Successive governments have failed to learn lessons of Grenfell Tragedy

Prem Sikka 

17 April, 2026 
Left Foot Forward


The conditions that facilitated the tragedy remain unchecked

We are approaching the ninth anniversary of the 2017 fire at Grenfell Towers in London which killed 72 people, including 18 children. This week, the UK parliament has passed a Bill to build a memorial to the memory of its victims. The most effective memorial would be to ensure that such avoidable tragedies never occur again. However, the conditions that facilitated the tragedy remain unchecked. The root cause of the tragedy is lust for higher profits; corporate power, performance related executive pay, failure of regulators and indifference of governments to the cry of the people.

The Grenfell tragedy provides a lens for examining systemic failures, corporate abuses, and failure of governments to hold anyone to account in not only housing but numerous other sectors too.

The Grenfell Tragedy

The Grenfell tragedy occurred in one of the wealthiest countries and cities on the planet. The 24-storey social housing block was in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the most affluent borough in London.

Grenfell Tower was located in the poor part of the borough, an area in the top 10% of the most deprived areas in England. Occupants of its 129 apartments had low incomes and survived on the margins of society. They frequently complained about the poor housing conditions, electrical faults and fire safety. There was no building-wide fire alarm or sprinkler system. Tenants’ complaints were ignored even though previous fires and fatalities at similar properties had raised safety concerns.

The fire was caused by an electrical fault which ignited highly combustible materials used in construction and refurbishments of the tower. A subsequent inquiry concluded that there was “systematic dishonesty” by suppliers of cladding panels and insulation products. “They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market … Arconic deliberately concealed from the market the true extent of the danger of using Reynobond 55 PE in cassette form, particularly on high-rise buildings.”

Kingspan knowingly made false claims about its insulation’s fire performance and conducted “long-running internal discussions about what it could get away with“. Celotex used “dishonest means”.to break into the market, presenting its insulation as safe while knowing it did not meet required standards.

The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation responsible for managing Grenfell Tower on behalf of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea showed “persistent indifference” to tenants’ complaints about fire safety. The tragedy was the ‘culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry’, especially as little reform followed previous high-rise block fires.

The Government accepted all 58 of the inquiry’s recommendations but they have not been fully implemented. Many buildings still have the same cladding as in Grenfell.

To date, no corporation or individual has yet been charged or prosecuted over the death of 72 people. No company director has been disqualified by the Department of Business and Trade. The offending companies are not excluded from public procurement. Despite promises, no legislation has been introduced to improve corporate and director accountability. Ministers bat away calls for urgent action by claiming that the Police are looking at the issues.

Grenfell is not the only case of political indifference to corporate abuses and damaged lives.

Corporate Capture of the State

State capture, a form of political corruption, is all around us. Governments speedily prosecute carers and poor people for comparatively minor indiscretions but lack the necessary backbone for dealing with corporate crimes.

England’s water companies have over 1,200 criminal convictions. Companies reward executives for boosting profits by dumping sewage in rivers. They bypass rules on payment of bonuses. To manage public opinion, occasionally fines on companies are announced but then quietly waived or deferred. No company has had its licence to operate withdrawn. No corporate executive has been fined or prosecuted.

The Post Office scandal goes back to the 1990s. The December 2019 High Court judgment showed that it falsely secured criminal convictions of hundreds of postmasters by not revealing that its Horizon accounting system was fundamentally flawed. An independent inquiry revealed that it was assisted by Fujitsu, the supplier of the IT system, lawyers and business advisors. So far, the public purse has paid nearly £1.5bn in compensation to victims.

Horizon’s predecessor system known as Capture was used from 1992 to 1999. It too was flawed and was used to falsely secure criminal convictions of postmasters. Millions will be paid in compensation.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, no corporation or corporate executive has been fined or prosecuted. Fujitsu and others have made no contribution to compensations. Fujitsu still gets government contracts.

The third strand of the Post Office scandal is that there has been no scrutiny of the 100 or so postmaster convictions secured by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) for alleged frauds on payments of social security benefits. On 27 February 2025, a Minister told the House of Lords, “My noble friend Lord Sikka raised a question about the DWP convictions. I can assure him that the Minister for Transformation is looking into this, a review is being established”. On 27 January 2026, at a meeting with the relevant Minister I learnt that no review had taken place, and that the government had not even appointed a reviewer. On 23 March 2026, the government finally advertised for the post of a reviewer. The position may be filled by summer 2026 and the reviewer is expected to spend just 30 working days on the job. The review is expected to be cosmetic.

Secret commission from mis-selling of motor finance is the latest finance industry scandal. On 24 October 2024, the Court of Appeal ruled that it was unlawful for car dealers to receive a commission from a lender providing motor finance to a customer, unless it was properly disclosed to the customer and they gave informed consent to the payment. A possible compensation bill of £44bn, hitting bank profits, was mooted. Lenders appealed to the Supreme Court.

In January 2025 the Treasury, led by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, took the unprecedented step of applying to intervene and influence the Supreme Court judges on how they should interpret the law. The Treasury opposed the proposed redress and claimed the compensation would have “adverse consequences for the UK’s reputation as a place to do business and could negatively impact economic growth”. The court rejected the Chancellor’s interference. Faced with snub, the Chancellor said that she is considering emergency legislation to overrule the Supreme Court and limit customer redress. The August 2025 Supreme Court judgment severely diluted the redress available to customers.

