They warned about fire, several times: they were ignored;

the block went up in flames: an uncounted number of them died (survivors have been warned the dead may never be properly counted);

the council that owned the block went invisible and residents were left to support each other: they did so;

the community went to look for the council: the council officers locked the front doors and slunk out the back;

a prime minister turned up and talked to the fire chief: she went away again without talking to anybody else;

she came back the next day after protests, but it was too late: they shouted at her and called her names;

the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire and local residents said they wanted a wide-ranging inquiry into the fire (its causes and the culprits as well as the details of what happened): they haven’t got it;

they wanted a say in who should chair the inquiry: they haven’t got it;

the prime minister appointed a retired judge whose record on standing up for residents against the arbitrary decisions of their local council is non-existent: he decided in favour of Westminster council when they rehoused tenants 50 miles from Westminster. The tenants appealed against the decision and won. When Kensington tenants tried to explain to him yesterday why they had no confidence in his judgment he seemed incapable of grasping the point.

The thing is: the days have gone (if they ever really existed) when grey-haired and grave-faced judges automatically inspired trust. They don’t. They inspire suspicion and contempt. Sir Martin Moore-Bick is, of course, incapable of recognising why that is. He just thinks people are being difficult (they’re tower-block people after all). He just thinks they’re ignorant. But they know they’re not. They’ve had years of experience of being treated like shit by people like him. They want him out. They want a proper inquiry, where they choose who they trust and ask all the questions they want to ask until they’re satisfied with the answers.

What’s going to happen? Who knows? I wish I was in London. I may go down there next week and take up Ben Okri’s challenge to “Go see the tower”. There’s somewhere else I want to go too: Finsbury Park, where the Islamophobic attack took place last week. I’ve known Finsbury Park all my life. It’s been called rubbish all that time, but its people have survived. And it isn’t just fascists who target the population there. The Blair government requisitioned one of the hotels there (the Pembury) and turned it into a detention centre for refugees they were preparing to deport. Outside, it still looked like a hotel. Inside, asylum seekers were treated like shit, their life stories disbelieved, their warnings of further persecution if they were sent back ignored, like the warnings of fire in Kensington. But my friends who were in the Pembury (Arben and Mira from Kosovo and their two children) survived. The Imam and his congregation at the mosque will survive too. So will the despised people of Kensington. I hope they get their proper inquiry. I don’t think they’ll settle for less.