Sixteen children dead. A school in central Kenya reduced to ash. And what does the United Kingdom do? It reaches for the dusty lever marked 'Commonwealth action on child safety standards'. How perfectly, predictably useless. We are witnessing a ritual of moral posturing that could have been lifted from the pages of a Victorian reform pamphlet, complete with the earnest belief that a committee in London can extinguish fires in Nairobi.
Let us be clear: this is a tragedy. The loss of young lives is always a horror. But the reflexive cry for 'Commonwealth standards' betrays a deeper intellectual decadence, a refusal to confront the real pathologies at work. What caused this fire? Faulty wiring? A lack of fire extinguishers? Overcrowded dormitories? These are not mysteries awaiting a Whitehall task force. They are symptoms of systemic underfunding, corruption, and a culture that treats school safety as an optional extra.
The fall of Rome, as Gibbon observed, was not the result of a single barbarian invasion but of a thousand small failures of governance. Kenya's tragedy is our contemporary equivalent: a nation that cannot keep its children safe from flames because its institutions have decayed from within. The British offer of 'action' is like a former emperor sending a scroll of advice while the provinces burn. It is the gesture of a power that no longer has the will or the means to enforce anything, a ghost haunting the Commonwealth hallways.
And yet, we must ask ourselves: does the UK have any standing to lecture? Our own schools have not escaped such horrors. The 1993 fire at a school in Glasgow? No, that was a hoax. But what of the systematic failures in our own educational system: the crumbling buildings, the underpaid staff, the culture of inspection that breeds compliance rather than safety? We are all Romans now, watching our own structures crumble while we argue about which committee should write the report.
The real issue here is not a lack of standards but a lack of will. Kenya's government spends more on official cars than on school infrastructure. The UK government spends more on consultants than on fire safety. Both share a common vice: a preference for appearance over reality. A Commonwealth summit will produce a glossy document; the next fire will produce more corpses.
What would a Victorian reformer do? He would demand not 'action' but accountability. He would name the negligent officials, the corrupt contractors, the politicians who siphone off funds. He would insist that safety is not a standard to be adopted but a practice to be enforced, daily, relentlessly, without sentiment. But we no longer have the stomach for such ruthlessness. We prefer the comfort of a communiqué.
So let us mourn the sixteen. Let us honour them by refusing the easy consolation of bureaucratic gestures. Let us instead demand that those responsible be named, shamed, and removed. Only then might we begin to reverse the decline. Or we can continue to play at empire, drafting standards while the children burn.
The choice is ours. But we all know what choice will be made.
