#grenfell tower

They keep calling Grenfell a "tragedy."

A tragedy is unavoidable.

This was a choice.

72 people died because of decisions made on a spreadsheet.

The price for their lives was a £293,368 saving on safe cladding.

The system's hypocrisy is proven by the numbers:

• At least 16 people jailed for fraud after the fire.

• Zero people charged for causing the fire.

The rules are for you. Impunity is for them.

This wasn't a tragedy. It was a calculated corporate act. Murder by spreadsheet, a calculated corporate death.

Books 32 and 33 of 2025. Prebble’s play, Enron, managed to capture the personalities behind the funny economics that underpinned its downfall and the credit crunch years later. Ben Okri’s poetry collection had an amazing poem on the Grenfell Tower Fire.

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But it made the tower look pretty, yes it made the tower look pretty. But in

twenty-four storeys, not a single sprinkler.

In twenty-four storeys not a single alarm that worked. In

twenty-four storeys not a single fire escape,

Only a single stairwell designed in hell, waiting For an

inferno. That’s the story of our times.

Make it pretty on the outside, but a death trap On the

inside. Make the hollow sound nice, make The empty

look nice. That’s all they will see,

How it looks, how it sounds, not how it really is, unseen. But if

you really look you can see it, if you really listen You can hear

it. You’ve got to look beneath the cladding. There’s cladding

everywhere. Political cladding,

Economic cladding, intellectual cladding—things that look good But