Last week news broke of trouble in Carlington Community College, a school in Cornwall, which has resonated throughout British society.

The school took swift action after it discovered that pupils were arriving late for lessons due to excessive hugging.

Headteacher Stephen Kenning has, according to pupils, “named and shamed” offenders in assembly and issued detentions, hopefully in solitary confinement.

This is to be applauded as a sterling example that the British stiff upper lip is still fiercely in place and the country has not gone to the Oprahs.

It is not acceptable for a history class to be disrupted at the first sight of open palms in the schoolyard as this could cause pupils to dash to the windows braying “Hug! Hug! Hug!”

Moreover, there are concerns that hugging could be a gateway to higher experiences of intimacy that could have devastating effects on British society. The known side effects of higher intimacies include boosted self-esteem, strong feelings of affiliation, increased emotional stability and a reduction in alcohol consumption, all of which are detrimental to the British economy.

We are in danger of bequeathing a generation of wobbly chinned individuals who refuse to answer the phone unless someone gives them a quick tickle. This is an unexploded land mine in the bedrock of our society and we should act now to prevent confident, uninhibited plebeians stomping over the values that made us proud to be British.

Now that the birch is unacceptable, solutions to the problem are not obvious but maybe help could come from abroad. .

Earlier this year, at a technology conference in Montreal, scientists from Singapore revealed The Jacket, a device that enables the wearer to feel the sensation of being hugged. A doll is allocated to a member of the family, or even an authority figure and, provided there is remote internet access, he can touch the model and it will generate the exact sensation in the wearer.

Trials on silkie bantam chickens, wearing bespoke jackets, were conducted to see if they would prefer the hutch that offered a sensation of being stroked. The silkies, over 28 days, picked the “hugging hutch” 72% of the time.

From chickens to GCSE students, it is clearly the way forward. The jacket could be designed in a variety of fashions, from blazer, to duffel, to hoodie. Likewise, the doll could be moulded into a replica of Simon Cowell and students would be able to experience the debatable benefits of hugging without any of the touchy–feely nonsense.

It is a perfect third way solution and human trials of the jacket could even ape the chicken run to see if it is possible to engineer students into enrolling into unfashionable subjects such as chemistry, physics and eugenics.

It is the perfect way to maintain a sense of Britishness in the future generation and it could be cheaply manufactured in China.