The zeal to protect banks is not extended to victims of bank frauds. There is the long-running saga of frauds at HBOS, since 2009 owned by Lloyds Bank. Between 2002 and 2007, small business owners at the Reading branch were classified as ‘high risk’ even they had never missed a repayment of loans. They were sold unnecessary financial products and ultimately forced into liquidation, with senior managers benefiting from the forced sale of assets. Despite the evidence, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Serious Fraud Office and the Police declined to bring any prosecutions. Finally, in 2017, the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner prosecuted and secured criminal convictions of HBOS managers for fraud and corruption.

Still, no regulatory agency sought to fully investigate the £1bn frauds and secure compensation for the victims. The buck was passed to Lloyds Bank for a very limited investigation by Dame Linda Dobbs. A report was promised by 2018. Nothing has been published. I have raised the matter in parliament on several occasions. The typical response from Ministers is silence, indifference, obfuscation and buck-passing.

The above is a tiny part of evidence showing callous disregard for the lives of ordinary people. In the public mind corporate crime is associated with tax dodges, illicit financial flows, dud products, profiteering, bribery and corruption, but it is more than that. It destroys lives, families and communities. The abuses are part of an enterprise culture that persuades many to believe that `bending the rules’ for personal gain is a sign of business acumen. Stealing a march on a competitor, at almost any price, to gain financial advantage is considered to be an entrepreneurial skill, especially where competitive pressures link promotion, status, profits, market shares and niches with meeting business targets. The result is that people are denied safe housing, water, work and essential services. Yet governments are obsessed with deregulation, with little regard for human rights, workers’ rights and protection of people and the environment.

The political system has done little to address the root causes of abuses. Current laws do not impose a proactive duty on companies and directors to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm arising from their commercial activities. No attempt is made to reform corporate governance, democratise corporations, reform regulation and ministerial accountability. The state itself has become a sponsor of social terror where corporate profits are prioritised over people’s lives. Unless checked, further loss of confidence in institutions of government is inevitable.

Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.

Outrage as Reform UK’s new housing chief says Grenfell was tragic but ‘everyone dies’

Olivia Barber 

2 April, 2026

Left Foot Forward

Nigel Farage has been told to sack Reform’s Simon Dudley

Nigel Farage has been told to sack Reform’s new housing spokesperson Simon Dudley over his “disgusting” comments about the tragic Grenfell tower fire.

Dudley said that the Grenfell fire, which killed 72 people in 2017, was tragic but that “sadly, you know, everyone dies in the end”, before adding “It’s just how you go, right?”.

He added: “Extracting Grenfell from the statistics, actually people dying in house fires is rare… many, many more people die on the roads driving cars, but we’re not making cars illegal, so why are we stopping houses being built?”.

In the interview with Inside Housing, he also said that building safety regulations introduced after the Grenfell Tower fire were an example of “regulation which is not working”.

He also remarked that the “pendulum has just swung too far the wrong way” when it comes to building regulations, which he argued is stopping housing being built.

The regulations introduced safety measures including a ban on combustible cladding for buildings over 18 metres tall and a requirement for high-rise housing blocks to have a second staircase, to increase the number of fire escape routes.

Farage appointed Dudley, a former chair of Homes England as Reform’s housing spokesperson on 6 March.

Green Party MP Siân Berry said Farage must sack Dudley “for this disgusting outburst”.

Berry said: “Reform has sunk to a new low and shown a real disrespect to the victims of Grenfell.

“Anyone who has any awareness of what Grenfell residents went through, in fact anyone with any empathy or humanity, will find these comments truly abhorrent.

“That Reform would want to scrap key safety regulations brought in after the horrific Grenfell fires tells you everything you need to know about the party.”

Housing secretary Steve Reed also called for Dudley to be fired.

Reed said: “If Nigel Farage has an ounce of decency, he will sack his housing chief immediately.

“These disgraceful comments about those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire are beyond the pale and it is completely untenable for Simon Dudley to continue in his position.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

 

Study examines how the last two respiratory pandemics rapidly spread through cities

Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

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Public health researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health used computer modeling to reconstruct how the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the U.S. The findings highlight the rapid spread of pandemic respiratory pathogens and the challenges of early outbreak containment. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to comprehensively compare the spatial transmission of the last two respiratory pandemics in the U.S. at the metropolitan scale. 

In the U.S., the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was responsible for 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has so far led to 1.2 million confirmed deaths.

The researchers set out understand the geographic spread of the two pandemics to inform strategies to prevent future pandemics. They applied detailed data on the dynamics of the two infectious diseases to a computer model to simulate their spread using known patterns of air travel and commuting, as well as potential superspreading events. They focused on over three hundred metropolitan areas in the U.S.

In the simulations, both pandemics were widely circulating in most of the metro areas within weeks, before government interventions or early case detection. While the specific transmission pathways across locations were different for the last two pandemics, the spatial expansion was driven by several shared transmission hubs such as the New York and Atlanta metropolitan areas. Their spread was largely driven by air travel rather than commuting, though random dynamics introduced substantial uncertainty in transmission routes, which makes it hard to predict where the outbreaks will happen in real time.

