The Trump Insanity Claws: psychology or machine?

 

Morlocks herd Eloi into cattle pens for cannibalisation. The Time Machine (1960)

There’s method in the madness of the relentless pursuit of profit in late capitalism but it’s not for your benefit

By Anna Chen. First published at Substack as Psychology or Machine? Are our leaders insane? 25 October 2026

This is a response to Nel Bonilla, who has written another insightful analysis. This time, she develops BettBeat Media’s critique of psychologism wherein we clutch our pearls at the horror of leaders rocking the Titanic as we get turfed out of steerage and into the briny deep.

Are our leaders mad? Or are they pursuing the relentless logic of the system?

Here we have both what appears at first glance to be madness, and then there’s method. But one serves the other, following a malign logic. To use another of my astro-political metaphors, the mad decision-making we are witnessing is like the speed of light and gravity embedded in the space-time structure of the universe. This insanity is not something separate that can be measured against the structure: it is a feature of the structure itself. It is determined by it. Changing the drivers of the clown-car-to-oblivion and hoping their good graces win out might offer a swerve. Perhaps even a slow-down in the way that light passing through the medium of water can be bent, interrupted by interacting with atoms. But it still retains its speed between atoms.(Perhaps sensing this is what, in earlier times, was known as fate or destiny. Or karma.)  

A respite buys us time — for Palestinians being wiped out in the Gaza genocide, that’s urgently needed and must be fought for. But the cycle still has its inherent quality, so said respite offers no place to stop and relax because the cycle always revs up. Our challenge, should we wish to take the red pill, is to realise we cannot delineate which is madness and which is method. And hopefully, realise in (space) time to do something about it. Oh, that’ll be root and branch revolution. 

The system is a machine, ultimately a war machine: a juggernaut that exists to expand and hold on to power. This is how my late father used to define imperialism, which he drummed into me from toddlerhood. Everything it does feeds that objective, like a great white shark forever moving forward or it dies. Different wings of the political class dress it up differently to render it palatable, but it always moves with the same relentless underlying ruthlessness. Sometimes that ruthlessness is disguised as soft power. Sometimes, when necessary, teeth are bared and jaws snap away. As we are seeing now. (Actually, there’s alwayssomeone outside our pampered delusional west who’s seeing it directly.) It’s Very Late Capitalism. 

At core is the dynamic of the board game of Risk, as anyone who plays it knows. I love that game and recommend you make it your game of choice during power cuts as we await the Apocalypse. That is, if you’re not already actively involved in juggernaut stoppage.

The presidential managers of the cycle line up

The start of the current wave of American imperial expansion can be located in 1992 with the fall of the USSR and the Paul Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guide, which identified China as the next rival to be preemptively contained. Asserting military dominance over China, and keeping check on a resurgent Russia, Germany and Japan and a unified Europe (see Brexit), would justify continuing massive investment in the Pentagon war machine now that the Cold War was officially over. You could actually take it all the way back to the 19th century Opium Wars, which capitalised western industrial revolutions and created a slew of banks and East Coast dynasties, but let’s start with the cycle rising in a crescendo towards a climax right now.  

We knew President George Dubbya Bush and his neocon flying monkeys were Patriot Act-level awful but if you’re looking back nostalgically at the cuddly Clintons and Obama, ask how sane were their actions? Yes, Clinton brought China into the WTO. But this was less from the goodness of his heart and more about having its huge scales of production function as the West’s factory of cheap goods, placating domestic populations being steadily stripped of their post-WWII gains. Clinton also dismembered former USSR ally Yugoslavia within Europe, launching the round of box-ticking as the serial-killer state scythed its way through its rivals now that the Soviet Union no longer stood in the way. The 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade served to remind them who was boss despite flattery as a “strategic partner”.  

Then we were given sophisticated, charming Barack Obama. His muted response to his fellow black people struggling in resistance was shown up in sharp relief when he crumbled over the grand jury’s failure to indict the police for killing unarmed youth Michael Brown in the troubled community of Ferguson, in 2014. However, African American solidarity was not his purpose, no matter what hopes had been pinned on the first Black president. He was more eager to be seen as “America’s first Pacific president,” as he grandiosely called himself, foreshadowing the line of destruction to come. Following Bush’s demand at the Bucharest conference in 2008 for Ukraine and Georgia to be drawn into NATO, Obama did most to kick off current conflicts: his Pivot to Asia to “contain” China and setting up Ukraine for the “proxy” war against Russia. Such sanity!

Smite and spite – sanity, insanity or something structural?

Which brings us to Trump, who is indeed unhinged. He’s the best wrecking ball the state ever had. The world waits on tenterhooks for his attempted destruction of a 5,000-year-old civilisation of 90 million Iranian people, even if he takes down the global economy with it. But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. There’s a tiny elite that will do very well, whether from the Military Industrial Complex, fossil fuels or the massive pile of assets they’ve accumulated. The top one percent own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, but even they are poor by comparison with the apex billionaire oligarchs and their ambitions to carve up the planet.  

Why so little pushback from a Congress packed with tools? How on earth did Biden do so badly that he ushered in Trump’s second term? Maybe it’s because our orange overlord does the elite’s dirty work so fast and furiously, easily manipulated by Deep State when he gets out of line. And he’s rewarded with his cut, billions to date. 

I’ve been yelling warnings that there are trajectories and objectives at work, but dearest friends have had two replies: it’s only “sabre-rattling” and “they’re stupid”. Head. Meet brick wall.

Subordinate to the uber-objective

There is no debate about any of this in the mainstream. On social media, algo-boosted commentators have been late, for example, only realising this year that China was the ultimate target in a seemingly disparate raft of targets. Another pundit belatedly observes that China is trying to save the world from America’s current excesses. Yes, China has been firefighting all along, providing our cheap stuff when underpaid workers couldn’t possibly afford American-made goods made on decent wages. China floated us out of trouble after the 2008 crash. In doing so, it also recharged American capitalism which can be seen directly in the longest bull-run ever. 

