IT IS unclear whether Murdoch rag the Sun knew when it first published yesterday’s incendiary Train Squatters front page, with its panic-mongering screech about the number of “illegals” getting into Britain on trains, that a teenage boy had been found dead on the roof of a Eurostar.

But it is unlikely that the knowledge would have pricked the conscience of a paper that happily runs columns calling refugees “cockroaches” who “spread like norovirus.”

Its lack of feeling was shared by Tory MP Philip Davies, with his warning that immigrants were “ingenious” and would “find any way to get into this country.”

Philip Davies is probably not known for compassion towards his fellow human beings, as the MP who has demanded we “scrap the Human Rights Act for foreign nationals,” asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission “why is it so offensive to black up your face, as I have never understood this” and has called for the minimum wage not to apply to disabled people.

For “ingenious,” read desperate: people are risking their lives to get into Europe and into Britain.

Forget the poisonous drivel from Jeremy Hunt and the rest of the Conservative Cabinet about “benefits tourism.”

People are not crossing the sea in leaking, overcrowded boats, being herded like animals into cramped holding camps, running the gauntlet of unprovoked police violence in a succession of countries and clinging to the roofs of trains because they’re after £57.90 a week in jobseeker’s allowance.

If they were, the number fleeing across the Mediterranean would not have almost tripled over the past year when European governments from London to Lisbon, Rome and Athens are hacking up their welfare states in an EU-wide frenzy of social destruction.

People are only endangering life and limb to get here because staying put is even more dangerous.

Small wonder then that the single largest group of refugees by nationality this year are Syrians.

The civil war in Syria has claimed over 300,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. Around half the country’s territory is now controlled by the murderous fanatics of Islamic State (Isis), who have hoovered up arms and money from the West and its regional allies.

Washington and, even more so, its Saudi playmates in Riyadh have fanned the flames of war in the region in their deadly game of one-upmanship against Iran and its ally the Syrian government. The result is that a legion of sadistic thugs has been given free rein to pursue its genocidal fantasies over vast swathes of Syrian and Iraqi territory.

If Isis was rampaging across England perhaps Mr Davies might also look for “ingenious” ways of saving his own life or his family’s.

More to the point, the British government has so far shown a total lack of responsibility for a crisis in which it is deeply complicit.

If we and our allies had not encouraged and helped fund the radical religious sectarians of the Syrian opposition, that country might not have been torn apart.

If we and our allies had not bombed the Libyan government into the dust in 2011, that country might not be a war-torn no-man’s-land where human traffickers operate with impunity.

If we and our allies had not launched the war on terror in 2001, with its indefinite timetable and global battlefield, setting Afghanistan and Iraq ablaze for starters before the US developed its penchant for murder-by-drone in other countries’ territories, then the world would be a more stable and safer place, without the soaring refugee crisis we face today.

And lots of children like the boy found on Thursday night might still be alive.