“The rapid and uncertain spread of the 2009 H1N1 flu and 2020 COVID-19 pandemics underscores the challenges for timely detection and control. Expanding wastewater surveillance coverage coupled with effective infection control could potentially slow the initial spread of future pandemics,” says the study’s senior author, Sen Pei, PhD, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School. Many studies have pointed to the benefits of wastewater surveillance programs. The new study further underscores the benefit of expanding wastewater surveillance for pandemic preparedness.

Beyond reconstructing the historical spread of the last two pandemics, the study also provides a generalizable framework to infer early epidemic dynamics that may be applied to other pathogens. While mobility, particularly air travel, is a key driver of pandemic spread, the researchers caution that other factors also play a role, including community demographics, school schedules, winter holidays, and weather conditions.

The study’s first author is Renquan Zhang, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China. Additional authors include Rui Deng and Sitong Liu, Dalian University of Technology; Qing Yao and Jeffrey Shaman, Columbia University; Bryan T. Grenfell, Princeton; and Cécile Viboud, National Institutes of Health.

For more than a decade, Jeffrey Shaman and colleagues, including Sen Pei, have developed and refined methods to understand and simulate the spread of infectious diseases, including the flu, COVID-19, and others. Their real-time forecasts anticipate the rate and geographic spread of an outbreak, as well as the timing of its peak, to guide public health responses.

Shaman and Columbia University disclose partial ownership of SK Analytics. Other authors declare no competing interests.

This study was supported by funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12371516), U.S. National Science Foundation (DMS-2229605), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U01CK000592, 75D30122C14289), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R01AI163023), Princeton Catalysis Initiative, Princeton Precision Health, and High Meadows Environmental Institute. The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or Department of Health and Human Services.

---

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2518051123 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Reconstructing the early spatial spread of pandemic respiratory viruses in the United States

Article Publication Date

5-Jan-2026

COI Statement

Shaman and Columbia University disclose partial ownership of SK Analytics. Other authors declare no competing interests.

 

Two narratives on the Hong Kong fire

By Au Loong-Yu

Published date 25 December, 2025

The 26 November 2025 Wang Fu Court fire has a lot of similarity with London’s 2017 Grenfell fire. In terms of scale, the former was much bigger — instead of just one building there were seven on fire, and instead of 72 deaths there have been 160 deaths as of now. However, the combustible materials used in renovating the outer walls were the direct cause of both.

At Grenfell the construction company used cheap cladding, while its counterpart at Wang Fu Court used cheap nets and foam boards to cover the scaffolding. In addition, the building company Prestige Construction replaced the fire escape windows with wooden boards to allow builders to move between scaffolding and the interior of buildings, allowing fire and smoke to easily spread when fire broke out.

Grenfell and Wang Fu – their similarities

Grenfell was a social housing project managed by the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council’s management company KCTMO. The Grenfell inquiry reports revealed that the building company’s greed led to profit being prioritized over safety. The tight budget of the local council provided incentive to favour cheap cladding and a willingness to go so far as to claim that the material conformed to “the relevant provisions”. This laid the ground for the building companies to use combustible materials for cladding. Multiple whistle blowers and Grenfell residents / Action Group warned about potential fire hazards. If the overseeing public institutions had done their job, they would have discovered these malpractices. However, the local council, regulators and various government departments all exhibited negligence, complacency and blame-shifting among themselves. The privatization of the construction industry standard-setting body, the Building Research Establishment (BRE), in 1997 was another underlying cause of wide-spread corruption within the industry. All these factors eventually led to systemic failure, dishonesty, greed and conflicts of interest.

In the Hong Kong case, when the Secretary of Security blamed the bamboo scaffolding it was more a distraction from investigating the root causes of the fire than a credible claim. After the fire, most of the covering netting had burned but most of the bamboo scaffolding remained standing. Bamboo is much less combustible. Using bamboo for scaffolding in Hong Kong is not because of some cultural pride or simply out of “ technological backwardness”. It has more because of the peculiarities of the city packed with high rising buildings, leaving only small spaces between them. The strength and lightness of bamboo make scaffolding there much easier than using metal ones. While some of the falling burning bamboo might have made the fire worse, it was likely proportionally a much lesser cause of spreading the fire, although one must await an independent investigation into the case before any definitive conclusion can be made. If the fire alarms had been effective more lives would have been saved as well. But they were not. And neither did the fire hose reels work.

The subcontractor was probably not acting on its own. The unholy trio of the Wang Fuk owners’ corporation, its consultant (a local councillor), and the builders/engineering consultants are now widely suspected to be involved in the so called Wei Biu (Cantonese圍標), or collusion by different players to bid for contracts handed out by owners’ corporations. To make this happen, the colluders first take control of the owners’ corporations. Mafia and councillors are often involved as well. In the case of Wang Fu Court, a pro-Beijing councillor, Peggy Wong, was the corporation’s consultant and had tried hard to persuade the corporation to accept Prestige’s bid even though the bid was the highest quotation, reaching HK$330 million (more than 30 million GBP).

As in the Grenfell case, the Wang Fu case also witnessed residents and whistle blowers filing complaints about fire hazards long before the fire, but they were ignored by both the building company and various government departments. In 2024, campaigner Jason Poon had warned about the combustible scaffolding covering net at both Sui Wo Court and Wang Fu Court multiple times but had been ignored. He was repeatedly harassed for doing this.

