This week, many British parents are dragging their reluctant children to the car and strapping them in for the first school run of the new term.

It’s this that makes the shocking image of a Turkish policeman scooping up the lifeless body of three-year-old Syrian migrant Aylan Kurdi from the beach of a holiday resort resonates all the more strongly.

Occasionally, a single piece of photo journalism crystallises the public’s focus on humanitarian issues and provides a catalyst for change, such as the terrifying image of a naked girl fleeing her napalmed village during the Vietnam War which contributed to the anti-war feeling in the US.

But other than a moral Twitter outcry, will, or can, a single image of human suffering move Europe to pull its head out of the sand over the deepening crisis?

Don’t get me wrong, governments (some more than others) are doing more than their fair share to accommodate refugees, with sports centres in Germany given over for the fingerprinting and verification of migrants flooding in on trains through countries like Hungary.

Germany says it will take close to a million asylum seekers this year alone. Sweden too does its fair share, taking in more migrants than anyone else in Europe relative to its size.

And figures show the UK is behind at least 15 other countries in terms of the number of asylum seekers resettled within its borders.

And while the EU established a ‘distribution’ arrangement to resettling refugees, only a meagre 32,500 per state could be agreed, and the UK opted out altogether.

So is this unacceptable, or is it only part of the story?

Minister Andrew Mitchell took to the airwaves to try and persuade us that the Brits do, in fact, help out on a huge scale, insisting we spend more than “the rest of the EU put together” on foreign aid.

And it’s true that one laudable act of the last two governments has been to protect and increase the foreign aid budget for crises like these.

But there is a picture emerging that paints the EU as a fortress rather than a progressive world power, and the UK as an uncaring, paranoid and isolated loner, its back to the cliffs of Dover, jabbing out defensively towards the English Channel.

With Germany processing hordes of migrants with a view to resettling them and the Greeks and Hungarian public flocking to stranded families and providing them with blankets, food and shelter, the UK appears to hunker down and build bigger fences around its one point of entry.

While economic migrants and refugees are totally different and should not be conflated, the scene emerging from around the Calais Channel Tunnel terminal and this week and moving on to the passenger trains of Eurostar, is one of inevitability.

Yes, the UK has a right to its fences, not being part of the free ‘Schengen’ free movement area, but it hardly delivers the right message.

Those flooding across borders into Europe will – as this week has shown all to clearly – give their lives to get where they want to be.

But with government ministers rocked by record net migration figures into the UK last year, taking on more has hardly looked like a vote-winner.

I was amazed at the seemingly spontaneous scenes of solidarity from football supporters across Germany last weekend, with ‘Refugees Welcome’ banners displayed proudly across Bundesliga crowds – in English, pointedly.

Though Celtic fans did something of the same, I can’t hitherto imagine seeing such a groundswell of opinion in favour of asylum seekers at many English football grounds – not if my experiences of the terraces are anything to by.

Cue the dissenting voices hollering from the rooftops that this is the fault of the UK for not intervening militarily in the Syrian conflict last year, claiming the inevitable knock on effect of the decision was an outpouring of refugees from the region.

And they might be right, but it is worth remembering that the British public was overwhelmingly opposed to sending RAF planes to bomb Syria. Public feeling played a large part in MPs voting down the proposal, and quite right too.

Now, with the migrant crisis escalating at a dizzying rate and with no end in sight, it could just be that a picture of one young boy - who died alone on a beach where many British families holidayed only a few weeks ago - will mobilise the British and wider EU public to put pressure on politicians once again.

We can’t just chuck money at refugees and hope they’ll go away – let them in, and let them live.