Dally wrote:
So you appear to have decided this funding is questionable? Is that because you think the victims or the Syrian regime are less worthy than suppoters of said regime? Or because you instinctively prefer to assume your country acts out of bad intention?
I've decided it's questionable because I can point to example after example after example of our government proving they have no regard for the welfare of citizens in other nations, often to the extent of funding and supporting the brutal governments against innocent people.
Do I need to list every ugly regime that we've put our support behind. Do I need to list every brutal regime that's been ignored, citizens left to suffer, by our government? Yes, with that in mind, when I see the government supporting citizens against a government in some far off land I have to question their intentions, as would any thinking person.
Ceausescu, Suharto, Karimov, Rajapaksa, Omar al-Bashir, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Pinochet, Mubarak and Gaddafi too at one point. There's a couple to start with. Or what about supporting the attacks/ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, support for the Saudi establishment, Bahrain establishment, the illegal removal of Mosaddegh in favour of Pahlavi the Pawn, etc. When the ANC were rising up against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, we condemned them as nought but terrorists. Tip of the iceberg stuff. It wasn't that long ago that Bashir al-Assad himself was buying chemical agents from us.
I don't expect your or anybody else to agree with all of those, but you'd at the very least have to concede a few of them.
The British government has proven time and time again that it cares bugger all for supporting oppressed peoples and taking down dictatorships. The government care and take action when it suits, just as they support these brutal regimes when it suits. Foreign policy is decided on economic grounds, not morality.