Now We Have Your Attention – A Review Nicholas

Miao

An invisible revolution currently underway in modern Britain. Invisible,

because it is not reported in the press. Nor is it taught in schools, nor spoken about
in our daily conversations. Invisible, because it does not take the form of
conventional revolutions, but rather, a painfully slow disintegration of the dominant
economic and political system of the last four decades, embodied in more
conventional upheavals from the climate crisis to the housing crisis, the rise of the
far-right to rise (or revival) of trade unionism. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash,
the consensus was that something had to change – but nothing ever did. Politics, as
a result, became increasingly distanced from the real world, and the narrative of the
press followed it into a parallel universe. But the consequences of this denial were
real – as suffered by real people, in the real world. And their stories, as Jack
Shenker documents in Now We Have Your Attention: The New Politics of the
People, reveals a paradigm shift from the bottom-up that seeks to bring change to
the heart of politics and beyond.

One of the most powerful stories documented by Shenker is the struggle for
justice by the London Renters’ Union (LRU) in the aftermath of the 2017 Grenfell
Tower Fire that claimed seventy-two lives, including Rania Ibrahim and her
daughters, Fethia and Hania. This was a tragedy that should never have happened –
in London, of all places, the supposed global metropolis where there seemed to be a
‘disconnect between the baseline security that [it] promised, and the cataclysm it
endangered’. But justice for the Grenfell victims did not come as straightforward by
any means. Indeed, no single authority was wholly responsible for the disaster, and
as a result, no one owned up to the mess. For Shenker, Grenfell revealed ‘a
collective failure in the way we organise ourselves as a country.’ We know, for
example, that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea had neglected
warnings from its residents about fire safety, had spent a mere £500,000 on
standard maintenance despite making £3.5 million in rent the six years leading up to
the fire, and had chosen the cheapest contractor for refurbishing the Tower, whose
hazardous claddings ultimately caused the disaster. But we also know that standards
of fire safety has been falling over the decades due to the privatisation of regulatory
regimes first under New Labour and more so under Cameron’s ‘bonfire of red tape’.
We know that for years, the construction industry had been blacklisting trade
unionists who would raise health and safety concerns. We know that there had been
significant cuts to the fire services in the years leading up to the fire under then-
mayor Boris Johnson. We know that cuts to legal aid had barred residents from
taking legal action. We know – they know – and yet, collectively, we allowed it to
happen anyway. Because for much of the past four decades, we have bought into
the neoliberal myth that market forces are inherently good, that housing is a
commodity rather than a social necessity, that the fruits of financialisation will ‘trickle
down’ to the people. But while the myth collapsed along with the markets in 2008,
the consequences were real – consequences epitomised by the fall of Grenfell
Tower.

We don’t hear about Rania’s, Fatima’s, Layla’s, Kyle’s, or indeed any of the
stories documented by Shenker from our middle-class ivory towers because these
are the stories of the silenced, the neglected, and the left behind. We hear cold,
impersonal statistic after statistic after statistic that numbs us from injustices like
stagnating wages, cuts to social services, and of course, calamities such as Grenfell.
I think here lies the beauty and the brilliance of Now We Have Your Attention: it
humanises the lived experiences of real people, their real struggles in late capitalist
Britain, and the real things they are doing to fight against it. Reflecting on our role as
private school pupils and perpetrators of inequality, it is both our duty and
responsibility to use our position of privilege to end this cycle of injustice by fighting
for real change, and for a future that works for the many, not few.