The enemy's enemy isn't always a friend

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The UK’s Prime Minister has taken time out of his busy schedule appeasing a brutal dictator who has his opponents killed and chopped up, and whose regime treats women as second class citizens and executes those who protest against his rule, in order to welcome the fall of a brutal dictator in another country in the neighbourhood. It’s almost as though what matters is not how brutal and barbaric a dictator is, but whether or not he has money available to be laundered by being invested in the UK.

In his rush to celebrate the end of one dictatorship (aided and abetted by his deputy back home) in the middle of a visit to another, the question which he doesn’t seem to be asking is whether, and to what extent, whatever replaces Assad will be any better. If their concern is really, as Rayner put it, ‘the protection of civilians’, the signs are not good. Whilst there might be at least some hope of a more enlightened approach from the Kurdish authorities who control a large chunk of Syria, it’s more than probable that the rather more ruthless rebels who have taken over the rest of the country – aided and abetted by NATO member Türkiye – will merely refocus the civil war along the lines of control between the disparate rebel groups, with the Kurds as a particular target. And within the areas that some of those groups control, the outlook for women and minority groups may end up being even more repressive than what went before.

Our enemy’s enemy isn’t always our friend, and the replacement of one brutal regime by another may not look like such a blessing to those who suffer its excesses. Still, if they can find some money to invest in the UK, Starmer and the rest of the UK government may yet end up appeasing them too.