The spin machine is already in full motion. While next of kin of those killed, continue to live with nightmares, a Grenfell industry has grown around our loss. We have to endure virtue signalling green hearts, balloons, doves and carefully managed messaging while the key legitimate questions of the actual next of kin are sidelined and silenced. Those of us who lost parents, partners, children and siblings have been systematically erased. Our concerns are buried and instead the narratives, set by the State through endirsed gatekeepers. Our voices are treated as an inconvenience. The people with the greatest stake in truth, accountability and justice are deliberately dehumanized and denied, while governments of different colours have preserved the same structures, the same gatekeepers and the same culture of managed grief, delayed and denied justice. What began under the Conservatives has continued under Labour. The faces changed; the deliberate system of denial of our existence and our rights did not. The lives we lost should never have been turned into a commodity. Yet hundreds of millions of pounds have flowed through contracts, organisations, consultants and projects. Handpicked individuals given State sponsored and funded platforms, promotion, and privilege, while the actual next of kin are denied agency, accountability and respect. Patronage, cronyism and corruption have flourished and taken hold. The SILENCED Walk is a symbol of failure. Most next of kin of the majority of those killed and the local residents stay away not because they have forgotten, but because we refuse to legitimise what's been going on. Absence is our only form of dissent. Do not tell us you are remembering our loved ones while ignoring what is OUR right to demand in OUR own family's names. If you will not listen to the next of kin of those killed, then stop claiming to honour our dead.
@mhclg @SamanthaDixonMP @SteveReedMP @LondonFire @MayorofLondon
@GrenfellTowerMC @metpoliceuk
You have no right to claim our loss and commoditise and monetise and capitalise our loved ones' deaths. The annual "SILENCED Walk" is presented as an act of remembrance, yet for the next of kin and local residents it has become a symbol of everything that is wrong and that is why we do not ever attend. Year after year, hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on gestures, branding and managed and controlled messaging. The majority of the next of kin of the majority of those who were killed and the local estate residents stay away because we refuse to legitimise a performance that is rooted in lies, control and corruption and speaks about us while deliberately excluding us. Absence is protest. Remembrance without accountability is theatre. Commemoration without truth is propaganda. All the systems and structures know all this. The Memorial people, the Council, the Ministers, the Met police, the LFB. They do not care. Because there's millions of pounds being made from the loss of our kin. And the level of profiteering is mind-blowing amounts. Total and persistent and shameless exploitation of our kin's loss of life and our ongoing grief.