Last year residents also filed complaints about their buildings’ potential fire hazards with the Labour Department, but the latter either said the law did not have clauses covering the safety of covering nets, or, when finally admitting that this was wrong, they simply replied that the nets were safe (which is false). The Housing Bureau, the Building Department, the Urban Renewal Authority, and the Fire Services Department all have the responsibility to regulate and monitor the safety of such a renovation project sponsored by the government’s Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme. They all failed miserably because they all merely relied on reports submitted by the managing company of the estate, the building company, or the engineering consultant of the owners’ corporation, without ever checking onsite; or if they did, they only went through the motions.

How the Basic Law laid the ground for rampant corruption

This has happened at a time when corruption in the construction industry has become even more rampant. Instead of complying with the law, it is a common practice for building companies to buy the fire compliance certificate from the Mainland Chinese suppliers instead. After the fire, David Lam Tzit-yuen, a legislator from the “medical functional constituency”, accused the construction industry of being “corrupt to the core with fraud and exploitation at every level”, and criticized the contractor who had built metal pipes for the Health Authority as being below standard and also criticized the shoddy workmanship of the Shatin to Central Link railway project. However, he failed to point out one thing: why haven’t his six colleagues at the more related constituencies to the fire (real estate and construction, architectural & surveying, and engineering) ever publicly warned about the danger of corruption and done something about it?

In general, the unholy trio of corrupted owners’ corporation, local councillors and the builders are the lowest level of the food chain. If there is ever an independent investigation it should first and foremost investigate the top level of the Hong Kong government. Particularly the relation between Peggy Wong and Clement Woo — he helped the former to succeed him as the consultant of the owner’s corporation. Before Woo was appointed Undersecretary of the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau in 2021, he was the consultant of the Wang Foo Court Owners’ Corporation, and was reported that he helped Peggy Wong to succeed him. On top of that, the newly elected legislator representing the Engineering functional constituency, Bok Kwok Ming, is now being questioned about his role in the costly 475 million HK$ renovation of water pipes of the villa Fairview Park. Owners there complained that the decision was forced upon them, and Bok facilitated such a deal in his role of being member of a committee and a working group of the related project respectively.

The widespread corruption in the industry has its root in the Basic law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing from the very beginning. Under its Basic Law, not only are one-third of the legislators “elected” by the above-mentioned functional constituency (before 2021 it was nearly half) but they are also given the rights to be part of the electoral committee which “elect” the Chief Executive too. Functional constituency mainly composed of business and professional sectors, designed to allow the business class to hold special power over the people and to continue to block the implementation of universal suffrage. The practice was borrowed from the fascist’s corporate state idea, where governments are composed of representatives from social sectors chosen for supposedly having made contributions to society. One cannot afford to overlook this matter if one is serious about identifying the causes of corruption there.

But Hong Kong had been well known for its anti-corruption watchdog, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Founded in 1973 after strong social protests against corruption, the colonial government reluctantly began weeding out corrupt officials and business people. Since then, it had been seen as the most respectable law enforcing institution among the public. Why did the ICAC not tackle the horrible scale corruption in the industry? Although the Wang Fu fire prompted the ICAC to prosecute the direct culprit Prestige directors, this is far from enough, and this inadequacy dates back some time ago. Since the pro-Beijing media has repeatedly condemned the “British influence” within and beyond the ICAC, it seems that for years the ICAC has stopped being enterprising in going after corruption. For the watchdog, going after pro-Beijing politicians and businesspeople is surely not welcomed by Beijing. With Chinese companies getting more and more dominant in the city this implies that the ICAC is increasingly having their hands tied. The case of the head of the ICAC, Timothy Tong, is particularly telling. In 2013, the Audit Commission report showed that he had misused public funds to wine and dine Beijing officials in private, however no charges were brought against him.

One global capitalism, many varieties

This leads us to a discussion about the dissimilarities between the Grenfell and Wang Fu cases. Imagine the London mayor arresting young people for handing out leaflets calling for an independent investigation into the Grenfell fire, his police force charging people who merely plan to run a press conference about the fire with breaking National Security law, his local officials chasing away volunteers who merely run a supply station to distribute daily necessaries to the survivors of the fire, and, finally announcing the founding of a non-independent inquiry committee to look at the causes of the fire. On top of this, the most senior whistle blower from a decade ago, Lam Cheuk Ting, a former pan-democrat legislator who founded the “Great Alliance of anti-corruption and anti-Wai Biu”, is now in prison (along with hundreds of democrat legislators and activists). This is exactly what has happened in Hong Kong since 2020, but not in the UK, at least not yet.

A self-exiled Hong Kong scholar Chung Kim Wah, now living in UK, commented that there is a connection between the fire and Beijing’s wiping out Hong Kong’s autonomy, rule of law, civil society, allowing government officials and their business cronies to collude not only without any fear but even further empowered by the National Security law to throw those who dare to ask questions into prison. Chung’s comment is very much shared by most people in Hong Kong.

