Abstract
On 21 December 2020, 2-year-old Awaab Ishak died at Royal Oldham Hospital. The inquest concluded that he had died from a severe respiratory condition caused by prolonged exposure to mould. Institutions which ultimately reacted to the case read this death as related to the impact of bad housing on health. The authors argue that Awaab’s death emerges through the mechanics of racialised neoliberal capitalism, and the devaluation of working-class life which is linked to the racialisation of the migrant as a ‘disposable subject’. For them, racialisation marks out working-class migrant communities to (in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words) ‘vulnerability to premature death’. Understanding the full context of this process is important in the building of movements against state-led austerity, racism, border violence and human disposability.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
According to the organisation Shelter, social housing means homes that have rents linked to local incomes and provide a truly affordable, secure housing option for people across the country. Though, historically, social housing was provided by local authorities, more recently and after Thatcher’s right to buy policy, much social housing has been moved to the auspices of housing associations which now run much of the ‘supply’. Rochdale Boroughwide Housing constitutes itself as a mutual housing society and, like housing associations, is not part of the open market.
2.
Sophie Henrys, “Awaab Ishak Inquest – Coroner Finds Prolonged Exposure to Mould Led to Death of 2-Year-Old,” Farleys Solicitors (blog), November 15, 2022, https://www.farleys.com/news/awaab-ishak-inquest-coroner-finds-prolonged-exposure-to-mould-led-entirely-to-death-of-2-year-old/.
3.
“Awaab Ishak – Prevention of Future Deaths Report,” Courts and Tribunal Judiciary, November 2022, https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Awaab-Ishak-Prevention-of-future-deaths-report-2022-0365_Published.pdf.
4.
“Awaab Ishak: Michael Gove Meets with Family,” Garden Court North Chambers, November 25, 2022, https://gcnchambers.co.uk/awaab-ishak-family-michael-gove/.
5.
“Government to Deliver Awaab’s Law,” GOV.UK: Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, February 9, 2023, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-deliver-awaabs-law.
6.
Andrew Kersley, “Tenant with Incurable Lung Disease ‘Caused by Mould’ to Sue Hackney Council,” The Guardian , January 22, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/22/tenant-with-incurable-lung-disease-caused-by-mould-to-sue-hackney-council.
7.
Robert Booth, “Mould Complaints in England’s Social Housing Double over Two Years,” The Guardian , February 2, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/02/mould-damp-complaints-social-housing-ombudsman-tenants-landlords.
8.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 28.
9.
We include those who are either seeking asylum, or have been granted refugee status, within the category of ‘migrant’ in recognition of the shared conditions of marginalisation and abjection faced by those racialised as migrants, irrespective of the legal nomenclature that is used to distinguish between them.
10.
For more information on the fire and the struggle of residents in the years previously to have safety matters attended to by their social housing provider and the negligence of various agencies acknowledged, see Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkinds and Nadine El-Enany, eds, After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (London: Pluto Press, 2019). The public inquiry set up to examine the circumstances leading up to the fire at Grenfell Tower on the night of June 14, 2017 is still ongoing: https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/.
11.
“Awaab Ishak – Prevention of Future Deaths Report.”
12.
“Awaab Ishak – Prevention of Future Deaths Report.”
13.
Joanne Kearsley: HM Senior Coroner, “Inquest Touching the Death of Awaab Ishak: Findings and Conclusion,” November 2022.
14.
Kearsley, “Inquest Touching the Death of Awaab Ishak.”
15.
“Housing Ombudsman Special Report on Rochdale Boroughwide Housing,” Housing Ombudsman Service, March 28, 2023, https://www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/P49-RBH-FINAL-200323.pdf.
16.
“Housing Ombudsman Special Report.”
17.
“Housing Ombudsman Special Report.”
18.
“Housing Ombudsman Special Report.”
19.
“Housing Ombudsman Special Report.”
20.
“Housing Ombudsman Special Report.”
21.
Peter James Hudson, “Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat,” Boston Review , February 20, 2018, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/peter-james-hudson-racial-capitalism-and/.
22.
Ida Danewid, “The Fire This Time: Grenfell, Racial Capitalism and the Urbanisation of Empire,” European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 1 (2020): 289–313,https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119858388.
23.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
24.
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), 5.
25.
Alexandra Kelbert, “It Shouldn’t Happen Here: Colonial and Racial Discourses of Deservingness in UK Anti-Poverty Campaign,” Critical Social Policy 42, no. 4 (November 2022), https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183221075960.
26.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
27.
Arun Kundnani, “The Racial Constitution of Neoliberalism,” Race & Class 63, no. 1 (2021): 57.
28.
Kundnani, “The Racial Constitution of Neoliberalism,” 63–64.
29.
Gilmore, Golden Gulag , 70.
30.
Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes,” New Political Economy 23, no. 5 (2018): 632.
31.
Rajaram, “Refugees as Surplus Population,” 627–39.
32.
Richard Millett KC, “Phase 2 Overarching and Module 7 Closing Statements – Thursday 10th November 2022 (1/2),” Grenfell Tower Inquiry, streamed live on November, 2022, YouTube video, 2:40:54, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHxp8eTfP1g.
33.
Millett, “Phase 2 Overarching and Module 7 Closing Statements.”
34.
Millett, “Phase 2 Overarching and Module 7 Closing Statements.”
35.
“English Housing Survey, 2020 to 2021,” GOV.UK: Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, July 7, 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-survey-2020-to-2021-housing-quality-and-condition.
36.
Mel Nowicki, “Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Politics, Precarity and Domicide,” in Austerity London (Bristol: Policy Press, 2023); Chloe Timperley, Generation Rent: How Greed Killed the Housing Dream (Kingston upon Thames: Canbury Press, 2020).
37.
Brenna Bhandar, “Organised State Abandonment: The Meaning of Grenfell,” The Sociological Review Magazine , October 4, 2022.
38.
Bhandar, “Organised State Abandonment.”
39.
Simon Guentner et al., “Bordering Practices in the UK Welfare System,” Critical Social Policy 36, no. 3 (2016): 391–411; Tom Gillespie, Kate Hardy and Paul Watt, “Surplus to the City: Austerity Urbanism, Displacement and ‘Letting Die,’” Economy and Space 53, no. 7 (2021).
40.
Robert Booth, “Grenfell Resident who Raised Fire Concerns Labelled Troublemaker, Inquiry Told,” The Guardian , April 21, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/21/grenfell-resident-who-raised-fire-concerns-labelled-troublemaker-inquiry-told.
41.
“Loss of Social Housing,” Shelter , https://england.shelter.org.uk/support_us/campaigns/social_housing_deficit.
42.
“Cashing in: How a Shortage of Social Housing is Fuelling a Billion-Pound a Year Temporary Accommodation Industry,”’ Shelter , February 3, 2020, https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/cashing_in_how_a_shortage_of_social_housing_is_fuelling_a_billion-pound_a_year_temporary_accommodation_industry.
43.
And those who are living on the margins but not classified by local authorities as ‘homeless’ (there are very specific criteria) have no choice but to rent sub-standard accommodation from unscrupulous private landlords on the open market. “Mayor of London Calls for National Action as New Analysis Reveals Private Landlords Receiving Billions of Pounds for Sub-Standard Homes,” Mayor of London, April 19, 2023, https://www.london.gov.uk/mayor-london-calls-national-action-new-analysis-reveals-private-landlords-receiving-billions-pounds.
44.
Peter Apps, “How the Tragic Death of a Man in an Overcrowded Flat Exposed the Dire Truth about Slumlord Britain,” Big Issue , December 12, 2023, https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/shadwell-flat-fire-maddocks-house-uk-housing-crisis/.
45.
“Tower Hamlets Landlords Plead Guilty to Overcrowding Charges,” Tower Hamlets Council, November 2023, https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/News_events/2023/November/Tower-Hamlets-landlords-plead-guilty-to-overcrowding-charges.aspx.
46.
Robert Booth, “Criminal Investigation Launched into Fatal East London Flat Fire,” The Guardian , March 14, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/14/criminal-investigation-launched-into-fatal-east-london-flat-fire.
47.
Robert Booth, “Residents Warned Council Landlord about Overcrowded Flat Before Fatal Fire,” The Guardian , March 12, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/12/residents-warned-tower-hamlets-council-landlord-overcrowded-flat-before-fatal-fire.
48.
Booth, “Residents Warned Council Landlord.”
49.
Gargi Bhattacharyya et al., Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 135.
50.
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Futures of Racial Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2024).
51.
The organisation Inquest campaigns for an oversight mechanism; see https://www.inquest.org.uk/no-more-deaths-campaign.
52.
“Guide for Tenants: Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018,” GOV.UK: Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, March 2019, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/homes-fitness-for-human-habitation-act-2018/guide-for-tenants-homes-fitness-for-human-habitation-act-2018.
53.
Giles Peaker, “An Avoidable Death,” Nearly Legal: Housing Law News and Comment (blog), November 15, 2022, https://nearlylegal.co.uk/2022/11/an-avoidable-death/.
54.
Nadine El-Enany, “Sunak and Braverman Have Learnt Nothing from Asylum Seekers’ Deaths,” Open Democracy , November 21, 2022, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/manston-immigration-centre-death-asylum-seekers/.
55.
Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2018).
56.