We shouldn’t rule out entirely the psychology that adds grace notes and potential shifts to the dynamic being played out. There is a human, psychological aspect to the subsequent betrayal by the US in that there was a responding period of paralysis when Vice Premier Liu He attempted to negotiate Donald Trump’s trade war in his first term as shock sank in. What an insane move for the new President Trump to make when China had saved the world from US folly and Wall Street was hogging down on a profit bonanza from China’s exploding middle-class: at 550 million, bigger than the entire population of the USA and still growing. Screw domestic sales, we’re gonna need a bigger wallet. The logic of self-interest would prevail — well, that depends on your ultimate aim. 

Illustrating the internecine warfare among American capitalists, Gary Cohn — Trump’s chief economic advisor from Goldman Sachs — wailed, “Peter Navarro ratfucked us into a trade war with China by taking advantage of Trump’s very small brain”. Navarro, with his anagram creation ‘Ron Vara’, had been a much derided China-hating wing-nut on the fringes, but he was soon to be drawn centre-stage by Trump: welcome, the New Normal.  

China then pinned hopes on a “sane” Joe Biden who had promised cooperation in dealing with the existential global threat of climate change. Surely he would see that China was a Good Thing for the US and the world? Once in office, Biden promptly placed a $1.6 billion dollar propaganda bounty on China’s head and continued Obama’s conflict wherever China was heavily invested. Chiefly the Ukraine where Crimea was earmarked to be a key BRICS hub — well, fancy that! We do all realise by now, I trust, that US military pollution is one of the key contributors to environmental damage, not to mention from the destruction of the Russia-Germany Nordstream pipeline as threatened by Biden.  

According to the UN, the Nord Stream pipeline explosions resulted in the largest human-caused release of methane, with up to 485,000 tonnes of methane escaping into the atmosphere, contributing significantly to global warming. This release was nearly five times larger than the previous record holder for methane emissions. 

Oops, there goes the neighbourhood. So much for climate change concerns.

The snake eating its own tail

Insane, desperate and shortsighted. But the war in Ukraine functioned as pursuit of the longer-term goal. Although it stirred up a hornets nest of conflict, it was a major step in trying to defeat Russia, keep the Europe bloc under wraps and halt a peaceful Eurasia prospering. The logic of the machine is that Europe needed a spanking after it began successfully emerging from America’s crash through Russian energy and BRICS trade, and leaving the malfunctioning US on the naughty step. 

That European leaders succumbed to US-induced self-harm just as the Eurasian landmass was consolidating through peaceful trade might undermine my argument and prove that insanity does indeed have its part to play. However, our own slow, clumsy, cloth-eared vassal insanity is not necessarily the same as the hegemon’s overriding drive in the twists and turns of a writhing snake: the machine exists to continue existing. The snake may well be eating its own tail.  

Europe initially resisted America’s proxy war on Russia. Angela Merkel stated that pulling Ukraine into NATO on Russia’s doorstep would be seen as a declaration of war. And she was right. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy resisted and was punished for it when his own crimes of corruption, which would normally be overlooked in someone of such power, sent him to jail: pour encourager les autres, to quote Voltaire. Prime Minister David Cameron was too busy forging a Golden Age with China to embroil us in a return to 19th and 20th century warfare.  

Unfortunately, in 2016, Old Etonian Cameron, none too bright, was manipulated into granting the non-legally binding EU referendum to placate Farage and his own right-wing in the Conservative party. Fending off an intra-party bunfight would have the severest of consequences for the UK and the world.  

The Brexit vote provided the trigger and lit the fuse. 

Whose finger is on the trigger?

Europe, weakened by Britain jumping out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, was soon caught in the increased gravitational pull of a reviving hegemon stripped of all niceties and going for broke. It eventually mounted the bucking serpent only to be thrown off with the next writhing coil of Trump 2’s Ukraine machinations.  

Piling in on a Gaza breakout armed with Kalashnikov rifles by the occupying US-armed Israel on Biden’s watch less than two weeks after Netanyahu threatened Iran at the UN general assembly, opened a second major front in the Middle East. The resulting genocidal wipe-out violates every code of the New Testament, the Enlightenment, the Geneva Convention, and every decency we thought the horrors of World War II had taught us about humanity. Trump fantasises aloud about destroying a 5,000-year-old civilisation with his MOAB bombs and maybe nukes. Israel has its (unacknowledged) nuclear weapons at the ready. The Hormuz Strait, which was open to free passage of the world’s shipping, is now closed, threatening the entire global economy. But actually, it’s America that has its finger on the trigger. And the rest of the world — including perceived US rivals China and Europe — is held to ransom, not just Iran. 

Now, there’s method in that madness. 

Read how this was unfolding in Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China.

The western Left snatches defeat from the jaws of victory

How did we get to this point, as a US-compliant UK, with so little resistance and a depleted consciousness in a country that once had a proto-bourgeoisie powerful enough to remove the head of a king?  

The Left allowed a 20-year vacuum to suffocate political consciousness since the proletarian classes flexed their muscle in the biggest protest ever seen in the UK, in the anti-Iraq war march of February 2003. Demobilising for the crucial day of Blair’s vote in Parliament the following month, which he had a real possibility of losing, was a Sliding Doors moment that stripped the movement of confidence. Failure to harness the public’s protest power built up over two years and mount a protest on the big day emboldened the hawks and shredded MP’s willingness to follow through with a dissenting vote: the result was 412 to 149. 

Opposition to war within the political establishment had collapsed. British parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq against the public wish shocked the movement. It created a lengthy hiatus in which the Right, largely marginalised throughout the post-war liberal period, has regrouped and consolidated. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, with millions displaced. 

The 2017 general election was our one chance to take some sort of power when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn verged on winning in a landslide. I said at the time we’d better win. If it failed, the forces of reaction who’d been taken by surprise, would power-up and ensure that it never happened again. And they would be vicious and pitiless.  

General Election Sliding Doors, 2017

The Labour Party was the biggest in Europe, with 564,443 full members. The nation was waking up from the non-legally binding referendum with a hangover and a surge of regret that 37 percent of the population was about to destabilise the economy just as we were emerging from America’s Great Crash of 2008 and its recessional austerity. Campaigning in 2016 on his Remain and Reform agenda, Corbyn said, “We, the Labour Party, are overwhelmingly for staying in, because we believe the European Union has brought investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment.” But then, in March 2017, he used the three-line whip to get Labour MPs to vote to trigger Article 50, overcoming the final hurdle against leaving. 

