In late August the official immigration statistics for the UK were released and showed that Cameron’s 2011 boast that his government would bring net immigration into the UK down from the “hundreds of thousands” a year to the “tens of thousands” has been missed by more than ever. The figures showed that net migration into the UK had actually reached an historic peak — rising to 330,000 up to the start of this year. We know how few people welcomed this because poll after poll tells us so. One poll carried out last year found that a mere 11 per cent of the UK population want the population to increase. Another recent poll showed that just 7 per cent of the British public want more immigration to our country. Now that 13 per cent of the UK population were not born in the UK, one interesting thing this shows is that even most immigrants to Britain do not want more immigrants. In the initial part of the current crisis Cameron tried to reflect British public opinion. He stood against the demands of Merkel and the European Commission that European countries take quotas even as they conceded that the quotas were insufficient to address the problem.

But then the internal contradictions of Europe were demonstrated again by what most seem to agree was a turning-point: the photograph of a dead Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, washed up on the shores of Turkey. A social media campaign grew — like the “Bring back our girls” hashtag of a couple of years ago about Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. This time the hashtag was “Refugees welcome” and celebrities, politicians and others photographed themselves with the sign and sent the photograph around on social media. Public and media opinion grew militant, simultaneously demanding slashes in net migration and vast increases in the number of refugees. The political class understandably struggled to keep pace with these contradictory demands. Soon the Hungarian government was being sat upon from above and every voice of caution seemed to be on the defensive.

To be opposed to letting in refugees was suddenly to be indifferent to the fate of dead children. Unsurprisingly the British Prime Minister buckled and agreed to start by allowing in a further 20,000 Syrian refugees. Dams broke elsewhere in Europe too, with media cameramen running alongside migrants as they poured through the fields and across the borders. Over the next 48 hours the New York Times reported a surge of migrant movement from Nigeria and elsewhere as people saw that a window of opportunity had opened for citizenship in Europe.

The Sun, meanwhile, responded to the photo of the drowned Syrian boy by drum-beating for RAF airstrikes inside Syria, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, used the opportunity to lambast the Labour party for voting against intervention in Syria two years ago, describing it as “one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made”. Few knee-jerks could more adequately sum up our confusion. For the 2013 Commons vote proposed a set of punitive airstrikes against the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war. As some of us who opposed those airstrikes said at the time, there was no strategic thinking about this, and no thinking whatsoever about what Britain would do if those strikes helped topple Assad and left Britain (which had previously had no involvement in Syria’s descent into chaos) with at least some responsibility for putting the country back together again. Those purported strikes had nothing to do with Isis, would have done nothing to stem the flow of refugees from Syria and might easily have made the refugee flow even larger.