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David Cameron gave his A-grade humanitarian spiel yesterday, with the word "swarms" appearing nowhere near the speech. "The whole country has been deeply moved by the heart-breaking images we have seen over the past few days," he said. "And it is absolutely right that Britain should fulfill its moral responsibility to help those refugees just as we have done so proudly throughout our history.""We will ensure that vulnerable children, including orphans, will be a priority," he said, failing to mention that vulnerable children and orphans who are taken in could be deported when they hit 18 years of age.Nevertheless, taking anybody at all is a bit of a U-turn since just last week, when the Prime Minister said Britain still shouldn't take any more refugees, despite the distressing pictures of a drowned Syrian child, Alan Krudi, going viral. "I don't think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees," he said. But with the scale of the human tragedy becoming unavoidable, Cameron was starting to look a bit callous. I guess a tough stance doesn't hold up so well when the scary enemy are leagues of drowned refugees, those who have tried and failed to make it by boat to Western Europe.Not that yesterday's announcement will help those people directly. Instead, Britain will take refugees who are currently in camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon; the idea is that we don't want to encourage people from taking these dangerous journeys in the first place. Experts say that this "pull factor"—the UK opening their borders being an invitation for refugees to travel across Europe—isn't a thing, but that doesn't stop people from banging on about it. It was presumably for this reason that Cameron was keen to hype the £1 billion [$1.54 billion] Britain has given to the Syrian conflict in aid money. "No other European country has come close to this level of support," he said.MPs repeatedly asked Cameron how many people we are going to take right now, since the crisis is pretty urgent. He wouldn't be pinned down. "It depends," he said, on the UNHCR's ability to process refugees, and local councils' willingness to take them. Caroline Lucas asked if the government would guarantee funding for local councils to welcome refugees for more than one year. He sort of skirted around the question.While taking 20,000 is better than nothing, there are hundreds of thousands Britain could feasibly be helping—but we're not. And for those refugees who don't form part of that figure, the reality is still bleak; being forcibly denied access to safety in Britain and potentially being locked up indefinitely in a detention center, only to be deported back to the country you were fleeing. At least for once, opinion has shamed politics into helping refugees out, instead of making a sadistic show of being violently uncaring.Follow Simon on Twitter.Read on Motherboard: Hell On High Seas