An entirely predictable outcome to the announcement of US troop withdrawals from the region, perhaps even co-ordinated with it, Turkey’s military action in the north of Syria cannot be aimed at anybody other than the Kurdish forces which have done so much to rid the area of Isis influence.

The combination of these actions can only lead to resentment on the part of the Kurds towards the US. (They already knew Turkey – at least Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey – was an enemy.)

Erdoğan has long regarded Kurds as adversaries because ethnic Kurds in South Turkey have for as long as I can remember sought for a degree of autonomy from the Government in Ankara. Some previous Turkish governments had had some sympathy to their requests but Erdoğan seems to deny any other ethnicity can exist within Turkey and regards everyone who lives within its borders as only being able to be Turkish. The Kurds also give him a handy scapegoat for any opposition in the south of Turkey to the central government. He calls them terrorists. His designation of north Syria as a “terror corridor” is clearly self-serving but may also be a prediction. I doubt the people living there – including those Syrians displaced there by the civil war in that country – will find Turkish rule any more benign than that of Bashar al-Assad.

Erdoğan’s proposed invasion looks to me like a land grab, designed solely to increase Turkey’s territory. He probably intends never to withdraw from what is actually Syrian sovereign territory. Kurds have had the singular misfortune to live in an area of the world where their population is distributed over the territory of four different countries (not only Turkey and Syria but also Iran and Iraq) – and not had one of their own to call home.

With the restraining hand of the US on Turkey removed, their outlook would seem to be bleak.

I have scarcely been disturbed so much by a British Prime Minister’s address than I was today by Theresa May.

The tone of her speech announcing her snap decision to have a General Election reminded me of nothing so much as President Erdoğan of Turkey who promised to ignore criticism by international observers of the recent referendum “result” in that country.

The way in which this has been greeted shows that the Fixed Parliament Act is not worth the paper it is written on. If a Prime Minister can just announce an election any time and everyone strings merrily along what was the point of it? Jeremy Corbyn’s acquiescence to the prospect merely gives him the opportunity to write his own long suicide note.

It makes a complete mockery of the electoral process – and to any objections Tories in Scotland may have to a second Scottish Independence Referendum on the grounds of weariness with ballots, or unripe time. The pretence that this is about anything other than embedding May’s own grip on the Prime Ministership is as breathtaking as it is mendacious.

And how can we believe anything she now says? This is something she emphasised she would not do and yet…. (OK she is a politician but this is brazen beyond belief.)

But none of that is my main concern. May’s line that “there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead there is division. The country is coming together, but Westminster is not,” is truly chilling. She is effectively saying that there should be no quibbling with her policies, that everyone should do as she says.

This is not any kind of democracy that I know.

Does she not believe in opposition? That those who do not agree with her have not just a right, but a duty, to speak out? (And to be represented in Parliament.)

It would seem, from her own words, that she does not.

This is the stance of a dictator.

So. “All hail Theresa Erdoğan, saviour of the nation.”