A SWARM makes a change, I suppose, from a flood. At least he didn't say "horde". By Tory standards, David Cameron was restrained. He even avoided invoking a country terrified of being “swamped by people with a different culture”. This isn't 1978, he isn't Thatcher, and her legacy is, in any case, well enough understood amid the high summer hysteria.

As is the Prime Minister of the moment. What he really meant was plain enough: there are multitudes, faceless and foreign, and they want to come here. A few weeks back they were abject refugees risking everything to cross the Mediterranean. They were objects of pity. Now they are to be feared, despised, and at all costs repelled. After all, success for one would only encourage the countless others.

That line of argument was, if anything, more contemptible than the carefully-chosen word “swarm”. All illegal immigrants from Calais will be removed from the United Kingdom, Cameron said, “so people know it's not a safe haven”. His mouth; those words. The truth has been plain for long enough as successive governments, Labour and Tory, have pandered to racism in the public realm, but still it must warm tabloid cockles. Whatever hell you come from, think again: the UK is no-one's haven.

You hail from Syria, the place Cameron is keen to bomb? You made it through Libya, the place we bombed with such enthusiasm? You're a Kurd, an Eritrean, Sudanese, an Afghan? And you managed not to die in the Med, far from Dover, at a decent hand-wringing distance? You're neither white nor a lion called Cecil? It's no way to get a sympathetic press, is it?

Cameron's allusion to the swarm's transit of the Middle Sea was unpleasant for more than one reason. Just over a month ago, you might remember, the European Union's leaders gathered in Brussels for a summit that was supposed to deal with the hideous traffic in human life once and for all. Typically, the affair was a shambles. Proposals for a quota system that would have seen 28 states take responsibility for just 60,000 souls fell apart in a shouting match.

Few countries were eager to shoulder the burden. Pictures of infants plucked from the waves might tug at heartstrings, but migrants are not vote-winners anywhere in our safe European home. Britain's display of indifference was, however, a whole other matter. As a gesture of calculated petty callousness, it would be hard to beat.

The UK's share of the refugees? The UK would accept no share. The UK's role in EU asylum policy? The UK has opted out of the EU's policy. Quotas, mandatory or voluntary? The UK would have none of it. In its essentials, our policy for “the swarm” was as it remains: let others, especially the Italians and the Greeks, handle them. Or let them drown.

The guardians of Fortress Britain in the tabloid press could tell you about our terrible problems with asylum seekers, after all. They might forget to explain that this category of immigrant formed just 4.6% of the UK total in 2013, according to the Office for National Statistics. It would also slip the minds of those publishing the “Invasion at Calais” headlines that – says Eurostat – 40% of the asylum claims lodged in Europe in the first quarter of this year were lodged in Germany. The UK accounted for 4%.

But how many precious German holidays are being disrupted? How much German trade is being choked off at the Channel? Is Angela Merkel ready to fight them on the beaches and send in the troops to keep a few editors happy? The tabloid mood is almost beyond parody. With nine migrants dead already this summer, it is certainly beyond comedy. To put it no higher, the shrieking demands for “action” directed at Cameron and the perfidious French are not likely to help a bad situation.

If nine deaths are not proof of desperation, what is? If risking the deserts, the people traffickers, the Med, hunger, drowning, rape, beatings, robbery, the cops, electrocution, or extinction beneath a lorry's wheels don't count for the arbiters of “British public opinion”, what does? The eagerness to treat perhaps 5,000 hopeless migrants as an enemy at the gates, as proof that all the years of bigoted tabloid claptrap have been justified, is an indictment in itself.

One irony is as ugly as it is profound. Inadvertently, Cameron is right: these desperate, deluded people really do think of Britain as a safe haven. The myth of lavish benefits on demand has been destroyed time and again: in cash terms, a young migrant would be better off – though not by much – staying in France. Britain might seem to have jobs to offer those who can speak English – it would depend what you mean by a job – but is that truly enough to justify the risks run by the people gathered at Calais? “Economic migrant” is a crooked little euphemism: for these individuals, home is hellish. They think we offer the chance of a better way to live.

Cameron doesn't often join the dots. Plainly, he is afraid that if he treats the Calais refugees as human beings in need, Britain will be inundated. That's open to question. The ubiquity of English being what it is, we certainly attract many. The fact remains that while 450,000 foreign nationals arrived in the UK in 2013, 607,000 went to Germany. Another fact is that those encamped at Calais scarcely feature on the UK's list of the “foreign-born”.

In 2013, 12.5% of the population (7.8 million) fell into that category. Of that total, 36.2% were in London (4.42% in Scotland). The top five countries represented were: India (9.4%), Poland (8.7%), Pakistan (6.4%), Ireland (5.1%), and – be amused – Germany (4%). Are we sending Gurkhas to the airports to keep out South Africans (2.6%) or Americans (2.5%)? Of course not.

The Prime Minister might also remember that foreign policy actions have consequences. What if he gets his wish and is given a chance to bomb Isis in Syria? What will that do to refugee numbers in Calais? The bombing of Libya left that country a base for the traffickers. The long war in Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq, wrought chains of refugees. But what else do we expect? Perhaps some of those at Calais heard that we bombed in the name of British values and took us at our word.

If so, they were misinformed. The jingoistic mania surrounding a port, a tunnel and a failure of immigration control has given another glimpse, if you needed one, into what lies behind Britain's fine talk of decency, compassion and humanitarian obligations. All that remains is to build the drawbridge at Dover and invite the Queen down for the ceremonial raising. The chance to keep “them” out has put a kind of weird triumphalism in the air. That too will have consequences.

It was never an unalloyed treat to be non-white and of overseas origins in these islands. Cameron and the tabloid carnival over Calais will make life that little bit worse henceforth for some Britons. The perpetrators know it, too.