“Britain will act with our head and our heart,” said David Cameron yesterday, “providing refuge for those in need while working on long-term solutions to this crisis.” The first part of that statement can be doubted, at least where the Government is concerned. What does the second part even mean?

Struggling to respond to public outrage over photographs of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, dead on a Turkish beach, the Prime Minister has rested much of his argument on the prospects for peace, or at least stability, in Syria. The logic cannot be faulted. End a supremely brutal civil war and you end the refugee crisis. At worst, as Whitehall would put it, you “contain the problem”.

In the four-and-a-half years since protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad turned into a ruthless conflict, the United Kingdom has spent more than £900 million trying to achieve that end. Judging by his statement in Lisbon yesterday, Mr Cameron still believes it is his only hope for keeping “hordes” from Britain's shores. People will not take to the roads and the seas, he argues, if they can be made safe at home, or close to home. In the meantime, we will accept unspecified “thousands” of asylum applicants.

So how do you stop a civil war involving a brute like Assad, willing to unleash chemical weapons on his own people; an outfit like Isis, for whom no barbarism is too extreme; a ragtag collection of “moderate” groups incapable of unity or coherent action; a West whose bombs give no civilian a reason to stay put; a collection of regional bystanders each with ambitions of their own; and – or so it is reported – Russian forces, of some description, aiding the regime?

There is a short answer. Such wars end in victory for someone – who takes your fancy? – or in mutually assured exhaustion in a country so ravaged no prize worth winning remains. In Syria, the main contenders are not at the end of the road, despite numerous predictions, and there is no sign that more congenial rivals can prevail. Assad's fall was predicted confidently over and over again until a couple of years ago. Isis was supposed to be “degraded and destroyed” by precision bombing. Both factions endure.

Sooner or later, preferably sooner, Mr Cameron will have to deal with this fact and what it means for his refugee strategy, such as it is. If the Syrian war cannot be stopped, or the region “stabilised”, people will continue to flee. Europe's crisis will deepen and serious efforts will have to be made, by the UK and its EU partners, to meet moral and legal responsibilities. The fact is not to Mr Cameron's taste, but such is the Franco-German demand. After the photographs of little Aylan Kurdi, it is also the British public's demand.

Those who continue to flee will not do so willingly: reporters on the ground talk endlessly of Syrians who love their country and are heartbroken to leave. They will not, contrary to daft and disgusting myths, make a beeline for Britain. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) continues to point out, 86 per cent of those in flight around the world are taken in by developing countries. Since the Syrian war began Turkey has given shelter to 1.6 million; Lebanon has 1.15 million; Jordan 654,000. The EU problem is big, not vast.

What, nevertheless, does Mr Cameron propose for the sake of Syrian stability? In truth, nothing much. Our hundreds of millions in aid have gone, by and large, to keep people in camps in countries struggling, as the numbers suggest, to cope. Consider a refugee's choices: expose children to barrel bombs at home; try to raise them under canvas in the depths of a Turkish winter; or risk the Mediterranean and European charity. Where would you await the British Prime Minister's plan for peace?

Neither the UK nor the United States has the slightest intention of committing troops to the conflict zone. Given the record of such interventions, that makes sense. Yet despite arms, training and funding, often from Gulf states, “moderate” forces are close to irrelevant in the war. Turkey, one of just two local powers capable of dealing decisively with Assad or Isis, is more interested in attacking Kurds. The other power is Israel. Its participation, in any shape or form, would be madness.

Such is the unpalatable reality. A Turkish-American scheme for a safe zone in the north of Syria seems destined to look better on paper than in reality: without troops for protection it amounts to a gesture. Assad might preside over a shattered economy with battle-weary armed forces, but he still has the backing of the Russians and of Iran. Efforts to resurrect the so-called Geneva II peace process and build some sort of coalition government are meanwhile going nowhere, for precisely that reason: the dictator still believes he can win.

Mr Cameron's talk of stability is an exercise in fiction, in other words, and he knows it. Any mention of peace is sheer deceit. There are between nine and 12 million “displaced” Syrians, fleeing within their country or beyond its borders, who understand this perfectly well. They understand it better, certainly, than people in Britain who still pay attention to the Prime Minister's “strategy”. It has much less to do with regional peace and stability than with keeping refugees out of Britain.

Mr Cameron will not get away with it for much longer, just as he will not get away with the assurance that Britain will accept “thousands”. How many thousands? This week Yvette Cooper, the Labour leadership candidate, challenged the Prime Minister by naming a figure. But 10,000 was an arbitrary number, and certainly too low. With EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg yesterday, and with Angela Merkel of Germany and Francois Hollande of France calling for binding quotas, the UK's “fair share” is anything from 15,000 to 25,000 new refugees.

Antonio Guterres, head of UNHCR, says Europe must develop “a common strategy” in this “defining moment”. Mr Cameron will not like the sound of that. Despite everything, parochial Tory attitudes and old prejudices are still at work. You could say the Prime Minister is entitled to those, or saddled with them. He is no longer entitled to pretend that “working on long-term solutions” to Syria's war is an alternative strategy when facing the plight of desperate people.

Politicians like Mr Cameron, happy enough to laud globalisation or European co-operation when trade is at stake, cannot pick and choose in a time of crisis. He has been a small, peripheral figure this week, but there is no public mood for standing aside, or for pretending that Syria's war is still just some “quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”, one that will be sorted out by and by. Hellish photographs of a dead child vouch for that.

The Prime Minister's own logic holds. The civil war in Syria is not going to end any time soon; Europe's refugee crisis will therefore continue. Pretence will bring nothing but suffering and dishonour.