Credit: Flickr/lambs.frances. CC BY 2.0.
‘That’s what happens when they don’t pay their rent,’ says one of the people caught on video at a Bonfire Night party joking as they burn an effigy of London’s Grenfell tower. The video is shocking and has sparked outrage on social media, but are the attitudes behind it so surprising? Is that ‘joke’ so different from ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne stirring anger at those “sleeping off a life on benefits?” “People say things like that all the time,” says Hazel, a member of the women’s cooperative skills network we work with in south London who lives at the sharp end of this rhetoric, “it’s in the air.”