Despite massively confusing contradictory messages, a lingering hope remained that, with the Tories ousted, we might not have to complete the Leave process. A second less febrile referendum leading to Remain but Reform from within was mentioned as a possibility and was likely to reverse the result. Pro-Labour voting intention soared in the polls. But then, with 70 percent of Labour voters supporting Remain, along with the majority of youth who saw their future being destroyed, and ethnic minorities far from enamoured of Brexit’s anti-immigration emphasis, Corbyn’s office leaked to the press that our triangulating leader was actually pro-Brexit.  

It was almost as if someone in his office didn’t actually want to take power. Labour canvassers reported support on the doorstep draining rapidly after that. Another hint in the press that Corbyn was listening to Remain halted the outflow for a moment but another pro-Brexit leak set it off again. Attempts to staunch the wound failed and Corbyn lost by a whisker, even though he did manage to deny Theresa May a resounding majority. That was it. That was our chance. As predicted, the state’s vicious blowback saw Corbyn labelled an anti-semite as were Jewish progressives in the party who were critical of Israel. 

The western Left snatches defeat from the jaws of victory

How did we get to this point, as a US-compliant UK, with so little resistance and a depleted consciousness in a country that once had a proto-bourgeoisie powerful enough to remove the head of a king?  

The Left allowed a 20-year vacuum to suffocate political consciousness since the proletarian classes flexed their muscle in the biggest protest ever seen in the UK, in the anti-Iraq war march of February 2003. Demobilising for the crucial day of Blair’s vote in Parliament the following month, which he had a real possibility of losing, was a Sliding Doors moment that stripped the movement of confidence. Failure to harness the public’s protest power built up over two years and mount a protest on the big day emboldened the hawks and shredded MP’s willingness to follow through with a dissenting vote: the result was 412 to 149. 

Opposition to war within the political establishment had collapsed. British parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq against the public wish shocked the movement. It created a lengthy hiatus in which the Right, largely marginalised throughout the post-war liberal period, has regrouped and consolidated. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, with millions displaced. 

The 2017 general election was our one chance to take some sort of power when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn verged on winning in a landslide. I said at the time we’d better win. If it failed, the forces of reaction who’d been taken by surprise, would power-up and ensure that it never happened again. And they would be vicious and pitiless.  

General Election Sliding Doors, 2017

The Labour Party was the biggest in Europe, with 564,443 full members. The nation was waking up from the non-legally binding referendum with a hangover and a surge of regret that 37 percent of the population was about to destabilise the economy just as we were emerging from America’s Great Crash of 2008 and its recessional austerity. Campaigning in 2016 on his Remain and Reform agenda, Corbyn said, “We, the Labour Party, are overwhelmingly for staying in, because we believe the European Union has brought investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment.” But then, in March 2017, he used the three-line whip to get Labour MPs to vote to trigger Article 50, overcoming the final hurdle against leaving. 

Despite massively confusing contradictory messages, a lingering hope remained that, with the Tories ousted, we might not have to complete the Leave process. A second less febrile referendum leading to Remain but Reform from within was mentioned as a possibility and was likely to reverse the result. Pro-Labour voting intention soared in the polls. But then, with 70 percent of Labour voters supporting Remain, along with the majority of youth who saw their future being destroyed, and ethnic minorities far from enamoured of Brexit’s anti-immigration emphasis, Corbyn’s office leaked to the press that our triangulating leader was actually pro-Brexit.  

It was almost as if someone in his office didn’t actually want to take power. Labour canvassers reported support on the doorstep draining rapidly after that. Another hint in the press that Corbyn was listening to Remain halted the outflow for a moment but another pro-Brexit leak set it off again. Attempts to staunch the wound failed and Corbyn lost by a whisker, even though he did manage to deny Theresa May a resounding majority. That was it. That was our chance. As predicted, the state’s vicious blowback saw Corbyn labelled an anti-semite as were Jewish progressives in the party who were critical of Israel. 

Parliamentary Brexit advisory referendum briefing document for MPs

Not that I’m advocating a return to the EU. We should never have left the EU bloc, (whatever its faults at the time, of which there were plenty), and destabilised the geopolitical equilibrium that was peacefully uniting the Eurasian landmass through cheap Russian energy and Chinese trade. But the damage has been done and Europe has been yanked rightward by the shock of Brexit. As an entity blatantly fashioning itself into the US elite’s battleship to fight Russia and China using our public money, it does not fill me with hope for a better future.

What now?

Since Corbyn’s chance was lost, there followed as Prime Ministers: New York-born Boris Johnson; lettuce-longevity wassername; US Green Card-carrying Rishi Sunak; Keir Starmer, now working for “international affairs including defence, security, trade, and technology in a fast-changing world,” having boasted of setting up war as “the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs”; and Andy Burnham and his Friends of Israel cabinet all pursuing the same goals. Burnham offers headphones and car park power while continuing to drag us into war, poverty and climate warming. He tells us to gather three days-worth of food for the coming storm but no word of what happens after that.  

Any glimmers of hope? An awakening working and middle-class on both sides of the Atlantic in the process of ditching their liberal Democrat managers and realising they have more in common with the global south. Interest in Marxism and hopes for socialism on the rise. America running out of armaments and unable to wreak further mayhem. China declining to provide its rare earths to make the weapons that will be used on them and other nations.  

Last thoughts: it’s a race against time. Sanity is relative and depends on which class you belong to. None of this is mechanistic — there’s still room to stop the maniacs furthering their selfish goals. Don’t succumb to nihilism. Americans and Europeans need to stop oscillating between two malign wings of the same deep state and create a better system that serves humanity, not the bottom-feeding apex predators. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the choice is between socialism and barbarism. 

We are social animals. Love, peace and understanding are actual things worth fighting for when they come under attack. Like now.