Yet it is another matter to say that the city was always clean from corruption until the 1997 handover, and it has only worsened from then on, or to argue that while British colonialism benefited Hong Kong people in general, the Beijing regime only brought us hardship and corruption. Beijing regime is no good but as far as colonial government is concerned we need to ask what period of the colonial era we are talking about? The statement that the colonial government significantly reformed itself is only valid in the short period of 1973 (the year when the ICAC was founded) to 1997. In other words, most of the colony’s 150 years plus history was brutal and plagued with corruption. In fact, the ICAC’s relative success was only a product of a momentary alignment in the relationship of forces between the colonial government and the rise of a youth movement, and also between China, Hong Kong and the UK. Therefore, the above liberal’s statement has to be revised — the British government only outperformed Beijing during the last twenty years plus of its rule.

Owen Au wrote in the Diplomat about the Hong Kong case, arguing that “No, Hong Kong’s governance is not becoming like China’s. It’s actually worse. Hong Kong is stuck in a governance vacuum, where neither democratic nor authoritarian accountability functions effectively.” According to him, many of Hong Kong’s governance traditions and key accountability mechanisms “were designed and institutionalized during the final decades of British rule, when the colonial government sought to develop Hong Kong into a prosperous global city grounded in professionalism, public accountability, and the rule of law.” His list did not include “universal suffrage”. It couldn’t, because there was none. So why counterpose “democratic accountability” to “authoritarian accountability” in comparing the colonial government and the Beijing regime then? And why is the UK, which does have liberal democracy, still unable to stop corruption from growing like cancer?

The Grenfell case and many other similar cases have already shown that as long as representative government is based on capitalism it will never get rid of corruption. Liberal democracy allows people have more rights to resist injustice than the Chinese authoritarian capitalism. But this dissimilarity should not blind us from seeing their common ground — capitalism. Capitalism is necessarily corrupting. Capitalism means money can also buy officials who are supposed to control corruption. This is exactly why Grenfell and Wang Fu share so much common ground. The victims of the Grenfell fire are still waiting for justice eight years after the fire. This is not to mention how a great number of the victims of the Post Office scandal have not received justice 25 years after being wrongfully prosecuted.

While able to see the dissimilarities between the two cases, Owen Au’s line of argument largely overlooks their similarities of being part of the same capitalist system; instead he hinted about “democratic accountability” under the colonial government, contrast this with how bad Hong Kong has become nowadays by making exaggerated claims about how good colonial Hong Kong had been (and also exaggerated the supposed “Chinese authoritarian accountability when he mentioned how Chinese officials often stepped down when disasters occurred — forgetting that often these officials would make a comeback to the same rank in a few years although not necessarily to the same post). It is no accident that he doesn’t even mention the term capitalism at all. When one avoids the term “capitalism” along with its history in discussions on the causes of corruption one would not be able to go very far in their search for answers. 

This also likely prevents us from understanding the Trump phenomenon in full — many wrongly think that this is just an anomaly which can be corrected once the Democratic Party returns to power. No, it has deep and strong roots in Western capitalism and colonialism, and if the evil forces of far right and social decay were once less rampant during the time when the welfare state still existed, they are now making a tidal wave come back. Certain Hong Kong and Mainland China liberals have always seen so called “Western civilization”, represented by the UK and the US, as their “light house” in the dark night. No wonder they were totally confused and disoriented when Trump cut all funding to the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

Sweeping generalisation and selective attack

In China an author called “Maoist21” wrote an indictment against both “Hong Kong and (Mainland) China’s bourgeoisie dictatorship” along this line:

The most hateful part of this fire is not the fire itself but the shameless bourgeoisie. The Hong Kong people have been repressed and exploited (by them). Li Ka Shing (the well-known local tycoon) lives in a mansion at the peak while the proletariat live in crowded small flats…The Hong Kong proletariat were antagonized by the shameless bourgeoisie and filed a lot of complaints… hoping to appeal to a government controlled by the bourgeoisie, or to adulate how democratic Taiwan or similar places are… If they do not understand how reactionary the Hong Kong government is, or do not understand the need to annihilate the bourgeois dictatorship in Hong Kong and in the whole of China, disasters like this fire will only occur time and time again there.

The above indictment of Hong Kong and Chinese capitalism and their “bourgeoisie dictatorship” is better than those leftists who while attacking Western capitalism they defend the Chinese regime by labelling it as “socialist” or “defender of our mother land against US imperialism”. However running through this and the author’s other articles is a failure to make more concrete analysis on the background of the fire — the author never acknowledged that there is a difference between a Hong Kong before 2020 and the Hong Kong since then, or more generally, a difference between capitalism where some degrees of civil and labour rights exist and those which had not. The Hong Kong people have been lamenting what have lost to them. Failing to acknowledge this loss makes the author’s appeal to the people there even more improbable.

While Owen Au sees no common socio-economic base between corruption in the West and those in Hong Kong/China, Maoist21 went to the other extreme, ignoring the dissimilarities between British/Taiwan/Hong Kong capitalism before 2020 and nowadays Hong Kong (and Mainland capitalism). Let us not glorify British capitalism or the other two — British capitalism has cracked down on the Palestine Action group and imprisoned a lot of their activists, violating the latter’s right to free speech. However awful capitalism is, the people in UK, Taiwan and Hong Kong before 2019 do/did have some rights to resist injustice. Acknowledging this does not amount to giving undeserved credit to liberal democracy. Rather it is to pay tribute to the history of their people’s heroic struggle of winning basic civil and labour rights from their ruling class, while reminding ourselves the need to fight for the rights to resist injustice under the CCP.

