The Sun is a compassionate family newspaper. We know this because in 1987, after the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, in which 193 people died, the Sun organised a charity single called Ferry Aid. Because the Sun cares about people who die in maritime accidents, they will be something similar this week?

No. Not this time. Katie Hopkins – writing in the Sun – says she doesn’t care. Her words: “Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”

Her views are extreme and presumably designed to provoke outrage; but plenty of people are sure that immigration is the big problem for the UK; there’s even a political party dedicated to the issue. So it’s as important as the environment.

The immigration debate is clearly emotional; but lets pretend we are capable of being rational and think about the issue in terms of logic.

Because immigrants are acting logically based on the best knowledge available to them. Think of what UKIP want for Britain: jobs, education, decent healthcare, human rights. These are the motivations people have for getting on a boat in the first place.

The UKIP policy on immigration is on a surface level simple – just prevent it from happening.*

Stop immigration? Stop people living and working outside the country in which they are born? Stop them moving in order to find  a better life for themselves in the way which has characterised the history of humanity?

It’s jawdroppingly stupid as a ‘solution’ to the problem, notwithstanding the fact that blaming foreigners and outsiders has a long history of ending badly for all concerned.

For one thing, we in the UK are net exporters of people. This is a good thing. Living and working abroad were defining experiences for me, including the welcome I received from complete strangers who could just as easily been mean.

The thought of being prevented from doing so, staying in a neglected post-industrial corner of Britain? It’s not a great thought.

Travelling, behaving internationally, makes us less likely to start wars because we think of people in other countries as people rather than people you call cockroaches.

(It doesn’t always work out: UKIP has an active branch in Spain. That UKIP is popular in Spain is a tragicomical logic problem, a bit like the fact that UKIPPERS spend so much time banging on about how great Britain is and then grumble about immigration)

Secondly, to be isolationist and British… lets think that one through. So you invent gunboat diplomacy, start an industrial revolution from the profits of the transatlantic slave trade, using the biggest Empire in the history of the world for raw material and a market? You then claim ownership of huge swathes of the planet, introducing your foreign religion, language and power structures all over the world, establishing self-serving but entirely false borders  in places which decades later are the cause of conflict and misery? Involve yourself in serial botched military interventions (including one based on fabricated evidence) and whilst selling weapons to people who supply  terrorists … then try to be isolationist?

The UKIP solution to immigration is so lacking in logic it would make Mr Spock depressed. The relatively good news is that there are much better solutions.

For one, reduce global inequality so that people are less strongly motivated to leave their country of origin.

Now, Farage wants to make Britain (only Britain) more prosperous whilst reducing foreign aid. This would effectively make it less attractive to live in those very places you want people to stay. Is that logical?

If you were being logical you would be thinking globally about inequality. If people cannot live prosperously and peacefully where they are, they will move. This is obvious? So try and make where all people live peaceful and prosperous, not just your little surface area.

Like a lot of bad ideas from the Victorians that we can’t quite shed, the notion of the world as a system of competing nation states, a zero sum game in which you can only prosper at the expense of others, has never been true. The reverse is true.

But this Britain versus the rest of the world thing won’t go away. Ironically it’s not even a particularly British thing. Petty nationalism is a global phenomenon – we didn’t invent it.

If we want Britain to be ‘great’ we would move beyond just thinking about Britain and acknowledge our karmic debt of honour to the countries we once treated as our own – which is what Britain did to most of the countries experiencing the kind problems which lead to the desperate emigration we are seeing today. That would be truly patriotic: if we truly do believe in the oft-quoted and self-declared British values of fairplay and decency.

Or perhaps it’s just our duty as world citizens.  If we believe that all people are created equal and therefore equally deserving of human rights, then we should getting angry about immigration in a totally different way. That is, angry that people are dying in barbaric conditions, rather than that they might try and live where we do.

Lets show some compassion to the people Katie Hopkins charmingly refers to as cockroaches.

Until we do – another massive species fail.

Katie: the washed up bodies you don’t care about might not share your skin tone, but if you picture them as your friends and family and you might start taking the solutions more seriously.

Nigel: Until we do – another massive species fail. if you had the bad luck to be born in a country experiencing conflict or where economic opportunities confine its citizens to poverty it’s pretty likely you would do exactly the same things as those tragically killed at sea this week. So what are you going to do about it? Because your current solutions are really, really bad.

Disaffected potential voters: it’s too late to start your own party, for this election and I feel bad that you don’t like the choice there is. But go for the least unacceptable choice to help prevent UKIP from influencing the political debate.

*It’s actually a little weirder than that; have a look. Given that this is their main thing it’s remarkably  underwhelming .  2,500 more Border Agency staff? Really? And confusing too. The vague, euphemistic  language evokes the early Nazis before they could say whatever they wanted.