BRICS First China freight train to Barking, east London, UK, 2017

Further reading

How the press was done: The Iraq War protest 2001-3, from race war to 9/11 

How the US wrecked Britain & China’s “Golden Age”: The Brexit trigger 

Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China, Page 1: 1997-2010 — Hong Kong handover & WTO to President Obama’s Pivot to Asia 

Shakedown Timeline, of America’s 21st Century War on China, Page 2: 2010-2020 — Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency 

Shakedown Timeline Of America’s 21st Century War On China, Page 3: 2019-2024 — Joe Biden’s presidency, Covid and Ukraine to the rise of BRICS and Donald Trump’s second term 

Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st Century War on China, Page 4: The Opium Wars on steroids. 2024 to the Present — President Trump’s 2nd term turmoil 

How the Covid Pandemic was weaponised: Covid-19 Timeline — the politics, the science and the timing of the pandemic

VIDEO: How America wrecked Britain and China’s Golden Age

The Brexit trigger that changed the world

Our British Defence Secretary John Healey keeps up the Labour government’s war-on-China schtick with a “we’re ready to fight” battle-cry that was widely mocked. Was Britain always this aggressive and desperate for war with China? Anna Chen analyses how it got this bad after so much promise.

Britain scored a victory in Beijing in 2010, ushering in a “golden age” collaboration that was mutually profitable & peaceful, uniting the Eurasia landmass in Belt and Road trade. What followed was a concerted effort by the declining US to stop the prosperous stabilisation of Europe and Asia at all costs and stifle the emergence of BRICS. The results have been tragic and avoidable.

Article first published 30 July 2025: How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age”

“Ready to fight,” blustered British Defence Secretary John Healey, heady on the new car smell rising from a lone HMS Prince of Wales aircraft-carrier docked in Australia at the weekend.

To widespread mockery, Healey delivered his oration on the fantasy threat to Taiwan the moment Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped on Yellow Peril turf on his diplomatic trade mission to China.

Were Healey's lurid suggestions of China invading its own province designed to inject steel into an Oz government wavering under an AUKUS lash-up now shrunk to AUK?

Some Australians finally twigged the folly of an existential war with their biggest trade partner (not to mention regional superpower). It’s no surprise, therefore, to see them seeking an off-ramp. If only the same could be said of the UK.

Britain wasn’t always so aggressively determined to wage war on China. Certainly not since the Cold War or even the Hong Kong handover. What changed?

BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum

In 2010, the BBC allowed me to make another programme for Radio 4: China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum. It pointed out that China’s days of making our tat were over and the new kid on the block was about to transition into a world-leading technological, giant.

How they laughed. What, with all those suicide factories?!

The timing turns out to be most telling. 2010 is the year of Obama’s Pivot to Asia (announced November 2011), following declaration of his status as the first Pacific President in a gargantuan territorial-pissing statement of intent.

Hillary Clinton kicks off the all-change with her incendiary speech at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi on 23 July 2010. She initiates the “smart power” strategy: stirring up enmity using carrot and stick to get the rising superpower’s neighbours on board to “contain China.”

Dubbing the Chinese end of the Pacific the “Western Pacific,” the US will later rename it the “Indo-Pacific,” removing China’ presence from its own coastal territory in favour of another Asian country completely round the corner. And as round the bend as Trump’s much-sneered-at renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.

All despite China saving the global economy from America’s greed-fuelled Great Crash of 2008 only two years previously. Oh, yes, who was it who did the damage? And who came to the rescue?

The BBC green-lighting my programme was a clear signal that, at that time, Britain had no intention of torpedoing their lifeboat and growth engine just on Obama’s say-so.

“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”
Anna Chen, 17 November 2011 after Obama’s Pivot to Asia

Britain not on the “contain China” bus

US and UK divergence is confirmed later that year after China floats the world economy out of danger.

In November 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron and his trade team score a victory in Beijing, ushering in a “golden age” with China. A collaboration that is mutually profitable, peaceful and helps knit together the Eurasia landmass end-to-end in Belt and Road trade.

Remember not so many years ago when food was cheap and plentiful? Interest rates were near zero? And supply chains were mwah!

In the geopolitical Three Body Problem of Europe, China and the US, Italy signs up to BRICS. Duisberg shapes up to become Europe’s busiest port. Crimea is granted pole position as a major BRICS hub, while China invests heavily in Ukraine’s agriculture. The first freight train from China running the entire length of Eurasia arrives in east London in 2017.

Ominously, a declining America, still on the naughty step for its global malfeasance, finds its influence jeopardised. What with being so well protected by two oceans that it’s cut off from the rest of the Northern hemisphere where all the action’s happening. And so dependent on sea and air. If only it had terrific High Speed Rail like that lot over there. What, not even one kilometre of HSR? And those pesky oceans keep getting in the way.

So g’wan, guess what happens next. Maybe America accepts China’s invitation to join in and keep the party going, as asked by ambassador Cui Tankai?

Nope.

Check out my Shakedown Timeline, compiling articles, analysis and programmes over two and a half decades as it happened.

Made in China 2025

Europe and China have stabilised Eurasia following recession and the near-fatal US crash harshing everyone’s economic mellow. The global economy is rising in sync and there are very few flashpoints to blow up. Slow and steady as it goes.

In 2015, Premier Li Keqiang signs Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), announced by President Xi to great fanfare. This strategic plan aims to lift China out of its role as world’s factory by upgrading manufacturing and innovation, turning itself into a technological powerhouse, and earning a place at Top Table with the Big Boys.

We’ll make you so proud of us, they think naively. I remember shuddering a bit and wondering, did you get an okay from the alpha male? Not that you should be asking permission, but America might not be the proud parent you’re hoping for. You can feel the frisson of fury in the West as MIC 2025 throws the spotlight onto China’s beautiful cities, shrinking poverty, a growing middle-class and numerous achievements.

Oh, well, you must know what you’re doing.

Britain and the China Golden Goose

Britain continues to resist pressure to give up the Golden Goose they accessed in 2010. A big yah-boo-sucks to Obama’s neocon Pivot. Yay, bring on the Chinese tech. C’mon Huawei and your gorgeous 5G. Rah, Hinkley Point C nuclear power, you are so gonna make us world class. We might even get a Chinese built High Speed Rail.

China is throwing money at us, investing in lil old Britain because it loves us. It loves our style, our queen. Our status as former biggest empire the world has ever known. Forget the pokey embassy in Portland Place up the street from the BBC. We’re gonna need a bigger base. Let’s have us the Royal Mint as home from home.

And then … and then …!

2016. Prime Minister David Cameron snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and caves in to right wing pressure to hold a referendum to leave Europe. Brexit: just the move that would fracture Europe and halt progress in its tracks.