The problem with Maoist21’s article is that in the name of opposing reformism it pays little attention to the fight to defend or fight for basic rights. The author only wants a revolution instead. But fighting for reform does not equal reformism. Reformism means campaigners look to the ruling class to hand out reform of its own accord. Socialists always stress the need to promote the self-organisation and their autonomous struggle from below instead. Genuine socialists have always been “walking on two legs” — while defending what they have won or fighting for what they are being denied (reform), they always understand the necessity to greatly extend these rights whenever they get a chance until they can disempower the bourgeoisie and their governments (revolution). The first leg is the bridge to the second leg. In contrast, Maoist21’s article seems only to walk on one leg — the second leg of “revolutionary transformation” but without the bridge to make it possible. Conversely, socialists stress the fight for reform by their own power and means, not only to win improvements to their lives but also to allow the working people to be trained and tested during these partial struggles — without this revolution is simply impossible.

What is more worrying is that this kind of sweeping generalisation may be used by suspicious fake leftist argument. The author mentioned Li Ka Shing as an example. But quite a few Chinese leftists took one step forward by literally singling out Li as their target. Or, even if the targets are broaden to include others, they only include local tycoons. After the fire, videos were shared online attacking “the four big families”, including Li and other three real estate local tycoons (who own a lot of land reserves and newly built housing). Again, why just four? The four families are of course guilty of greed, but the above mentioned attack on them has a problem — again, it fails to mention the constitutional design as laid down by the Basic Law. It is this design about land ownership which allows such an oligopoly to exist in the first place. It stipulates that all land in Hong Kong is “state owned” but “managed by the Hong Kong government”. 

But does “state owned” mean “owned by the people”? This is impossible because to have such an implication the state must have at least some form of democracy. There is none in Mainland China, and in Hong Kong’s case it is even more laughable — while Mainland China recognises universal suffrage on paper, in Hong Kong the Basic Law only gives vague promises to implement it somewhere in the future, with no timetable at all. The head and the cabinet of the Hong Kong government remain selected by Beijing after consultation with local elites. With no democratic control by the Hong Kong citizens, government officials can simply continue their collusion with all major real estate giants (Mainland and Hong Kong companies alike) to push up land and housing prices and profit from it. 

Therefore, if a leftist indicts Hong Kong capitalism but only singles out one or four families and forgets to attack the constitutional arrangement of land which is nothing but in the service of the oligopoly, it is not credible. In fact, this kind of fake left argument contradicts itself in terms of methodology. When it condemned Western capitalism it always appear to be too sweepingly generalising things, but when it comes to attacking Hong Kong or Chinese capitalist forces it is surprisingly narrow — singling out Hong Kong local tycoons or Mainland private business/foreign capital. Seriously, are they the only culprits?

When some of the Mainland “leftists” joined this crusade against Li Ka Shing or the four family, it was also a time when the latter have been increasingly marginalised, politically and economically, by Mainland Chinese companies and the patrons behind them instead. The latter now account for more than 80 percent of the total value of the Hong Kong stock market because they have all the blessing from the big brother in Beijing. They have been in collusion but also compete with local tycoons and have been winning out most of the time. They are not well known for being clean from corruption either. This kind of “leftist” selective critique on Hong Kong “capitalism” carries only one purpose — to distract attention away from the rampant corruption of the most powerful capitalist collusion — the high ranking party officials and their crony business partners.

Conclusion

But we should not believe that there is an insurmountable difference between liberal capitalism and authoritarian capitalism. As mentioned above, the darkest force of barbarism has always been one of the core components of Western capitalism. Trump’s United State is converging with Chinese capitalism if the people there allow him. But right now there are still differences in degree between the two. Activists must walk on two legs — grasping the differences between two versions of capitalism in order to make the best use of the local situation while remain vigilant on how the future of varieties of capitalism may unfold.

Au Loong-Yu is a long-time Hong Kong labour rights and political activist. Author of China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility and Hong Kong in Revolt: The Protest Movement and the Future of China, Au now lives in exile.

Hong Kongers demand truth on Wang Fuk fire

3 December, 2025 

Author: Chan Ying

The horrendous fire in Wang Fuk Court, Tai Po is the worst in living memory for Hong Kong residents. Videos show flames rapidly sweeping up inflammable external netting, with winds spreading the fire across the blocks. The death toll so far is 156, with more yet to be accounted for. Nearly 40% of around 4,800 people in the complex are aged 65 or above.

The eight 31-storey tower blocks were built in 1983 under the then colonial government’s subsidised purchase scheme for low income families. There are 2,000-odd densely packed apartments (8 apartments per floor, about 450 sq ft each). Hundreds of similar blocks were built in the 80s, no doubt inspired by the Thatcher government’s “Right to Buy” 1980 Housing Act. Typically, they had narrow corridors, thin glass windows and lacked modern safety features such as sprinkler systems and refuge floors. Like Wang Fuk Court, many are now undergoing extensive renovation.

