Asian Provocateur | What the Syrian migrant crisis tells us about Europe’s politics

To the eponymous legislature of both Messrs Murphy and Parkinson, we should surely add a third - Cameron’s Law or, perhaps, Merkel’s Theorem. Though the exact wording would obviously be subject to protracted international debate, this would roughly approximate to: “There is no situation so grave or wretched that someone, somewhere won’t seek to make political capital out of it.”

A case in point, of late, would be the Refugee Crisis, something that has been befuddling European politicians of every hue, off and on, since 2011. For the most part, this has cast EU administrators into Canute-like roles, seeking to stem the Syrian tide as it threatened to swamp health systems, schools or housing resources, depending on which mock concern looked least NIMBYesque on the day in question.

Famously, all of this changed nearly a month ago, when photographs of a drowned three-year-old flashed around the world. Rightly sensing a shift in public sentiment – and an opportunity for a little self-serving hand-wringing - the Eurocrats jostled with one another to score points and reshuffle the deckchairs on their own faltering ships of state.

For David Cameron, a man for a whom a commitment may as well be a sax player in a Roddy Doyle movie, it was a chance to fudge his own immigration figures. Long tussling with his public pledge to appease Middle England by manhandling migrants back to Calais, he has been hamstrung by the EU open borders policy. In short, he has been buying off public opponents – within and without his own party – by promising to deliver the undeliverable, a fact he has surely been only too aware of.

With the British public famously likely to fail in any pub quiz that sought a dictionary difference between an immigrant and a refugee, you can see only too clearly how next year’s net migration figures will be spun. At the same time, these photo-opp friendly fleers of distant tyrannies have neatly sorted another policy pledge for the Cameronistas.

It has long rankled with the more right wing rank and file that the UK is committed to spending 0.7% of its gross national income on international aid. With this pledge somewhat grudgingly enshrined on the statute books as late as March this year – making the UK the only G7 nation to meet the target figure set by the UN back in 1970 – it would be politically difficult for even Cameron, one of the world’s great welchers, to blob on this particular statistic.