SOCIAL media conservatives claim that Grenfell Tower is simply a tragic accident that shouldn’t be exploited for political ends. This bromide might be correct in its own very limited terms: yes, this isn’t technically about whether you vote Labour versus Tory or Brexit versus the EU. But, otherwise, it’s very wrong, because we’re talking about the longstanding, deliberate neglect of basic safety precautions for some of London’s poorest residents who just happen to live in – by many measures – the richest borough in the world, leading to the death of possibly hundreds of innocent people. And that’s political in a far more meaningful sense than elections.

It’s also criminal, or it should be. If the very rich and pampered people responsible don’t see jail time, there’s no justice left in this country.

Let’s highlight just one example. Mariem Elgwahry, 27, and Nadia Choucair, 33, are two of the residents missing and feared dead. It’s now alleged that these young women had campaigned for improved fire safety in the tower, and had even organised a petition and protest over safety lapses, targeting the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO). Their reward, according to the Radical Housing Network, was threatening legal letters through the door.

If true, the lawyers and managers at the TMO – a “mini mafia”, by residents’ accounts – should face a sea of consequences. And that’s just the beginning: so many warnings have been ignored over the years. Responsibility stretches from Rydon, the much-criticised company behind the cheap-as-chips cladding work, to the TMO and Kensington and Chelsea Council and all the way to the top, where government ministers allegedly “sat on” warnings about fire safety in tower blocks. Wherever you look, you find errors of judgment, moral indifference and failures of accountability.

But, really, these questions of individual responsibility are merely symptomatic. The politics of this are much deeper.

Grenfell is about the corner-cutting culture of austerity, and it’s about class. Specifically, it’s about how easily the publicity-driven world forgets that working-class people exist, so that it takes a ghastly flaming tomb to yank our public sphere out of its everyday apathy.

But, more directly, this is about the Brazilianisation of the United Kingdom’s capital. London is often listed as the most unequal city in the Western world. The city is bulbous with wealth, as the financial destination of choice for arms traders, oligarchs and the global theft-oisie. House prices – indeed, box room prices – continued to soar throughout Britain’s long recession and longer decline in living standards. Social geographer Danny Dorling has estimated that London is more unequal now than it was during the era of slavery.

As the undeserving rich colonised the city, including estates once intended for low-income immigrants, the poor were shooed ever further out in a process politely referred to as “social cleansing” and otherwise known as a capitalist apartheid. And yet somebody must serve the skinny lattes and sell the mobile phones on bottom-rate wages. And they must live somewhere.

This is the unresolved contradiction in London’s development model that makes the city singularly unfit for human habitation. The poor are expendable, and in the way, but they’re also functionally necessary to keep the great roulette wheels turning. This problem lies behind the will-this-do attitude of one of the world’s richest councils. For decades, they’ve focused on “property development” in a very different sense, inviting in the spivs and sharks for a frenzy of speculation, rebranding bohemian living spaces as haut-bourgeois investment playgrounds. But the poor linger, because you can’t have extravagant wealth without its contrast.

London is living proof that wealth hasn’t “trickled down” for decades, and Grenfell is a monument to the failures of “development” geared to the whims of rich people.

Grenfell raises fundamental questions about our political economy. London has grown and grown, and will continue to grow: our whole economic policy is geared towards this. The result has been a chaotic conjunction of extreme wealth and deathly poverty, with a vast army of precarious workers and vulnerable professionals clinging on after waves and waves of gentrification until eventually they’re pushed out – but there are always others willing to take their place.

“Regional Britain”, by which I mean everywhere outside London, is in a funk. Devolution is in tatters. The public sector is being squeezed from the top, forcing lower rungs of government into deeper cuts. The resulting political chaos has brought constitutional referendums and anti-establishment backlashes that have left us no nearer to solving these problems.

In previous decades, governments made commitments to tackling “congestion” in London and pushing development into other parts of Britain. They didn’t always honour them, not by any means. But at least they acknowledged the problems linked to a behemoth of a capital city that destroys everything in its path. Nowadays, the mere thought of holding back London’s growth is unimaginable, even though the chaos it produces is increasingly obvious.

Political responsibility for the Grenfell Tower tragedy lies with generations of politicians. You can’t blame Theresa May without pointing a finger at Osborne. You can’t lecture Osborne without turning to the failings of Blair and Brown. The problems are above and beyond “politics” in the crude and petty sense of parties and elections. Nonetheless, if this isn’t political, then the word has lost all meaning. And if this isn’t criminal, we might as well open the jails, because justice is broken beyond repair.