The authorities first attributed the styrofoam covering thin windows as the most likely cause of the fire rapidly entering the inside of the blocks, generating lethal toxic fumes and extreme high temperatures. Fire services reported that all the fire alarms had malfunctioned. This is so unusual that residents are speculating that they were switched off during renovation.

Although the HK government arrested a number of people connected with the renovation programme, it is struggling to control the narrative against a public outcry over the causes of this man-made tragedy. Citizens are expressing widespread frustrations, built up over the decades, about the construction industry’s corrupt practices, use of cheap sub-standard materials, as well as the government’s ineffective regulatory oversight. E.g. fire-retardant netting is legally required but is twice as expensive, and can only be used once because it deteriorates under strong sunlight, making it an obvious target for cost-cutting and corruption.

Government

People accuse the government’s subsequent announcements about its policy to replace bamboo with iron scaffolding as a diversion from the real causes of the disaster. Bamboo scaffolding is part of Hong Kong’s cultural heritage, it is sustainable, highly flexible and has served Hong Kong well for many decades.

Anticipating government inspections, many contractors are hurriedly removing netting and foam from building renovations, while angry residents are seizing samples of these materials to conduct tests.

Colonial Hong Kong used to follow the UK practice of using judge-led commissions of inquiry, but not any more. There was no public inquiry over Covid. On this occasion, it has announced an internal inter-departmental inquiry.

After listening to a government official announcing they would press on with phasing out bamboo scaffolding, University student Miles Kwan launched a petition calling for accommodation for displaced residents and an independent investigation to probe regulatory neglect, potential conflicts of interest and to review the supervision system for construction as well as to hold government officials accountable. The next day Kwan was arrested on suspicion of sedition. His online petition is no longer accessible, but a second petition has since been started by a former Tai Po resident living overseas.

Imran Khan, who represented the bereaved and survivors of Grenfell, said that Hong Kong now needs a public inquiry with court-like powers because “an internal investigation will not get to the truth and there will be no faith in it…” Based on his experience with Grenfell residents, he said “without justice they cannot grieve.” HK’s Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu has ordered an “independent review committee”, which however lacks the powers that a Commission of Inquiry would bring.

In Hong Kong, the heroic fire service does not have independent trade union representation. In the UK, the FBU has a strong track record of defending fire fighters and the public. Its recent publication,Culpable: Deregulation, Austerity and the Causes of the Grenfell Tower Fire, written by Paul Hampton, contains key lessons not just for the UK but for Hong Kong and many cities across the world.

The UK housing crisis – what might work and why Labour’s plans won’t

HubMP2012

DECEMBER 2, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, by Peter Apps, published by One World and Eviction: A Social History of Rent, by Jessica Field, published by Verso.

Two more books on the housing crisis! The first one is by Peter Apps, who previously wrote an award-winning exposé of the Grenfell scandal. It focuses on the human impact of the housing crisis in London. As he puts it, “We have deliberately changed the primary purpose of houses from providing a home for a family to providing an income-generating asset for an investor.” On the street where he grew up, houses once available to low-income families are now attainable only to the top 5% of earners.

In 1981, over a third of Londoners lived in social housing, more than double the number who rented privately. The social housing sector embraced 872,926 households – compared to 178,000 in New York, for example. Nor had they been exiled to the capital’s outskirts, as in Paris.

But as elsewhere in the UK, Thatcher’s Right to Buy programme and grant cutbacks reduced the housing stock and changed the social make-up of council tenants, increasingly drawn from the socially marginalised. Over the next decade, private landlords, once almost an endangered species, were revived with the help of easier evictions and other anti-tenant measures.

By the mid-1990s, home prices began rising rapidly, fuelled by the search by global investment funds for ‘safe assets’. Houses were increasingly bought on a buy-to-let basis by wealthier landlords. Over the next decade, the house-price-to-income ratio would soar, just as the New Labour government created a new rent formula which increased social rents above the rate of inflation.

Under Blair, councils were also required to work with the private sector to access the investment they needed for social housing. Many transferred their housing stock to housing associations, whose lack of democratic accountability would become a major problem when the service level they offered declined.

Councils unwilling to take this route were left with no money for major repairs. Redevelopment of crumbling estates necessitated private developers, who had little interest in providing affordable homes. The result was gentrification and the displacement of long-standing local communities.

When the Tories returned to power in 2010, a harsh programme of austerity combined with a massive speculative boom in London’s property market created a perfect storm. The boom could have been harnessed by those in power to demand truly affordable housing in the new developments, but in fact they made the developers’ work easier. In the 700-home development at London’s Mount Pleasant, for example, personally signed off by Mayor Boris Johnson, the developers refused to include anything higher than 10% of affordable housing, despite local planning targets seeking 50%. “A revolving door began to spin between council planning departments, developers and the consultancies which worked to broker relations between the two,” notes Apps.

The unregulated private sector market allowed quality to nosedive. Council environmental officers discovered shocking ‘accommodation’ in their localities – in one case, six ‘tenants’ paying rent to sleep in old commercial meat freezers, with no natural light or ventilation. As rents spiralled, the government cut benefits and introduced other punitive measures.

Today, London’s social housing provision is in a parlous state. Despite some well-managed estates, much is high-priced, in disrepair, and overcrowded in 15% of cases. Waiting times on average are 55 years in the Borough of Greenwich, 38 in Newham.

