The Germans want to introduce a pan-European tax to pay for the refugee crisis. The Danish want to pass a law to seize any jewellery worth more than £1,000 as refugees arrive – apart from wedding rings. That’s what marks you out as a civilised people, apparently, that you can see the romance in a stranger’s life and set that aside before you bag them up as a profit or a loss.

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In Turkey people smugglers are charging a thousand dollars for a place in a dinghy, $2,500 in a wooden boat, with more than 350,000 refugees passing through one Greek island – Lesbos – alone in 2015. The profit runs into hundreds and millions of dollars, and the best EU response so far has been to offer the Turkish government more money to either hold refugees in their own country or – against the letter and the spirit of every pledge modern society has made on refugees – send them back whence they came.

Turkey is a country of 75 million that has already taken a million refugees, accepting impossible and cruel demands from a continent of more than 500 million people that, apparently, can’t really help because of the threat to its “social cohesion”. Our own government has pledged to take 20,000 refugees but only the respectable ones, from faraway camps: the subtext being that the act of fleeing to Europe puts refugees outside the purview of human sympathy, being itinerant, a vagrant, on the take.

Institutions and governments represent an ever narrower strain of harsh opinion. The thousands of volunteers in Greece, the Guardian readers who gave more at Christmas to refugee charities than to any appeal before, the grassroots organisations springing up everywhere to try and show some human warmth on this savage journey to imagined safety – none of these are represented, politically, in a discourse that takes as its starting point the need to make the swarms disappear, to trick them into going somewhere else.

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It’s those neutral-sounding, just-good-economics ideas that give the game away: if a million people in any given European nation suffered a natural disaster, nobody would be talking about how to raise a tax so that help could be sent. We would help first and worry about the money second. When the EU wants to rescue a government, or the banks of a member state (granted, at swingeing cost for the rescued), it doesn’t first float a “rescue tax”.

The suggestion that the current crisis needs its own special tax may well be an attempt to force individual governments to confront the reality of their current strategy, which is to have no strategy. Yet it sullies the underlying principle of the refugee convention: that anyone fleeing in fear for their life be taken in on that basis, not pending a whip-round. To repudiate that is essentially to say that human rights are no longer our core business. But without that as an organising principle, the ties that bind one nation to another begin to fray: alliances must at the very least be founded on ideas you’re not ashamed to say out loud.

A continent whose fellowship is based on shunning the desperate is going to find its confidence fatally damaged. Against that backdrop, the Danish jewellery grab, the French and the British vying with one another to see who can be the most inert and pathetic on the questions of Calais and Dunkirk, the myriad brutalities erected across Europe, make dispiriting sense; without a moral purpose, a competitive yet indifferent impotence pervades.

While the war in Syria persists, while Isis exists – indeed, until there is a massive outbreak of unprecedented peace – certain facts will remain unarguable. The flow of refugees will not stop. It will not lessen and those people cannot be accommodated by Turkey, even if they were happy to stop there. A solution that relies on beefing up the fortification of Europe will merely deliver more money into the hands of people-smugglers, intensifying and empowering networks of criminality across the continent to a degree that will change its nature. A solution that relies on not noticing that people are drowning is indivisible, ethically, from a solution that undertakes to drown people deliberately, and this, again, will ultimately change the nature of all countries that let it happen. A solution of avoidance on this issue will erode our collective ability to cooperate on anything. Rather than watch this painful display of inadequacy and heckle, we need to start setting out a framework for what adequacy would look like.

First, we need to assert the legitimacy of the asylum claims, based on the routes taken, the countries fled, the extent of the conflicts that we all know. Too much time is wasted on who’s an economic migrant and who’s a refugee. We can say in full confidence that 850,000 people crossed the water from Turkey last year and not one of them was a South American plumber looking for new opportunities.

It is not impossible or even unreasonable work to divide up 850,000 people between European nations, based on size and space and GDP per capita – and require each nation, as a condition of membership, to take its share. All of this must be undertaken without the petty vindictiveness that has characterised immigration policy since the turn of the century. We all need to spell out what it would take to meaningfully uphold the convention upon which so much of our collective self-belief is based; or consider a future in which that self-belief has gone.