There is no reason to think anything else bad will come of the Grenfell tragedy. What should worry us is too little will be learned

Where were you when you first saw the images of the Grenfell fire? You will probably always remember, so shocking was the sight of flames destroying that huge tower. Busy people stopped what they were doing to stare at a screen in horrified fascination.

It was like the shock of seeing New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11 – except that in 2001 there was a quick-witted prime minister whose immediate reaction was nimble and appropriate, though what followed, Afghanistan’s long agony and the invasion of Iraq, was unremittingly ghastly.

Theresa May’s first response to the Grenfell disaster was flat-footed, as she herself admitted in a recent article in the Evening Standard. Yet, despite May, despite the horrific death toll, and the grief and trauma of Grenfell’s survivors, there is no reason to think that anything else bad will come out of this catastrophe. What should worry us is that too little may come of it.

As Grenfell’s survivors began to tell their stories a year ago, it became glaringly obvious there was more to this catastrophe than negligence by council health and safety inspectors. It dramatically brought home the disparity in the distribution of wealth in this wealthy country, where rich and poor might live close together, and yet inhabit worlds so different they could as well be on separate planets.

Grenfell Tower is less than two miles from Kensington Palace Gardens, Britain’s most expensive street. A pedestrian can get from one location to the other in less than half an hour. The average income of Grenfell Tower residents was around £15,000 a year. The price of an average house on that street a short walk away is £35m. Put it this way: if an average Grenfell Tower survivor contrived to spend no money at all, year after year, and put aside his or her entire income, to buy a house, the time it would take to accumulate enough to buy a house in Kensington Palace Gardens would be in excess of 2,000 years.

Yet evidence has emerged, in advance of the findings of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s inquiry, that a contributory cause of this deadly inferno was a tender concern for the wallets of Kensington’s well-heeled residents. Kensington and Chelsea takes pride in keeping council tax well below that, for instance, of the nearby borough of Lambeth. It appears that Grenfell Tower was wrapped in its lethally dangerous cladding because council officials were shown a way to make the building look good from the outside at a reduced cost, and thought that was a suitable way to ease the burden born by council tax payers. This horrific catastrophe is a byproduct of a state of mind which sees every expense the state imposes on the well-off for the benefit of those at the bottom of the income scale as, at best, an unfortunate necessity.

It was illuminating to see the very different reactions from the Grenfell survivors to the politicians who visited them in the days after the fire. Local Conservative councillors were met with visceral hostility, which was understandable, if harsh. The newly appointed leader of the Commons, Andrea Leadsom – who at least showed her face – was heckled, with a cry of “Where is Theresa May?” For Jeremy Corbyn, it was all handshakes and hugs. One man told him: “The country needs you. Someone has to be accountable: someone has to be responsible.”

Like most people who have been observing politics for a long time, I cannot see the magic in Corbyn. If he is Dumbledore, I’m a muggle. If someone has to be responsible, Corbyn is not the most obvious candidate for that role, not least because responsibility was something he spent his first 32 years inparliament systematically avoiding.

And some of his policies might have a limited appeal along Grenfell Road if they were better known. Notably absent from Labour’s last general election manifesto was any promise to reverse cuts in welfare, which would have been a costly commitment, but one whose omission implies that welfare recipients would be worse off under a Corbyn administration than they were under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

In a speech three months ago, Corbyn talked of “preventing employers being able to import cheap agency labour to undercut existing pay and conditions” – implying that he also wants immigration rules to be tighter than they were under his predecessors. Most of Grenfell’s former residents are of immigrant stock. A substantial number, given their level of average income, must presumably be claimants, or have family or friends who have felt the impact of the benefit cuts that Corbyn did not promise to reverse – and yet instinctively they received him as a politician who is on their side.

And who can fault them? The rough edge of the capitalist system ripped these people’s lives to pieces, in a way they did nothing to deserve – so why wouldn’t they invest their political hopes in a leader who talks about turning the whole, hostile system upside down?

If Brexit were not sucking all the oxygen out of British political life, we might all have a better idea of the seriousness of the housing crisis. Admittedly, here will always be unmet demand for housing. After food and clothing, a suitable place to live is the most basic requisite for human happiness. Right now, the hope of getting happily settled anywhere is a mirage for hundreds of thousands of people – a problem made vastly worse since the government began its austerity programme in the wake of the banks that failed in 2008.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, resistance to government-imposed austerity came mainly from the organised working class, through trade unions. Now the pushback is principally from two disparate groups, the young and university educated, and the socially dispossessed. It is sometimes assumed that student debt is the cause of Corbyn’s extraordinary appeal to young voters, but the under-25s that I know are quietly resigned to the prospect of having an extra 9p in the pound deducted from their income into the distant future. They are not relaxed about the possibility they might never be able to buy a place of their own, because house prices are so high. It has been pointed out – rightly – that people who have no prospect of accumulating capital have no stake in the capitalist system.

That aspect of the housing crisis is hitting people who are comparatively well placed to make themselves heard. The other problem, which is arguably more serious because of the suffering it causes, affects people who would not be able to buy a property even if there were a sudden collapse in the housing market. It is government’s sustained assault on social housing.

When the Conservative-led coalition came to power in 2010 with a mission to reduce public debt, social housing was one of the first targets. Government investment in house building fell from £11.4bn in 2009 to £5.3bn in 2015. The building of new social housing for people ground almost to a halt. Last week, the housing charity Shelter declared there are now 1.15 million families on waiting lists for social housing. Almost two-thirds of those families have been waiting more than a year, over a quarter for more than five years. Last year, the number of homes made available to reduce this vast queue was just 290,000. One crazy aspect of this scandal is that it condemns thousands of families to live in unsuitable privately owned accommodation, with their rent paid by the government, through housing benefit.

The people who need social housing are generally out of sight and out of mind, but a year ago this one group, who had survived the Grenfell fire, were highly visible and audible, with public opinion on their side. This raised a glimmer of hope that those in authority might change their attitude to social housing. Perhaps, they might see it as an important and necessary service in which the nation can take pride, like the NHS, rather than an expense. When May addressed the Conservative annual conference last October, she announced to stout applause that public spending on the Affordable Homes Programme was to go up from £7.1bn to £9.1bn.

But within a few months of May’s announcement, it emerged that Sajid Javid, who then headed the Department of Communities, Housing and Local Government, had no use for all the cash held by the programme, and was surrendering £72m of it, to be added to the Help to Buy scheme. Last month, it emerged the £400m that the government has put aside to replace the cladding on 158 or so highrise social housing tower blocks is to come out of the Affordable Homes Programme.

Perhaps when the Grenfell Tower inquiry team produces its report, that will concentrate minds on the bigger issues around social housing – or perhaps another disaster will reawaken the nation’s conscience. Unfortunately, a more likely outcome is that the Grenfell catastrophe will be treated as a one-off, a few individuals will cop the blame, no more highrise blocks will be wrapped in the type of cladding that turned the tower into a death trap; those former residents who have not yet been rehoused will be, and then those in authority will feel that they can say job done, Grenfell sorted, move on!