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I am gripped by a similar feeling of astonishment – mixed with horrified disbelief – as democracy disappears over a political cliff in the US, with nothing effective being done to prevent its fall. As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches next year, its political system increasingly resembles the elective autocracies of Hungary and Turkey.
Prison camps are to sprout all over the US in the next four years. An arrest quota of 3,000 people a day has been set for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In pursuit of this target, ICE is already detaining categories of people it had previously left alone, such as high school students, farm workers and those attending court hearings.
A new American-style “Gulag Archipelago” of detention camps will soon dot the US, officially holding 116,000 inmates at any one time but designed to imprison a million people in the course of a year. Those running this system will be greatly expanded in numbers, as ICE hires 10,000 extra agents, bringing its total up to 30,000 – considerably more than the FBI, making ICE the largest federal police force in the US.
A Trumpian counter-revolution
But there are echoes also of earlier conflicts and deep divisions dating back to before the US Civil War. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, for instance, gave slave owners the right to demand that local law enforcement in non-slave states help them capture runaway slaves. This is not so different from the Trump administration’s insistence that local police help ICE pursue and detain immigrants, who can be picked up off the street with no legal protection.
The mobilisation of anti-immigrant feeling, key to Trump’s political success, plugs into a broader racist appeal in which anti-discrimination measures like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are caricatured as discriminating against white people.
In his 2024 election campaign, he produced a fantasy picture in which America is at the mercy of a migrant-fuelled crime wave, though the murder rate in 2024 and early 2025 was the lowest ever in the US, while the rate for violent crime is the lowest since 1968.
Autocratic control of the White House expands by the day
Trump has acted similarly since he began his second term in the White House. Resistance either failed to materialise or swiftly crumbled. The division of powers between great American institutions, considered the great obstacle to monarchical pretensions by any individual, proved a paper tiger because the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives and the Senate together with the Supreme Court. The latter has curbed the ability of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions to block Trump’s executive orders. Parts of the judiciary still fight back but the autocratic control of the White House expands by the day and ICE can do whatever it wants.
Trump-type rulers do not tolerate dissent, even when it exists only in their own imagination. According to a report by The New York Times, former director of the FBI, James Comey, was followed by law enforcement and his exact movements tracked through his phone, because he posted an image of an arrangement of stones on a beach which was interpreted by Trump supporters as a bizarre call to assassinate the President.
Compare the significant but still limited cost of the Government U-turns on benefit cuts with the torrent of state funding poured yearly into the half-abandoned HS2 high speed rail project.
It should have been clear that HS2 was unnecessary and likely to prove gigantically expensive because Britain is a small, heavily built up island in which all train journeys are fairly short in distance and time, so it was absurd to opt for a high-speed rail link like that between Beijing and Shanghai.
In 2013, the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee published a report saying that the Treasury should not allow HS2 to proceed “until it is sure the cost-benefit analysis for HS2 has been updated”. None of these objections appear to have impeded HS2, drifting forward under its own huge momentum, like a giant iceberg which has become unstoppable.
Some 13 construction companies each received more than £1bn for a total of £27bn. The overall cost so far for HS2 is £38.8bn – and the project is only 60 per cent complete. The Ministry of Transport was entirely out of its depth as it signed contracts in which it took responsibility for cost over-runs over which it had no control.
Beneath the Radar
The death of Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher’s key lieutenant for most of her time in Downing Street until 1987, was greeted with a slew of admiring obituaries. An early proponent of right-wing populist nationalism, Tebbit was an example of the type of person who has since come to dominate the Tory party.
Martin Wolf, the chief economic commentator on the Financial Times, says that a starting point for economic revival in the UK “must be recognition that the Thatcher experiment failed: it did not transform the underlying performance of the economy for the better. This must now be admitted. Too much of the post-Thatcher performance was unsustainable. This was, in good part, because it was the fruit of a global credit bubble, in which the UK was a leading actor.”
Cockburn’s Picks
Trump pretends that there is a crime wave in the US led by illegal immigrants, but violent crime is in sharp decline. The number of murders fell by 20.1 per cent from 2,621 in the first four months compared to 2,095 over the same period in 2025 according to the Real-Time Crime Index.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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