Sixteen lives extinguished. Another Kenyan school, another inferno. The headlines write themselves: 'Pupils Die in Dormitory Blaze', 'Safety Lapses Blamed'.
And then, the inevitable, almost reflexive comparison: 'British Safety Standards Contrasted'. But what does this contrast truly illuminate? A smug satisfaction in our regulatory superiority?
A patronising tut-tut from afar? Or does it reveal something far more uncomfortable: a society that has traded resilience for regulation and forgotten what the Fall of Rome can teach us about the brittleness of empire? I propose the latter.
The colonial narrative of 'civilising missions' has been replaced by a technocratic one of 'safety audits'. Both miss the point. The real question is not why Kenyan schools burn, but why British ones no longer do.
And the answer, I fear, is not progress but a kind of intellectual decadence that mistakes paperwork for protection. In the Victorian era, schools were draughty, dangerous places. Boys died.
It was accepted as the cost of forging character. Today, we have eliminated that cost. But have we eliminated the character?
Or merely outsourced risk to poorer nations, where the bill for our safety comes due in the lives of children? The fire in Kenya is a mirror. Look into it.
See a Britain more concerned with condemning than comprehending. The Romans did not fall because their baths were unsafe. They fell because they forgot how to build them properly.
We have not forgotten how to build. But we have forgotten why. We have created a world where every school in Britain is a fortress of fire extinguishers and evacuation drills, yet we wonder why our young people lack the grit to face a world that burns.
Meanwhile, in Kenya, they learn the hard way. They pay in blood. And we send our sympathies and our standards.
A poor exchange.
