Three dead in a Philippine school shooting. The news arrives stripped of context: a gunman, a classroom, a familiar horror. But this time, it comes with a twist. British counter-terror officials are reportedly urging their model for export. The ‘Prevent’ strategy, our own uneasy compromise between security and civil liberty, is being touted as a solution for Manila. I find myself watching the story unfold from a London newsroom, feeling the strange gravity of events that are both far away and uncomfortably close.
The human cost is immediate: three families shattered, a community in mourning, a nation questioning its safety. But the cultural shift is what I am paid to notice. The Philippine school system, already straining under resource pressures and a fraught political landscape, now faces a new export: a conceptual toolbox for fighting radicalisation. The irony is that our own model, born from the London Bridge attacks and the Manchester Arena bombing, is itself a reaction to a threat that crosses borders. We have exported the template for a different kind of fear.
On the ground, I imagine a teacher in Quezon City, trying to explain lockdown drills to primary school children. The same drills my own niece practices in her Hertfordshire classroom. The universality of the response betrays a deeper unease: we are all learning to watch for signs, to categorise anger, to manage the unthinkable. The question that hangs, unspoken, is whether a model designed for one culture can be transplanted into another. Does ‘Prevent’ work when the radicalisation is not ideological but personal? When the grievance is poverty, not prophecy?
This is the human element that policy debates often obscure. The British approach relies on community partnerships, on teachers and imams and parents being the first line of defence. But for that to work, there must be trust. In the Philippines, where state authority is often viewed with suspicion, such trust is fragile. The class dynamics shift too: a school in a wealthy enclave is a fortress; a school in a poor province is a target. The export of our model cannot ignore these fractures.
I watch the press conference. The British ambassador speaks of solidarity, of shared values. But the camera pans to a mother weeping. Her face says what no policy can: some losses have no answer. We are left with the uneasy feeling that our best efforts, our templates and strategies, are just scaffolding over an abyss. The tragedy is that we need them at all. The cultural shift is that now we always will.