“In order to bring China to heel, Trump would have to break the European Union first. That affects Britain, too. Once we’re out of the EU, it’s unlikely that Trump will allow Britain to trade with China … What was that about Brexit ‘taking back control’?”
Anna Chen, What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about? 13 November 2018

Boris Johnson – London mayor (2008-16), Foreign Secretary (2016-18) and Prime Minister-to-be (2019-22) – and the Brexit bus promise to fund the NHS from money saved, 2016.

Brexit wrecks it

American-born Boris Johnson, who doesn’t care about anything except his own interests, is pulled both ways. He eventually campaigns for Brexit in front of a red London bus bearing the promise to save £350 million a year for the NHS.

Later, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Donald Trump campaign (close to Nigel Farage) are all suspected of links to the outcome. Far from taking back control, 37% of Britons have voted to leap out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, nailing us to the USS Titanic. Not burning but drowning.

Still, not to worry. Everyone knows it’s only a non-legally binding referendum to take the temperature of national opinion and not an actual deciding vote.

Over to you, leader of the opposition who is our last ditch defence against such xenophobic madness. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red Article 50 button.

Clown car reverses gear

The deed done, we may be losing the huge European market, as well as considerable political influence in the EU, but at least we have China as backup.

Taking us completely by surprise, however, unforeseen by everybody except those of us paying attention, the Right and far Right float to Europe’s surface, emboldened by the wave of xenophobic reaction sweeping the continent.

In Britain, Farage reverses sharply from using trade with a rising China as a bribe for leaving the European Union: “Look at lucky Iceland, able to make lucrative deals with China! Leave the EU and we can too”.

Overnight, post-Brexit vote, China is morphed from strategic partner to competition bogey man. Preaching conflict with China, Farage’s new pet project, sits in alignment with US neocons and isolationists like his hero, presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Britain hangs on to benefits

However, Boris Johnson isn’t blind to China’s great wealth. A massively overflowing trough, it awaits the likes of clever men like the Prime Minister to free up all that moolah. In addition to the benefits the country enjoys from our golden age relations, Johnson’s family has financial interests in China. Johnson holds out manfully.

In his 2005 Telegraph article, in which he scoffed at the Chinese for being incapable of original thought, he wrote: “It has become a cliché of geopolitical analysis to say that China is the next world superpower, that the 21st century will belong to Beijing, and that we had better get in tutors to teach our nippers Mandarin if they are to make it in the new world order.”

Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005

Britain has invested around £7 billion in Huawei 5G infrastructure which will secure our place ahead of the pack in the modern tech era. Helping our energy independence now that the North Sea is running out of oil (unfortunately privatised and no longer owned by the nation), there are several nuclear power stations in the pipeline, including Hinkley Point C, a third owned by the Chinese who are investing billions in the UK.

But there’s a new sheriff in town, a new clown in the driving seat, a giant bluebottle in the ointment. Choose your own metaphor and stir until shaken. Meet President Donald Trump, a throwback to 1950s nostalgia for a powerful America, Jim Crow and war on everyone who won’t bow down. Or am I confusing him with Nero or Caligula or Eric Cartman? Whatever, the prognosis isn’t looking good for anyone.

Superman versus Kryptonite

Brexit Day, 3 February 2020. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives his famous Superman speech at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich about future trade agreements and championing free trade now that he’s lost us our key neighbouring market.

He has ignored US demands on several occasions, including from Mike Pompeo only the previous month, to drop Chinese investments such as Huawei’s 5G, to which Johnson had just given limited approval, excluding it from military and nuclear sites and keeping it to the uncontroversial phone mast system.

The cheeky monkey even has the temerity to comment that America’s trade war on China has been “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy”. This will be the last time Johnson ever shows evidence of a spine.

A few days later, Johnson feels the wrath of Trump in a phone call.

US Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. According to the Sunday Times account of the White House delegation’s visit to London in May 2019, the GCHQ team whose detailed intelligence and technology assessment exonerated Huawei, was given the hairdryer treatment for five hours. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”.

Nevertheless, Johnson ditches Huawei in June 2020 after Trump bans the company from using US-made chips. Neither Theresa May nor Johnson gets a post-Brexit trade deal with the US out of this.

“The people who brought us AUSTERITY, then sold us BREXIT on the promise of a trade deal with China beyond the dreams of avarice, are the same Empire Crusaders who now want a war with it. China is the newly rich kid who’s strayed onto mafia turf and is about to be rolled.”
Anna Chen, The Sleep of Reason produces monsters from the West’s own id, 13 January 2021

Eurasia land mess

A far cry from the optimism of 2017, and in contrast to the pre-Trump era, Europe is shooting down the swannee.

The world is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. Had Trump not won the 2016 election, the US might not have doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to China quite so fast. But had Hillary won, Russia would be back where it was after Gorbachev and Yeltsin sold out their own country. Pensioners going unpaid, children addicts living in sewers. Really bad Christmas-style jumpers being the height of fashion in Moscow. And quite possibly flattened.

With a four-year Trump pause, they’ve had time to build up defences against predatory NATO schemes.

In the Middle East, the Democrats have already shown their appetite for ruthless cruelty against the Palestinians, so no advantage there.

Ukraine is a proxy-war tragedy. “F**k the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Kiev just before their 2014 Maidan coup, as I am fond of reminding everyone. And they certainly did.

Europe, your nine lives are up

The EU bankrupts itself, throwing money at Zelensky even as he takes the anti-corruption agencies under his control. Germany is deindustrialised by the loss of cheap Russian energy, accepting the Nordstream pipeline being blown up by allies. Mertz wants a replay of Stalingrad with Russia and neglects domestic matters.

Ursula von der Lyen has more lives than a cat. She’s survived accusations of grift, dodgy Pfizer deals, war-mongering galore, and a humiliatingly bad deal with President Trump. A $700b commitment over three years to buying America’s expensive LNG even though declining supplies make fulfilling orders unlikely. A $600b “investment” tribute to Trump, and “only” 15% tariffs. What a bargain.

France has been shafted before by the US, previously over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. Ursula’s agreement that the EU market be prised open for US aggrobiz has not pleased French farmers.

NATO chief Mark Rutte calls Trump “daddy” and dreams of fighting China. Presumably from the depths of a luxury bunker while the rest of us fry.

It would be ironic as well as suicidal for Britain to now rejoin the EU. Brexit did the damage. Is there really any point jumping into it as it circles the drain?

BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.

How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age” is also published at Anna’s Substack

About Anna Chen: Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. She has written for Asia Times, Tribune, Morning Star, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Standing up to sinophobia: how racism has its roots in politics

STANDING UP TO SINOPHOBIA: From Fu Manchu to Bat Soup

Online event hosted by The Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) 6th April 2021

Contribution by Anna Chen

HOW RACISM HAS ITS ROOTS IN POLITICS

So here we are in April 2021 as America’s anti-Chinese pogrom goes full blown. We’re seeing almost daily attacks on Asian people who’ve been caught up in this vicious wave of sinophobia. Britain is thankfully further behind but is being dragged in the same direction.

In the deadly Atlanta attack, six out of eight people who lost their lives were Asian women.

After Atlanta, we saw a brief display of crocodile tears from the government and media but then a return to business as usual.

Because this isn’t about being nice to minority victims. This is about turning a group of people – in this case 1.4 billion human beings – into a dehumanised blob so that the American superpower can retain top position as ruling hegemon in a unipolar world.

President Joe Biden finally admitted to what Victor Gao calls “Tonya Harding Syndrome” — with the declining superpower trying to smash the kneecaps of its upcoming rival. Biden declared that “China will never grow wealthier or more powerful than us on my watch”, despite China having four times the population, a lot of talent and an aim to raise the tide that floats all boats (see poverty eradication).

We’ve been assailed by a relentless Case for the Prosecution with no right of reply, obscene stories invented by an obscenely resourced psychological operations campaign. And here was Biden threatening that China would not overtake the US by any metric.

I first realised that China was the probable endgame of the Project for America in the 21st Century in 2005 when Dubbya Bush stood in the rubble of a destroyed Iraq and suddenly declared China to be a competitor. It came as America was ticking off its wars in a never ending stream of horror: in this latest round, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. And I guessed that China stood at the end of that list, somewhere near Russia.

Bush had first called China a competitor during his election campaign of 2000.

The same year that Bush was putting China in the crosshairs, Prime Minister Tony Blair was badly mishandling the outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in Britain. The countryside was full of flaming pyres of dead livestock. Farmers were going bust and committing suicide.

A few months later, in March 2001, a government office — the Northumberland branch of the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) — briefed the press that the outbreak had been started by a Chinese restaurant in the north of England whose leftovers, they claimed, had contaminated food collected for pigswill.

It was absurd. It didn’t matter there was no science to back it up, or that Chinese restaurants buy their meat at the same place as everyone else: at the butchers. Or that the price of food and meat in the fourth richest economy in the world was at a near all time low, meaning that speculation about antelope meat being smuggled in by a Chinese Mr Big was as unhinged as the vision of herds of wildebeest roaming the plains of the Chinese serengeti – that is, it didn’t exist.

It was enough to use the method favoured by Goebbels that powered this character assassination — of linking the scapegoated group to filth and pestilence. And we know that the Big Lie, if repeated enough times, becomes gospel truth.

This was the first time I’d seen a government in the developed world blatantly triggering hate and disgust to divert problems onto a scapegoat. It seemed so crude and cruel and archaic.

Luckily, most Brits were too sceptical to buy into this, and many seemed quite outraged by it.

Chinese Brits held an unprecedented protest in London’s Chinatown and a delegation presented the Case for the Defence to the minister, Nick Brown, who seemed genuinely shocked and ended up publicly vindicating us.

However, there was no rectification or apology from the press. It was as if someone was testing out how effective scapegoating us would be.

It was like going back in time to the 19th and early 20th centuries when Yellow Peril imagery dehumanised the Chinese using tropes of over-sexualised, maleveolent, dirty Other, most famously expressed in Sax Rohmer’s FU MANCHU books, whose clever, cruel villain possessed “a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan”. That is to say, he’s smarter than us, almost like us but not quite. Fu Manchu was the embodiment of the evil Other, which is really only a mirror for all the cruelty we were doing in Empire.

So where did this vilification of an entire race begin?

To locate its origins, we’d have to travel in our time machine back past the Cold War and China’s revolution to liberate itself; past the deportation from Liverpool of thousands of Chinese sailors who’d run our British merchant navy during World War 2; past the United States Exclusion Act of 1882 which was designed specifically to keep out Chinese and which didn't end until 1943; past the 19th century lynchings in America when to have bad luck meant you had only an unenviable Chinaman’s Chance, and it took ten Chinese voices to carry the same weight as one white person … and even then, not so much. And past the Chinese who built north America’s rairoads from sea to shining sea.

This monstering of the Chinese began in earnest during the 19th century OPIUM WARS when Britain forced cheap, mass-produced opium grown in stolen Bengal onto China at gunpoint, turning what had been an expensive aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction.

The narco-capitalists proceeded to smear their victims as sub-human and deserving of the crimes committed against them.

Not only was China plundered, their great treasures stolen, but the famed Summer Palace was looted and burnt to the ground by the French. Tens of thousands were massacred. Great chunks of China, like Hong Kong, were bitten off by the invading imperial powers that followed Britain. In the first great case of industrial espionage and theft of intellectual property, Britain stole China's tea trade and transplanted smuggled tea plants to India. America joined in the opium trade and took advantage of the unfair treaties forced onto a weak Qing government. Astor, Forbes, HSBC, Jardine, Matheson, the Midland Bank ... the opium trade made fortunes and helped finance the West’s industrial revolutions.

It was a carve-up that led to more than a century of suffering from which China’s only emerged in the last 40 years.

People who are convinced of their own superiority have to justify their savagery against their neighbours on this small, blue planet. And, as happened to native Americans, enslaved Africans and Aboriginal Australians among others, they have to dehumanise their victims.

SO WHY NOW?

Why is this happening now only five years after Christine Lagarde observed that the world economy was coming up evenly together with growing stability, prosperity and optimism? And little more than a decade after China saved the global economy from America’s devastating 2008 crash which threatened to plunge us all into a depression?

By allowing global currencies to devalue against the yuan, taking a huge hit in the process, China had acted as the world’s shock absorber and stabilised us. Consumption of foreign goods was stimulated by the Chinese government. China also bought a ton of American debt and helped kick-start the longest bull run in American markets ever. So if you made money from that, just remember how different things could have been.

And this is the thanks they get.

