Grenfell Councillors Visited – Five and a half months after the terrible fire at Grenfell tower the local council responsible seemed still to be doing little to rehouse those displaced and there had been no criminal charges brought. A small group of local residents and supporters from the Revolutionary Communist Group took to the streets of North Kensington to try and call on councillors and ask questions. Of course six years later they are still waiting for justice – and it seems unlikely ever to happen. The British establishment has long practised ways of looking after its own.
Protesters visit Grenfell councillors – North Kensington
The group gathered at Latimer Road station in the early evening where they held a short rally. They then set off to march to the addresses of several councillors in the area, though most of the council come from the wealthier end of the borough rather than North Kensington.
I could have told them (and probably did) that they were wasting their time at the first address, that of Councillor Rock Feilding-Mellen, former deputy leader of Kensington Council and their cabinet member for housing in charge of the installation of the dangerous cladding which caused the fire to spread disastrously. He had urged the consultants in 2014 to cut the cost of the cladding leading to the safe zinc cladding specified being replaced with flammable panels – and he only worried about whether they were the right colour. Those making them were labelled as troublemakers (and worse.)
Other councillors were also involved in various decisions and lack of action, including deciding against an inspection of fire doors in properties in the borough that the London Fire Brigade had made a few months before the fire.
Seven major complaints made about safety by residents to through the Grenfell Action Group were detailed in evidence to the Grenfell inquiry; these were simply dismissed by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea officers and councillors and in particular by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) responsible under the council for the management of Grenfell and other properties in the borough.
Feilding-Mellen, elected as a councillor in 2010 was made Deputy Leader of Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) and Cabinet Member for Housing, Property and Regeneration in 2013 with no obvious qualification or experience for either position and began a campaign of social cleansing, to, in his words, “wean people off” living in social housing in the borough.
He cut the council’s housing waiting list in half, removed the right of residents forced out of the borough in redevelopment schemes to return and began an aggressive campaign of removing social assets from North Kensington. Both North Kensington Library and Westway Information centre were sold at cut price to Notting Hill Prep School and the Isaac Newton Centre to Chepstow House Prep School.
Both Feilding-Mellen and council leader Nicholas Paget-Brown were forced to resign from their posts weeks after the fire, though both remained councillors. Feilding-Mellen moved out of his house not far from Grenfell Tower at the end of June, claiming there had been threats against him and vandalism. He was thought to have retreated to the safer climes of Chelsea Harbour, though his wealthy family have quite a few properties around the country and doubtless abroad. Feilding-Mellen’s evidence to the inquiry sickened many as it seemed greatly concerned with getting free publicity for his business interests in psychoactive substances, which includes offering supervised, legal psilocybin retreats in Jamaica and The Netherlands.
The protesters were more successful in their visit to councillor David Lindsay, a locally born Conservative councillor who is said to be genuinely community minded and respected in North Kensington and was elected as Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea for 2022-23. He came out from his home and talked with them, explaining he had no connection with housing before the fire and had gone down to Grenfell at 4am on the morning of the fire to open up a centre for those affected. He told them that the council were trying hard to find suitable accomodation for the survivors and had spent considerable sums in doing so. The local residents told him they felt the council had been and still was failing in its duties and were not satisfied with his answers.
Finally I went with them some way further south into to rather wealthier areas, stopping outside the house of a third councillor in Portland Road. If they were home they were in hiding, but a neighbour came out to to complain that the protesters were waking his children up, and saying that they shouldn’t protest here and shouldn’t protest at night, but should do so in the daytime when no one would be at home and affected by it. He was met with some very angry and rather rude responses – and the protest continued rather longer and much more noisily that it would otherwise have done.
The group then turned around to make its way back towards Grenfell Tower, but I left them. The Royal Borough doesn’t seem to spend a great deal on street lighting and the batteries in my LED light were failing. I’d taken enough photographs and I was cold and tired and needed to eat and get home to work on the pictures.
More pictures at Protesters visit Grenfell councillors.