The private rented sector is even worse. The individual stories that the author scatters throughout the text underline its inhumanity. In Catford, a pensioner who was forced to leave her accommodation after a steep rent hike, appealed to Lewisham Council for help. They offered her a private tenancy in County Durham, warning that if she refused it they would help no further. In Harrow, doctors had to provide inhalers for a number of children living in a privately rented block due to respiratory problems caused by damp and mould.

Homelessness has skyrocketed. By 2024, there were over 65,000 households in temporary accommodation, an 80% increase since 2011. Some get housed late in the day for a single night and return to wait in council offices the next day for their next ‘home’, a routine that can go for days. Children in temporary accommodation are three times more likely to die in childhood, compared to the general population.

The result is an exodus from the capital – especially of the young. London’s population grew by 625,000 in the ten years from 2011, but the 2021 census showed 62, 412 fewer children, a figure that also reflects a 25% drop in London’s birth rate, a far faster fall  than the national rate. The future looks bleak, as ageing renters will see their pension eaten up by rent and face poverty in their last years.

Apps offers some radical solutions, including the nationalisation of private lets, which comfortably passed in a city-wide referendum in Berlin in2021; local authorities having the power to requisition land at sub-market rates and public land for free; and incentives for reuse and repair rather than grandiose redevelopments.

Little of this will happen without community organising. The London Renters Union and similar groups will need to grow and step up their campaigning if things are to change.

Let’s hope so. Apps’ book comes with a warning: the level of precarity and displacement wrought by the housing crisis undermines people’s fundamental sense of identity and belonging and fuels far right narratives. Others pose the problem even more starkly: “The housing crisis is not merely about roofs and rent – it’s about the future of democracy itself,” writes Bartosz Rydlinski, referring to a Europe-wide plight where one in five Europeans aged 30 to 34 still lives with their parents. “A generation locked out of stable housing is a generation with diminished stake in the democratic order.”

Meanwhile in Leeds…

Jessica Field’s book also focuses on the plight of renters, but it comes from a very personal place. For five years between 2017 and 2022, the author’s mother Hazell was a leading figure in her community’s campaign to prevent their mass eviction, after her family and 69 other tenant households learned that their landlord, corporate investment company Pemberstone, was seeking to demolish their entire tenanted estate in south Leeds and build up to 72 new executive-style houses for sale.

The background was the usual story: scant investment in the estate, growing disrepair and decline and then the offer of a shiny new private sector development, with minimal social housing. To win its case, Permberstone resorted to moralising – they were apparently not prepared to allow their tenants to continue renting properties that were becoming unsafe.

There is a long record of moralising landlords, evicting tenants for their own good. Field takes us through the history of slum landlordism, but also of renters’ resistance, as in the massive rent strike in Glasgow in 1915, as well as smaller battles in her own area of Leeds.

Her own estate was owned by the National Coard Board, which nationally once held 140,000 properties. As the mining industry waned, so did the NCB’s commitment to home maintenance. Managed decline became the norm.  Then, in 1976, even before Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation bonanza, the Board decided it would ‘get out of housing’ and rushed to sell its remaining stock. Houses too dilapidated to sell were simply boarded up. As neglect intensified, the NCB sold off entire estates for a pittance. Under private landlords, repairs and maintenance stopped entirely, yet rents rose. Eventually, evictions paved the way for developers, attracted  by the vast profits that could be extracted and facilitated by the national context of rising rents and less secure tenancies.

The prospect of eviction and being pitched into the expensive, competitive private renting market – Leeds City Council has lost 35,000 council houses in the past thirty years due to Right to Buy – galvanised a fightback on Hazell’s estate. The campaign generated widespread local support and national media attention and succeeded in getting the landlord’s plans unanimously rejected by the council planning panel. But Pemberstone appealed and the campaign found it difficult to mobilise as effectively as before, with the onset of the Covid pandemic.

The Government planning inspector agreed with the landlord’s seeming concern for the fate of their tenants. “In short: Pemberstone’s neglect of the houses gave Pemberstone the right to evict,” the author notes drily. An entire neighbourhood community was destroyed along with its vital social networks.

It’s unsurprising that the tenants’ campaign did not win: in recent years, just a handful of such campaigns have caused enough of a stir to prevent the worst excesses of mass eviction. Yet  the protests – often women-led – are growing in size and number and have helped make housing the central political issue it needs to be.

Labour rightly made renters’ rights a priority on gaining office, yet its housing reforms will do little to alleviate the dire position facing renters, the author argues. While ending Section 21 no-fault evictions is positive, increasing  landlord notice periods from two to four months is still well below the requirement of other European countries. Nor do these piecemeal reforms tackle the huge issue of affordability.

“The whole system needs an overhaul,” concludes Field. “The structure of the housing market, where skyrocketing profits are made through land-banking and sales, means that private builders can’t be neutral constructors of affordable rented houses.”

And, Labour take note: “The solution to this 150-year-plus eviction crisis isn’t for the state to enable the building of more houses… The future landlords in this simplistic build-more terrain will continue to be investors.”

Field’s father was 65 and her mother 57 when they were evicted. Small wonder that for her the essence of any new approach must be housing security – people feeling secure in family and neighbourhood communities. Government policy is a long way from that.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

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