MANILA. A 17-year-old student, armed with a grudge and a pistol, has turned a Philippine high school into a bullet-riddled theatre of the absurd, leaving three corpses and a nation’s worth of hollow platitudes in his wake. The boy, reportedly nursing a decades-old grievance about being called ‘four-eyes’ or some such playground idiocy, decided that the appropriate response to adolescent cruelty was a ballistic seminar in mortal consequences. Now, in the great British tradition of mistaking a problem for a piece of paper, our own educational apparatchiks are ‘urgently reviewing’ anti-bullying protocols. Because nothing says ‘firm grip on reality’ like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while the iceberg melts.
Let us pause, dear reader, to savour the sheer, gin-soaked futility of this response. A boy in the Philippines, a country where gun laws are about as enforceable as a chocolate teapot, has committed an atrocity. And the British response is to… review a policy. I half expect the Home Secretary to issue a sternly worded memo to the Archbishop of Canterbury about the need for better sin management. The tragedy is real, the grief is genuine, but the response is pure, unadulterated farce.
We have all seen the cycle before. A tragedy occurs. The nation tuts. A review is commissioned. The review produces a report the size of a small car. The report is filed. Nothing changes. And the next bully, emboldened by the knowledge that the worst he faces is a stern talking-to about ‘emotional intelligence’, continues his reign of terror while the teachers are too busy filling in ‘wellbeing impact assessments’ to notice. The real bullying in British schools isn’t the name-calling; it’s the systematic, bureaucratic gaslighting that tells victims their suffering is a statistical data point.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, they are burying children. Three of them. And the international community, led by our own virtuous mediocrities, responds with a policy review. I can almost hear the clinking of glasses in Whitehall as they toast their own sensitivity. “Well done, chaps. We’ve shown them we care.” But do they? Or is it simply easier to write a memo than to admit that the world is a brutal, chaotic place where a bullied boy can buy a gun and turn a classroom into a killing field?
The irony, of course, is that the bullying epidemic in British schools is real. It is a festering sore that leaves scars far deeper than any policy can reach. But the solution is not to be found in a review. It is found in a culture shift: in teaching children that cruelty has consequences, that empathy is not a weakness, and that the state, despite its best efforts, cannot legislate away every baser human instinct. But that would require courage, not a committee. It would require admitting that we have failed, not commissioning a document to pretend we haven’t.
So let the reviews roll in. Let the task forces assemble. Let the thinktanks publish their inevitable ‘Roadmap to a Kinder Classroom’. But remember, as you read these noble pronouncements, that somewhere in the Philippines, three families are planning funerals. And the only thing that will change is the colour of the ribbon on some minister’s lapel. The rest is just noise. The rest is just the sound of a system so terrified of action that it mistakes motion for progress.
I will drink to that. A large gin, please. And make it a double. The absurdity is becoming unbearable.
