"This is a tale of two cities."
An emotional British politician has invoked Charles Dickens while describing the injustices of this week's Grenfell Tower fire in London, imploring Britain to care for its poor.
Labour MP David Lammy???, who spent his childhood playing in a housing estate in Tottenham, in northern London, says he is heartbroken.
"This is what Dickens was writing about in the century before the last, and it's still here in 2017. It's the face of the poorest and the most vulnerable," Mr Lammy told Britain's Channel 4, his voice cracking.
???His friend Khadija Saye???, an emerging photographer, was killed in her flat in the Grenfell building.
"My friend who lost her life was a talented artist, but she was a young, black woman making her way in this country and she absolutely had no power, or locus, or agency. She had not yet achieved that in her life.
"She'd done amazing things: gone to university, the best in her life. But she's died with her mother on the 22nd floor of a building. And it breaks my heart that that's happening in Britain in 2017."
Mr Lammy said the welfare state was not just about schools and hospitals, and there needed to be a safety net for the poor.
"We need to live in a society where we care for the poorest and the vulnerable. And that means housing. It means somewhere decent to live. It was a noble idea that we built ??? and it's falling apart around our eyes.
"And if it's taken this tragedy to bring that reality home to people, who are lucky enough to live in very different circumstances, then thank God."
Mr Lammy spent his childhood playing in a housing estate called Broadwater Farm with his cousin. His mother raised him and his four siblings alone, after their father left the family when he was 12.
He worked at KFC to help bring in extra money.
"My mum had to do three jobs to make ends meet. I wanted to get a job to help out, and also because I wanted to be able to buy clothes," Mr Lammy told The Guardian in 2014.
He won a scholarship to attend a prestigious school outside of London, and later returned to the city to study law.
In 2000, when Mr Lammy was 27, he was elected Labour MP for Tottenham.
A week before the Grenfell Tower fire, Mr Lammy said he was knocking on doors at his childhood housing estate, noticing how little had changed since he was a boy.
"For decades we have consigned people to live in overcrowded conditions that are not just unacceptable but that, in many cases, are criminally unsafe," Mr Lammy wrote in The Guardian.
"Families live in hutches, not houses. Plywood walls divide rooms in homes that were designed for families of three but are now occupied by six or more."
Of the Grenfell fire, he said: "Don't let them tell you it's a tragedy. It's not a tragedy, it's a monstrous crime."
Fairfax Media
