The scene is ghastly: a roof in a Pakistani school, collapsing like a Roman aqueduct after centuries of neglect. Fourteen children dead, crushed by concrete that no one thought to inspect, maintained by a system that treats safety as a foreign luxury. Every instinct screams tragedy.
But for the contrarian, the deeper wound is intellectual. We in Britain, flushed with our own safety standards, will tut and demand change. Yet this tragedy is not a failure of regulation.
It is a failure of civilisation. We export our textbooks but not our building codes. We lecture about inspections but ignore the fact that in much of South Asia, concrete is mixed by hand, structures are not stress-tested, and fatalism is a cheaper narcotic than insurance.
The real scandal is not the roof. It is the comfortable assumption that our norms are universal, that a few paragraphs of legislation can substitute for centuries of institutional trust. The Victorian era bred a culture of integrity in infrastructure.
We have since abandoned that culture for a faith in paperwork. For Pakistan, the cure is not a British safety standard. It is a domestic awakening to the value of a child's skull.
And for us? A moment of silence, then back to our complacent certainties.
