What They Want, the Government Can’t Give

Money won’t do. Words won’t do.

It wasn’t a surprise to me, or to anyone else in the UK, that residents of Grenfell Tower heckled their councillors and Tory politicians. And I wasn’t surprised when Prime Minister Theresa May cravenly refused to meet with anyone from the tower.

But what is surprising to me is that even the Queen received criticism:

There were emotionally charged scenes as the Queen and the Duke of Cambridge visited the Westway sports centre earlier in the day. Standing beneath the rumbling Westway flyover, the royals had finished meeting firefighters and police officers who responded to the inferno, when they were met with a spontaneous round of applause from onlookers.

But when the clapping died down, a distraught man beckoned them to come over. “Please come here,” he said. Clutching a missing appeal poster for the siblings Firdaws and Yahya, Rami Mohamed said he was a friend of the missing children’s family.

The Queen climbed into her car as the prince apologised and pledged to return to the Westway centre, which is operating as a relief centre for displaced evacuees and relatives of the missing.

When the royals departed, Mohamed said he was frustrated that so many people arrived for the monarch but it felt like his friends were being left behind. The Queen and the prince spent about 30 minutes in the centre visiting those affected, the day after May declined to visit the area over the security concerns.

Theresa May promised a £5 million cash fund for residents, but that didn’t stop the protests. The truth is, there’s literally nothing that the current government could promise that could. Not £50 million, not £500 million, not even the resignation of the Prime Minister herself.

Even a full-throated apology, for years of austerity, decades of neglect, and unremitting abuse from certain sectors of the press, wouldn’t do — because no-one would believe it. What use are words when there’s nothing stopping the Tories, or indeed the entire ‘neoliberal project’, from continuing to dismantle safety regulations and value money above all else? The right wing, led by the Vicar’s Daughter, would crucify the poor and the struggling on a cross of gold.

But the residents’ moral authority is unimpeachable — they weren’t even kettled on Oxford Circus:

What they want, the government can’t give. And so this will only end with the collapse of the government.