[user104658]

Wow. The last two pages of this thread only confirm that most people clearly have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about when I say that Britain has fingerprints all over this...

I'm not talking about some specific "involvement" that Britain has had, some military action that can be pointed to, "British foreign policy" or any of that... stuff.

I'm talking about the very fabric of the way the world has developed over the last several hundred years. Did we put Assad in power? No. Was the British Empire - which you may say is "now over", but upon which our entire wealth and comfortable way of life is founded - a huge part of the formation of the political situations in these countries? Yes. Absolutely.

Have we continued to use that power and influence and been complicit in the massively uneven distribution of wealth and global resources that is the root of pretty much every issue in the Middle East and Africa? Mmmmm... that would be a "yup", also.

Is it just Britain? No, of course not, plenty of others have benefitted their own citizens by raping the **** out of the rest of the world. Some may even feel like that's justified - "survival of the fittest" and all that - but what utterly baffles me is that people want to pretend like it didn't happen. Like our cosy homes aren't built on the backs of billions of the world's poorest. And that the things that are happening now aren't in any way related to that. It's just so, so blinkered.

We aren't the worst country in the world, not by a million miles. It's a good place to live. Many of the people are good, and enlightened, and kind. That's why people keep trying to get in. OBVIOUSLY living under the Assad regime would be worse. That's not the point or even close to it.