I BELIEVE that in the future, just as we speak of the Dunkirk spirit, so will we refer to “another Grenfell”.

But I don’t want to dwell on the horrendous details of the ongoing human tragedy of Grenfell but I do want to talk about why it happened.

Not whether this type of cladding should or should not be used but how this situation came about.

It is not as if the fire-risk was a complete unknown quantity.

In the months and years before the disaster the Grenfell Action Group had been warning about the dangers. Their blog might not have been widely read but they sent out regular press releases to the media but the story was never followed up, not just by the national media but by the local press as well.

And this brings us to one of the “preventable” aspects of the fire. The day-to-day job of being the eyes and ears of the public, in terms of keeping an eye on what the local public and private organisations are up to, just did not happen in Kensington and Chelsea.

People buy The Argus because they want to know what’s going on in Brighton and Hove and the surrounding area. By paying for the paper there’s an informal contract between the reader and the newspaper – we pay, you tell.

But in Kensington and Chelsea there is no paid-for local newspaper, daily or weekly; and the one and only local free sheet covers Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster and appears to show scant interest in the daily lives of people living in places like Grenfell Tower.

Its current web front page has more international news than local, and a search under the word Grenfell reveals just five stories on the site.

The phrase used to describe this situation is the “democratic deficit”. It means that boroughs like Kensington and Chelsea (I have removed its ‘Royal’ prefix as a mark of respect for the Crown), its “arms-length” housing management company, the contractors, sub-contractors and everyone else spending public money, were not being effectively monitored, except by the residents of Grenfell Tower themselves.

It was only when Nicholas Brown-Paget, the leader of the council, was exposed to public view in TV and radio interviews, defending the extraordinary inactivity of his borough after the fire, did it become obvious just how poorly-served were the local residents.

Had Mr Paget Brown – who has finally stepped down from his position of leadership – been exposed to the intensity of such monitoring on a daily basis, as for example, the leader of Brighton and Hove City Council endures, then it is unlikely that voters in Kensington and Chelsea would have so regularly re-elected Mr Paget Brown and his team.

There is another issue that the disaster exposed – that Kensington and Chelsea is home to some of the country’s richest and poorest communities and that the council, true or otherwise, was seen to govern in the interests of the few rather than the many.

Kensington and Chelsea might be an extreme example of this inequality but it is not unique.

Brighton and Hove contains some of the wealthiest and poorest communities in the South East and yet doesn’t function, or rather malfunction, in the way that Kensington and Chelsea has done.

One reason for this is because the local media, not just The Argus, play a key role in keeping all its residents informed and this in turn creates a sense of community, a sense of caring about what is happening down the road.

Today, local newspapers have to attract readers to their online as well as their print versions; and although more and more of us are accessing our news online I remain convinced that the visibility of a printed newspaper remains crucial.

Seeing a newspaper headline, billboard or just in a shop, is a constant reminder of its presence and even if it not bought, it stimulates people to search it out online.

And in my experience as a political journalist, politicians, local and national, remain fixated by print.

If they see it in print they believe it and, more importantly, they think others will believe it as well.

If the concerns that the Grenfell Tower residents were expressing about the safety of their building had been seen regularly in the pages of a local newspaper then I suspect something would have been done.

The council would have been shamed into action.

That never happened and the consequences were literally deadly.

The democratic deficit is more than just an airy-fairy concept, it involves real people real lives and regrettably, real tragedies.

Ivor Gaber is Professor of Journalism at the University of Sussex and a former reporter on a local daily newspaper.