Whose lives matter?

analysis of hegemony, the way that a dominant social group asserts control over the masses by coercion. Coercion works through the law, the courts, the police and armed forces. Gramsci developed the concept of ideological persuasion working in parallel with coercion to get inside people’s minds, influencing them to consent to the dominant power, persuading people that the dominant story is the real truth, or common sense. Of course, it makes no sense at all, but without the tools to dismantle this paradoxical truth, subordinated groups start acting out contradictions that are often against their own best interests. Tyler (2020: 8) extends Gramsci’s profound analysis by ‘disrupting’ the taming of stigma to expose it as a form of violent power entangled in capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, both in the past and in the present.

Whose lives matter?

One blatant example, imprinted on my brain, of wasted lives treated with impunity as human detritus is that of the floodwaters of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The story of Hurricane Katrina…

The images that shocked the world were not those of the force of a hurricane, but that of human inhumanity: largely Black, mostly female, overwhelmingly poor and often children or older people … some desperately calling for help to the rest of the world, for others it was too late, dead and abandoned, floating in the floodwaters while the rest of the USA carried on with business as usual.

The Bush government knew the storm risks from Hurricane Katrina, knew that the flood defences could not withstand a Category 5 hurricane, but refused to fund the upgrading requested with their logic of market forces. The $500m was not forthcoming, and over 1,800 people died, with a million made homeless. Ironically, $23bn of property damage, far more than the cost of reinforcing the storm defences, was sustained.

Source: Mason (2019: 164–5)

We were warned by Henry Giroux of this politics of disposability on the part of the neoliberal state (Giroux, 2006). We should have heeded the warning! As neoliberal politics has globalised and entrenched, the atrocities have worsened. People’s value is now unashamedly differentialised along lines of discrimination.

The story of the Windrush Scandal …

In 1948, the MV Empire Windrush docked in London with workers from the Caribbean actively recruited by the British government to rebuild post-war Britain. Many of them had fought for Britain in World War II and felt proud to be part of the British empire. This heralded a large-scale immigration programme from 1948 to 1971. Their free movement ended with the 1971 Immigration Act which called for a work permit and a parent/grandparent born in the UK, but Commonwealth citizens already here were given the right to remain. Not only did Enoch Powell shame Britain politically with his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, but what’s now become known as the ‘Windrush Scandal’ unfolded in the spring of 2018, exposing the Conservative Brexit Government’s disgraceful, dehumanising plan to keep aliens out, under the leadership of Theresa May. Generations of families who have the legal right to citizenship have been denied passports, lost jobs, been refused the right to re-enter Britain, refused health care, social care and welfare benefits because the government had cleverly destroyed their legal documentation that provided evidence of residence, thereby making them illegal citizens.

Source: Gentleman (2019)

This paved the way for a ‘hostile’ approach to all immigration applications, setting targets, success measured by deportation (Ballat, 2020: 172–3). ‘The list of regulatory failures under neoliberalism is long and global’ (Mason, 2019: 165), and there is no better example of this than the Grenfell Tower Disaster.

The story of the Grenfell Tower nightmare …

Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey council housing apartment block, was ablaze, with people jumping from it in desperation floating down as the world watched. It was just after 1 am on 14 June 2017 when a fire broke out on the fourth floor and it took just 15 minutes to turn the entire building into a blazing inferno. This was public housing owned by Kensington and Chelsea London Borough, Britain’s richest and most neoliberal local council, an important point to bear in mind (Mason, 2019). The extremely rich and the extremely poor live here, side by side. The councillors who made decisions about the housing for the poor are among the privileged who have benefited from neoliberal policies and who have no empathy with