Grenfell: Ignored Warnings and Victim-Blaming
The Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 killed 72 residents. Unlike Hillsborough, the media’s main failure occurred before the disaster. Residents had publicly warned of serious fire risks through the Grenfell Action Group blog, yet mainstream media ignored these concerns. Only specialist outlets, such as Inside Housing, sustained attention on fire safety in social housing.
Example: The Grenfell Action Group Blog, November 2016
Eight months before the fire, the Grenfell Action Group published a blog post which predicted with chilling accuracy that only a catastrophic loss of life would expose the management failures at the tower. The group had published at least eight warnings about fire safety over the preceding three years. In 2013, the council threatened one of the bloggers with legal action, calling their posts “defamation and harassment.” Two women who had campaigned for improved fire safety, Mariem Elgwahry and Nadia Choucair, were also reported to have been threatened with legal action by the management organisation, according to housing campaigner Pilgrim Tucker. Both later died in the fire.
Source: The Independent, 18 June 2017.
On the day of the fire, the Grenfell Action Group published a statement pointing back to its earlier warnings [R041].
Veteran television journalist Jon Snow used the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival to ask why the mainstream media had failed so completely. He argued that the media was “comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact or connection with those not of the elite,” and demanded to know why nobody in the mainstream press had seen the Grenfell Action Group blog.
Source: Jon Snow, MacTaggart Lecture, Edinburgh International Television Festival, 23 August 2017.
Example: The Role of Specialist Journalism
Inside Housing journalist Sophie Barnes had been reporting on fire safety problems in social housing long before Grenfell, including the 2009 Lakanal House fire (which killed six people due to exterior cladding) and a 2016 fire in Shepherd’s Bush where the London Fire Brigade wrote to all London councils warning about cladding dangers. After Grenfell, Barnes filed Freedom of Information requests to all councils in the country, uncovering that 268 tower blocks had problems with fire doors, 71 had no emergency lighting, and 54 lacked ventilation in escape routes, as The Conversation later reported [R042].
After the fire, sections of the press quickly turned to victim-blaming. The Daily Mail identified a resident, Behailu Kebede, implying his fridge caused the fire. Despite widespread complaints, the article deflected attention from systemic failures later identified by the Grenfell Inquiry, including government inaction, regulatory failure, and industry dishonesty.
Example: The Scapegoating of Behailu Kebede
Just two days after the fire, the Daily Mail published Kebede’s name, photo, and address, framing him as the person whose “faulty fridge started the Grenfell Tower inferno.” The article tracked down the traumatised survivor to his emergency accommodation. Kebede’s lawyer later told the Grenfell Inquiry that the media harassment was so severe that police offered him witness protection [R043]. He was also falsely called an Islamist in some online coverage. The Inquiry’s Phase 1 report formally exonerated Kebede, finding that the fire resulted from an electrical fault in a fridge-freezer and spread catastrophically due to combustible cladding, not due to any action or negligence by the resident.
Key Reference
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s Phase 2 report (September 2024) found that the fire was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and systematic dishonesty by cladding manufacturers. In February 2025, the government published its response to all 58 recommendations, accepting 49 in full and nine in principle [R020].
Class, Race, and Structural Bias
Both disasters reveal how media narratives draw on class and racial stereotypes. Hillsborough victims were portrayed as irresponsible working-class “yobs”, while Grenfell residents, many of them ethnic-minority residents in social housing, were marginalised before the fire and framed as irrational when demanding justice afterwards. Sympathy proved conditional and short-lived.
| Dimension | Hillsborough (1989) | Grenfell (2017) |
|---|---|---|
| Community profile | Working-class football supporters from Liverpool, a city stigmatised for its politics and unemployment | Predominantly ethnic-minority residents in social housing in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs |
| Pre-disaster stereotyping | The Sun had nicknamed an Everton-Liverpool cup final “The Giro Cup” (a welfare reference); Liverpool was treated as culturally alien | Residents’ complaints about fire safety were dismissed; bloggers were threatened with legal action for “defamation” |
| Post-disaster framing | Victims blamed as drunken hooligans; police narrative accepted as “The Truth” | Individual resident scapegoated; survivors framed as unreasonable for demanding accountability |
| Duration of injustice | 27 years for unlawful killing verdicts (1989-2016); Graham Mackrell convicted of a health-and-safety offence | 7 years to final Inquiry report (2017-2024); criminal prosecutions are still pending |
| Institutional response | PM committed to a “Hillsborough Law”, a legal duty of candour on public servants | The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea adopted the “Hillsborough Charter” for its approach to the Grenfell Inquiry |
In July 2020, bereaved families and survivors urged the Inquiry to examine whether race and discrimination had been factors in the fire. Their barrister, Leslie Thomas QC, told the Inquiry that the fire was “inextricably linked with race”.
Source: Channel 4 News, 7 July 2020.
Further Context: The Collapse of Local Journalism
A 2019 article in The Conversation [R029] drew a direct line between the collapse of local journalism and the failure to detect the conditions that produced the Grenfell disaster. As former local journalist Peter Sands recalled: “Any local newspaper journalist worth his or her salt would have been all over that story because of that blog. We would have known about that local group’s concerns because we were very much in the local community.” Instead, he noted, “there is no-one there.”