Conditions in overcrowded asylum accommodation, accentuated during the Covid pandemic, were exposed by the South Yorkshire-based Migration & Asylum Action Group; see, for example, John Grayson, “Abandoned Voices from the UK Asylum System in a Time of Covid-19,” IRR News , June 22, 2020, https://irr.org.uk/article/abandoned-voices-from-the-uk-asylum-system-in-a-time-of-covid-19/; more recently see Monish Bhatia and Roxana Cavalcanti, “Racism and the Food System: From Asylum Hotels to Overfishing in Senegal,” IRR News , May 7, 2024, https://irr.org.uk/article/racism-and-the-food-system-from-asylum-hotels-to-overfishing-in-senegal/.
57.
Diane Taylor, “Man Being Processed at Manston Detention Centre in Kent Dies,” The Guardian , November 19, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/19/man-being-processed-at-manston-detention-centre-in-kent-dies.
58.
Amelia Gentleman, “Home Office Leaves Asylum Seekers from Manston Stranded in Central London,” The Guardian , November 2, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/02/home-office-leaves-asylum-seekers-from-manston-stranded-in-central-london.
59.
Diane Taylor, “Lone Children as Young as 14 Detained at Manston Asylum Seeker Centre,” The Guardian , February 19, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/19/children-manston-asylum-seeker-centre-home-office.
60.
Diane Taylor, “Man Found Dead on Bibby Stockholm was ‘Tricked’ on to Barge, says Support Worker,” The Guardian , February 16, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/16/family-leonard-farruku-bibby-stockholm-independent-inquiry.
61.
Greg Barradale, “‘I Thought I was Going to Die’: The Reality of Life on Controversial Asylum Barge Bibby Stockholm,” Big Issue , March 7, 2024, https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/bibby-stockholm-asylum-seekers-residents-life/.
62.
Diane Taylor, “People on Bibby Stockholm Treated like ‘Cattle’, Former Workers Say,” The Guardian , May 14, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/14/people-on-bibby-stockholm-treated-like-cattle-former-workers-say.
63.
Carole Malone, “Illegal Immigrants Should be Grateful for a Barge to Call their Own,” Daily Express , April 7, 2023, https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1756144/Illegal-immigrants-barge-rishi-sunak.
64.
Rupinder Parhar, “10 Years of Immigration Control: ‘A Really Hostile Environment,’” The Justice Gap (blog), November 1, 2022, https://www.thejusticegap.com/10-years-of-immigration-control-a-really-hostile-environment/.
65.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: NYU Press, 2000).
66.
Kundnani, “The Racial Constitution of Neoliberalism,” 65.
67.
Luke de Noronha, “Deportation, Racism and Multi-Status Britain: Immigration Control and the Production of Race in the Present,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 14 (October 2019): 2416–18.
68.
De Noronha, “Deportation, Racism and Multi-Status Britain,” 2416-18.
69.
Jennifer Allsopp, Nando Sigona, and Jenny Phillimore, “Poverty among Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK,” IRIS Working Paper Series , no. 1 (2014).
70.
Gilmore, Golden Gulag , 28.
71.
Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism, 5.
72.
Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism , ed. UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 337.
73.
Danny Dorling, “Unique Britain,” Open Democracy , May 15, 2011, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/shine-a-light/unique-britain/.
74.
“Prevention of Future Deaths Report: Ella Kissi-Debrah,” Courts and Tribunal Judiciary, April 2021, https://www.judiciary.uk/prevention-of-future-death-reports/ella-kissi-debrah/.
75.
Daniel R. Morales and Sarah N. Ali, “COVID-19 and Disparities Affecting Ethnic Minorities,” The Lancet 397, no. 10286 (May 2021): 19.
76.
Arun Kundnani, What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anti-Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2023), 82.
77.
“Press Release: Government to Deliver Awaab’s Law,” GOV.UK: Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, February 9, 2023.
78.
“Implementation of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 Recommendations 28th Progress Report,” Mayor of London, November 2022; Robert Booth and Vikram Dodd, “Grenfell Bereaved and Survivors Must Wait until 2027 for Suspects to Face Trial,” Guardian , May 22, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/22/grenfell-bereaved-and-survivors-must-wait-until-2027-for-suspects-to-face-trial.
79.
Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (Glasgow, UK: Panther Edition, 1969), 45.
80.
Solidarity Knows No Borders, https://sknb.org/.
81.
“End Racism in Housing,” London Renters Union, https://londonrentersunion.org/2020/end-racism-in-housing/.
82.
For information on the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) policy in the UK, see https://www.nrpfnetwork.org.uk/information-and-resources/rights-and-entitlements/immigration-status-and-entitlements/who-has-no-recourse-to-public-funds.
83.
“One Year on Follow Up Report: Spotlight on Damp and Mould – It’s Not Lifestyle,” Housing Ombudsman Service, February 2, 2023, https://www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Damp-and-mould-follow-up-report-final-2.2.23.pdf.