So why this hate for China? Unfortunately, the West is in trouble and losing their lead as its capitalism enters geriatric old age. No universal healthcare in the US. Crumbling infrastructure. Rising poverty with tent cities springing up everywhere. Treasure spent on endless wars. The richest zero point one percent owning the same as the bottom 90 percent. The whole system is built on the upward suck of national wealth by the billionaire class who own the government. They’ve sucked their country dry and are looking elsewhere.

In Britain, austerity laid low the economy, Brexit chaos threatens to finish it off, and Covid mishandling means we are dying in large numbers with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, China has the world’s only positive GDP growth in 2020. It’s the world’s growth engine as well as our lifeboat. It invested in its people, raising over 800 million out of absolute poverty — that’s well over twice the population of the US. It’s built them homes, created jobs, extended life expectancy and gradually given them a prosperity that Mr Spock would have been proud of. “Live long and prosper” might well be the motto of modern China.

Not only that, but having stood up to President Trump’s vicious trade war, after some initial fumbles, China then protected its people from the new coronavirus.

While America shockingly closed down its pandemic team and the CDC office in Beijing that was supposed to have helped China monitor and contain any new diseases, China identified, sequenced and shared the virus’s gene code with international scientists in record time.

It amazed the world with its unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan and Hubei province, with a population of 64 million, almost the same size as the British Isles. By day 43 of its 76-day lockdown, China had eradicated the Covid-19 virus bar flare-ups.

China bought us time which Trump’s Covid superspreader policy proceeded to squander: stigmatising masks, holding massive rallies and playing down the danger which we now know he was aware of as far back as his briefing by the NSA right at the start on 28th January 2020.

When Trump performed his U-turn in March 2020, the White House issued instructions for politicians to incessently blame China as reported by The Daily Beast, the Independent and Politico. So we’ve had lab creations, bat soup and twisted timelines … and it’s been a revelation as to which politicians and media have gone along with it.

It's been long discussed that the objective is to "contain China". The way Trump claimed that China's wealth is all America's doing, this suggests plunder as well. On top of everything else, let's not forget that Xinjiang happens to have the second largest oil field in the world as well as being China’s old Silk Route into the Middle East and Europe which now has the Belt and Road running through it.

Washington’s think tanks, such as CIMSEC, have stated an aim of “Preparing the American public for competition and conflict”. The only thing holding a fractured America together today is hatred for a common enemy. Fears are rising and the motivation is high.

As US Covid deaths continue to rise, the economy implodes with $28 trillion dollars in debt to date and race relations deteriorate, America needs a pressure valve and they have decided that China is its safety release.

I've long seen the WESTWORLD TV series as a potent metaphor for the current situation with Chinese cast as the hosts upon whom the guests can inflict any horror they want.

So to the China haters spinning this atrocity porn, every drop of poison, every toxic word, every lurid rape fantasy: what you’re saying about China doesn’t tell us who they are. It tells us who you are.

Notes and further reading:

A Reservoir of Scapegoats: How Chinese in Britain challenged the Foot and Mouth disease smear campaign of 2001.

"I will not flinch from...WAR!" Our ruling elite just might be stupid and sociopathic enough to go to war with China.

The Struggle with China is not a Replay of the Cold War: Remarks to the Asia American Forum by former Ambassador Chas Freeman

Italian paper researching Xinjiang allegations made by the US bloc: "... accounts and testimonies coming out of China, as well as from foreign journalists, diplomats, experts, students and professionals who have had and continue to have the chance to visit Xinjiang and its cities and counties, tell a very different story, which seriously undermines the West’s charges."

Australian report on Xinjiang by the Citizens Party: "The November 2020 – March 2021 Australian Alert Service series of eight articles assembled here, with an appendix of related material from the AAS, demystifies what is going on in and around Xinjiang, and why."

US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue

The Opening to China Part I: the First Opium War, the United States, and the Treaty of Wangxia, 1839–1844

The Opening to China Part II: the Second Opium War, the United States, and the Treaty of Tianjin, 1857–1859

How's it hanging in Brexitland? Politicians fiddle while Brits stare catastrophe in the face

With mere weeks to go before Britain crashes deal-less out of the European Union, where are we now?

Britain is leaving the EU just as Japan's ground-breaking trade pact with the EU kicks in, making those combined forces the world's largest trading body and one in which we still (for a nanosecond or two) have a major say.

The rest of the world's trade is blowing up under US tariffs, trade wars and imminent hot wars, while the WTO, which is supposed to be our life-raft after Brexit, has been marked for death by Trump.

Theresa May's principle-free efforts to push through Brexit at all costs are so unpopular that there were suggestions she might even have to call upon the Queen to overrule Parliament and force it through by royal decree ... until 25 Labour rebels helped her out by abstaining or voting against Yvette Cooper's attempt to extend Article 50. If the Queen had done so, it would have been the first use of the royal prerogative of prorogation (shutting down Parliament) in 300 years.

Someone's taking back control, but it isn't us.

Meanwhile, facial recognition technology is forced on UK citizens in expectation of riots on a No Deal Brexit, with one guy in Romford fined on the spot £90 for not complying. Cold War plans are being revived to evacuate the Queen and the royals to "safety" and away from the civil unrest (in other words, legitimate protest) that the rest of us will be coping with.

Goodbye NHS, already eyed up by Farage et al for privatisation, the 80 per cent of our fresh food that comes from Europe, libraries, anything that gave some bare bones to the nation's infrastructure for working class people.  It was already being clawed back. Brexit accelerates the process.

Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit-supporting coterie is co-operating with the Tories because they hope that in the ensuing chaos, they will win power. Triggering Article 50 and then doing the bare minimum in the Remain campaign to the extent that swathes of the population have no idea where Labour stands on Brexit, against a legally questionable Leave campaign, may have seemed like a good idea to Lexiteers stuck in the 1970s. However, I have news for them: this is the right's revolution. Not the left's.

Despite John McDonnell's touching faith that Labour MPs will never accept Theresa May's bribes, there are some like John Mann ("Show me the money!") willing to take the Tory shilling when much of the problem was created by Tory austerity in the first place. I am even more doubtful about good faith on offer after Corbyn took no disciplinary action against the 25 pro-Brexit Labour MPs — including 8 front-benchers — who refrained from voting or voted against Yvette Cooper's attempt to extend Article 50, a chance for a second referendum. As every good tailor knows, you have to measure twice and cut once to make sure. So what gives?

