David Cameron has highly developed skills in the art of following where he should be leading. And so, after being taught an excruciating lesson in compassion, decency and leadership by Angela Merkel, and sensing himself behind opinion again, he has produced a plan to take in 20,000 refugees – over five years. Nothing better shows the PM’s tone deafness to the urgency of the situation than to announce this headline figure, and then add that it will take five years to implement.

Not only is this response calibrated more by political expediency than compassion, he has also indicated he believes the answer to the problem is more bombing. If the best part of two years of bombing with more than enough high explosive hasn’t solved this problem, how would Britain’s widow’s mite of a few extra bombs help? Military strikes against Isis are failing, not because we do not have enough high explosive, but because we do not have a diplomatic strategy on Syria that would make sense of the military action.

But let us first consider Cameron’s refugee “plan”. Not only is he offering a derisory number of places for refugees, but the prime minister chooses to help those who are already safely housed and fed in refugee camps outside Europe, rather than those who suffer (and die too) for want of these things inside Europe. Could it be that the toxic term here is not “suffering”, but “inside Europe”, because of the effect these words have on his backbench Europhobes? If so then – irony of ironies – the desperate and the destitute tramping towards us on the dusty roads of the Balkans are hostages to Cameron’s headbangers, just as he is.

And how will we measure the success of this plan? Not by how much it assuages the suffering of those fleeing from the Syrian battlefields, obviously – for it is in no way aimed at them. By its effect on reducing the number fleeing, then? But it won’t do that either.

Cameron seems to think that seeking asylum is like going to the theatre: one only does it if one has a ticket for a seat

Then consider this. Cameron tells us that not helping those in flimsy boats struggling to Europe will reduce the temptation for others to take this “lethal journey”. This is exactly the same inhuman logic that government ministers gave us last Christmas when they insisted (albeit at Europe’s behest) that not saving drowning refugees in the Mediterranean was the best way to stop others following them. Hundreds had to drown before we finally saw that this immoral policy didn’t work. Do we really have to learn that lesson again?

Cameron seems to believe that being an asylum seeker is like going to the theatre – one only does it if one has a ticket for a seat. But fleeing for your family’s life, you will take any risk. You are not going to stay to die just because there may not be a comfortable bed in a place you can be safe.

But surely, the government argues, shouldn’t we be discouraging the people smugglers? Of course we should. So attack the people smugglers directly, not their poor, powerless clients. We in Britain have a refugee “problem” as well – 3,000 of them throwing themselves at the gates of the Channel tunnel. Whether that is a large number or a small one, measured against the 1.5 million in Turkey, or the 800,000 who will be accepted by Germany, or the 68,500 who settled in France last year, depends on your point of view. But one thing is common to all these figures. The refugee problem is Europe-wide and can only be solved by a Europe-wide solution. Yet Cameron rejects any smell of a European solution. And in doing so he undermines our national interest, makes solving our refugee “problem” harder, damages his own bargaining power with Europe and betrays our age-old, proud record as a nation of generosity to those in need.

David Cameron is a decent man. But in his “plan”, the politics has trumped the decency. This is not a strategy to give succour, it is a fig leaf to cover nakedness.

The public are ahead of the politicians in this – as they were on intervention in Bosnia. And so, in our myopia (or rather the government’s), we fail to see what the cheering welcomers of Germany see so clearly. Those fleeing the Syrian battlefield are not “economic migrants” – they are, in large measure, the educated middle class. They are the Ugandan Asians of our day. Remember how much they have done for our country?

The numbers we see fleeing conflict will be dwarfed by the population movements we will see as global warming takes hold. But if this has to be so, then let it be done thoughtfully, within a Europe-wide context, and in a way consistent with our principles of free movement, decency and humanity. Not by spatchcock policies dreamed up to cover political embarrassment.

And now to back a refugee plan that isn’t going to work, Cameron wants us to get involved in a military plan that isn’t working either. The so-called coalition waging the bombing campaign is too small, too Sunni and too western. This is increasing the danger of a widening Sunni-Shia regional war in which the west is drawn into one side and Russia the other (as we have recently seen).

The new rapprochement with Tehran offers us new possibilities to build a wider coalition that spans the Sunni-Shia divide in a way that strangles Isis, and creates the context in which military force makes sense. This is a framework into which Russia, with its own Sunni jihadist problems, could be drawn too.

Isis will not be defeated by killing more Arab Muslims with more western bombs. What is needed here is more clever diplomacy, not more pointless bombing, and this is where Britain should be taking the lead.