song, which we play at the end of the video. “I saw all that in front of me. Someone I’d know since he was 14 years old, died, with his entire family, including his little brother, at the age of 4. The cladding from the building was in my hair and all over my body. “ For Lowkey, this wasn’t just a tragic accident. This was “social murder.“ And it was caused by “deregulation of the construction industry, which was a bipartisan orthodoxy of neoliberal necro-politics from Labor to the Conservative Party led to a point where you had flammable cladding put on , but also hospitals, cinemas. schools across the country. But in this particular building, Grenfell Tower, the fire there spread across