How will Labour play the post-Brexit unrest when the state rolls out its repression? Will Corbyn weep for the youth protesting against the very measures he helped usher in? If he gets voted in, he'll be the one wielding the power of the state. The squirmy squaring of that contradiction will be fascinating to watch.

The three-quarters of the population who did NOT vote for the permanent Brexit change to the constitution in the ADVISORY referendum, including the youth generation who weren't allowed to vote in 2016, have had their future ripped from them by charlatans who have already moved their money offshore, and applied for French/Irish/other European passports for themselves and their children. At least the wealthy will avoid the EU tax avoidance laws and get to buy up UK assets at firesale prices. After all, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

Rees-Mogg in line for a huge personal windfall when Britain exits the single market. His firm Somerset Capital has 9.6 billion dollars under management according to its website. Banking on Brexit! https://t.co/ZyjxahRBXy via @LondonEconomic

— Gina Miller (@thatginamiller) February 8, 2018

Who Should We Let In? Anna Chen joins Ian Hislop's investigation of immigration hysteria in Britain

Anna Chen discusses Victorian and Edwardian-era Yellow Peril fears with Ian Hislop on Who Should We Let In? Thursday 22nd June, 9pm, BBC2

From the sublime to the ridiculous. There was I, having a high old time with Ian Hislop on Who Should We Let In?— the First Great Immigration Row, his grown-up investigation into the origins of immigration hysteria in Old Blighty, when – like a toxic photobomb – up pops a modern embodiment of racism. Yes indeed, poor Katie Hopkins (for it is she), has been projecting her demons with satanic ferocity only to have it dawn that the monster is actually herself.

I'd been talking to Ian about Victorian and Edwardian attitudes towards the Chinese, portrayed in the 1900s as "hordes of fanatical barbarians", and lurid reports of massacres that never happened in early versions of the Fake News which the Daily Mail does so well and so often. Never mind the mid-19th century Opium Wars waged by Britain, which was mass producing industrial tonnages of opium in Bengal and forcing it onto the Chinese population at the point of a gun. Having turned an expensive aristocratic vice into a cheap nationwide addiction, the Brits were able — along with the other European and Asian superpowers — to take advantage of an ailing, decrepit Ching dynasty and bite off great chunks of China. Hence Hong Kong, among other territories ceded to imperialist powers.

A vicious Yellow Peril mania fuelling fear, revulsion and paranoia saturated the Yellow Press. A tiny turn-of-the-century UK Chinese population of 400 was smeared with images of drugs and sex: a bleedin' obvious projection of the vast undifferentiated id belonging to the repressed Victorians. By 1905 Britain had scored its first immigration control in the form of the Aliens Act (aimed at Jews) and, when in 1906, on the promise of jobs, 32 Chinese migrants were allowed in to Liverpool, the press barons were not so much predicting a riot as pouring on the petrol to ensure that riots took place.

"British jobs for British workers," was the rallying cry, something I have heard in my own lifetime applied to UK Chinese not only from the right but also in the British outside left. Trade unionist and co-founder of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) James Sexton may be a hero of the Liverpool labour movement, but he rode this wave of hatred for all it was worth: it has been pointed out that "he won St Anne's ward in 1905 on an overtly anti-Chinese (and anti- Semitic) manifesto." Whether or not the left stick to socialist principles over free movement of labour as well as capital when Brexit presents such get-rich-quick pickings remains to be seen.

In 1906, still others scented blood. With a jaundiced eye on the main chance, American writer Claude Blake migrated to Britain and rang the dinner bell on the tiny group of would-be laundry and shop workers in a sensationalist series of articles, entirely oblivious to the hypocrisy of his own freedom to travel and displace hard-working journos in Ingerland. His most infamous article, "Chinese Vice in England: a view of terrible conditions at close range" in the Sunday Chronicle, described "dark, dirty, evil-smelling streets", "half-caste youngsters" and "sinister offspring". (Well, hell-ooo!) The Chinese were "far less fitted to form an integral part of a civilised white community." These stereotypes linger still — more easily detected in up-front "monsters" like Hopkins but also hanging around the left like a bad smell.

Alarmed by Blake's article, Liverpool City Council investigated, finding only that their Chinese community was in fact "the embodiment of public order". Facts? Facts? Who cares about facts?

Over a century on, nuthin' changes. Hopkins observes, "Two things sell newspapers, Maddy McCann and migration." "It feels so modern, so contemporary," she gushes over Blake's article. Under Ian's steely gaze and queasiness over her use of the word "cockroaches" to describe migrants, she slips and slithers and volunteers some bullshit that it was really migrants' endurance that led to the comparison. She says she admires Blake's language, both of them happy to describe migrant communities as "festering sores". Ian offers "an offence against humanity" as a more accurate definition but this hurtles right over her pink-rinse. Challenged on her "plague of feral humans" — "Are they all feral? Is it actually a 'plague'? Have you met any asylum seekers?" — her pitch and volume rise as she defends the indefensible, descending into Trumpelicious attacks on the PC meeja including Hislop; collectively responsible, she says, for the biglyness of her audience. She reminds me of Caliban, the dark mirror of the human soul, and seems to see herself as a Teller of Titanic Truths who would people "this isle with Calibans" while blaming others for her excesses.

Well done, Ian, for leading Hopkins to some sort of moment of self-enlightenment, even if it did emerge with the feeble glimmer of a 20-watt light bulb. Illuminating, all the same. Hopkin's self-aggrandising movie cliché, "I am the monster but you made me," denies intellectual responsibility or free will, putting her at the heart of a drama whose tragic consequences have nothing to do with commentators like her mangling the facts.

I've tried to be generous with Hopkins, aware that she has a severe epileptic condition that wipes out swathes of brain cells with every episode. However, making her illness an excuse would risk ascribing her malice to everyone sharing her disability rather than merely those sharing her poisonous ideology. But what do I know? Perhaps fear and paranoia around "other" really does come down to a brain disorder with synapses misfiring all over the place and, as ever, innocents caught in the crossfire.

As innocents always are.

Who Should We Let In is available to watch on iPlayer for 30 days from 22nd June 2017

More information about the programme here