I think about him often. Especially that day in the boat as we scoured the shoreline on the Greek island of Kos looking for some sign, anything, of his missing son. I still cannot begin to imagine what Ali Chadan went through, and most likely is still going through.

What must it be like to watch your child slip away from your grasp in the ocean never to be seen again? What goes through your head when a short time later another of your children dies from heart failure before your eyes on a beach?

Having survived a war during which Ali lost his wife and lived under the rule of terror wrought by the Islamic State (IS) group, all this man wanted, he told me, was to make his children safe.

Instead he found himself along with his youngsters and 40 other refugees from Syria and Iraq alone at night in the freezing waters of the Aegean Sea after the rubber boat into which they had been crammed foundered in the waves.

The last I saw of Ali Chadan was in a cafe in Kos town. It was the day after we had searched the coastline in vain for his son’s body, and he and his two surviving children were waiting to be fed by local volunteers who had come together to help refugees like them.

The closure Ali so sorely wanted by finding a trace of his missing son had eluded him. Now he and his remaining family faced the long, unpredictable and arduous journey to Switzerland where he hoped to stay with relatives who lived there.

I thought of Ali and his children again last Monday after MPs voted against welcoming just 600 child refugees a year over the next half decade.

Had the cross-party amendment to the immigration bill, tabled in the House of Lords, gone through, it would have seen the UK accept 3,000 unaccompanied Syrian refugee children from inside the EU. This in itself is a tiny number but proved too much for "Great" Britain to muster the humanity needed to make these children safe.

To say I felt a profound sense of shame in the result of that vote would be an understatement. It was a shame only subsequently matched by an anger and frustration at the moral bankruptcy of a UK government that once again showed its true and callous colours. If ever there was any doubt as to the political hue of the UK in which we now live that Commons vote made it plain to see.

Here once again thrown in our face like a soiled rag was another flagrant display of the inhumanity the rich and secure inflict on the destitute and powerless. That the government’s arguments against the bill were at best spurious and at times downright bogus only added to the sickening sense of "I’m all right Jack".

In arguing its case the government says taking more children would only create a "pull factor" encouraging others to send their children to Europe.

Frankly, the government’s promulgation of the idea that somewhere in the ruins of cities like Aleppo or Homs, Syrian families sit conspiratorially planning to work the system to their advantage is nothing short of insulting. If nothing else, too, it is but an extension of the thinking that prevails here at home among those Tories who see scroungers and chancers everywhere except among their own ranks of tax avoiders.

The Tory government’s take is but another symptom of the self-centredness that has become the hallmark of the country in which we now live.

As long as my offshore investment fund is fine, who gives a damn about those foundering in the Aegean, is the rallying cry of Tory austerity, pull-up-the-ladder behind you Britain.

As Lord Alfred Dubs, who tabled the amendment to the bill last week, pointed out, this current Tory government would “have probably said no” to taking in children fleeing the Nazis as the world lurched towards war in the 1930’s.

As he rightly said too the government of David Cameron is “hung up, obsessed” with opposing bringing children from Europe.

Lord Dubs should know given he himself came to Britain on the Kindertransport for Jewish children fleeing Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia after the government here at the time agreed to go ahead with the rescue scheme.

But that was back then. Today one can’t help wondering whatever became of that Britain, the one ready and willing to step up to the plate as it did in the 1930s in a spirit of basic humanity.

This was a place where British merchant seamen risked their lives to take cargo ships through a blockade into the beleaguered Basque port city of Bilbao. Their mission was to rescue refugees fleeing General Franco’s fascist onslaught of Guernica and other towns during the Spanish Civil War.

These days the British government is more ready to send warships to prevent refugees crossing the Aegean after fleeing conflict rather than deploy those same vessels in any humanitarian capacity.

Just like Ali Chadan’s children, thousands of others have already lost their lives trying to do no more than strive for even a sliver of the security and comfort we all demand and take for granted.

If reaction on social media was anything to go by the nation seemed collectively appalled at the 289 Conservative MPs who voted against the amendment to the bill that would help these refugee children.

Perhaps after a time some politicians can sleep easy at night after making decisions like this that effectively ensured thousands of vulnerable children who have already undergone all manner of horrors, would continue to sleep rough or in fear in makeshift camps across Europe.

Maybe those same politicians take succour from the fact that at least we know where those children are, unlike the 10,000 other refugee children Europol, the police agency says are unaccounted for. Where are these children, these ghosts of government cynicism, indifference and outrageous abdication of responsibility?

Targeted by today’s Nazis, forced into slave labour in sweatshops and sexually exploited, this continues to be the fate of so many refugee children. The terrible statistics speak for themselves with an estimated half of all unaccompanied refugee children who go through medical assessment found to carry sexually transmitted diseases.

Meanwhile, our politicians vote against helping these children while the traffickers and criminal gangs who exploit them made up to £4 billion in profits last year alone from their predatory trade.

Yes, I often think of Ali Chadan and his children. I think too of the countless others who will follow in their footsteps. For the simple fact is that no cynical, selfish vote like that taken in the Commons last Monday will stop people fleeing war and wanting to make their children safe.

I wish Ali Chadan and his surviving children well where ever they are. I wish too for a government in this country that shows compassion and concern. One of which we can be proud, not ashamed of.