Creeping Americanisation is a threat to Scotland's democracy

She was referring to the leaked draft of a US ­Supreme Court judgment which would reverse Roe v Wade, the 1970s court decision which gave women the constitutional right to abortion.

Ever since which time a combination of right-wing politicians and right-wing ­evangelicals have plotted ways to overturn it.

There will be an immediate impact – 13 states have oven ready laws ready to re-enforce the ban, one, Louisiana, is preparing to make termination a murder, and a handful of states have already enacted laws which outlaw abortion after six weeks – when many women don’t even know they’re expecting.

READ MORE: Roe vs Wade may feel miles away but abortion rights row is on our doorstep

The assault on a woman’s right to choose has been a long time in the planning; its ­victory assured the moment Donald Trump shoehorned a rabid anti-abortionist on to the court at the 11th hour of his ­presidency. It followed the admission of two more ­judges who could be relied on to uphold strict conservative views for their lifetimes.

Since the last appointee was only 48 when appointed that could be a very long time indeed.

It’s difficult to ignore the naked ­chicanery which went on to pack this court with hard liners. When Barack Obama tried to have Merrick Garland considered, a Harvard educated, highly experienced judge who is now the Attorney General, the ­Republicans said it was inappropriate to take a decision of that magnitude in an election year.

Fast forward to November 2020 when Trump nominated and pushed through Amy Coney Barrett within weeks of polling day, a staunch catholic who had made little secret of her anti-abortion views.

Thing is, Joe Biden, the US president, is also a staunch member of that faith. The difference being that he sees nothing ­particularly Christian about forcing women to have babies who will be born without vital organs, babies resulting from rape, or babies born to exhausted single mothers who can’t feed their existing families.

Not even to mention forcing women to continue pregnancies at a known threat to their own lives – lives only matter, it seems when they are a foetus rather than an adult woman.

You will not locate a four-deep queue of those men who caused the pregnancy standing right by waiting to pay for and raise the child postnatally. You WILL find states where a raft of middle-aged men think it appropriate that they ­decide the fate of women’s bodies. Maybe they think all births are the result of ­immaculate conceptions with men playing no part in the process.

In the land where death by ­shooting now dwarfs dying in a car accident, and black Americans regularly die at the hands of the police, it seems only some lives are worth fighting for. ­Apparently gun ­control is not pro life, it’s anti the ­personal ­freedom to buy a battle-grade weapon and mow down innocent ­bystanders and children.

There is an added twist to this saga which is that striking down Roe v Wade disproportionately affects poor women since contraception is not free of charge, and they are unlikely to have the funds to obtain the termination in another state.

This is all of a piece in a country which regards our national health service as some kind of socialist outrage, and where people regularly die for want of adequate and expensive health insurance. Those lovely Republicans have also fought tooth and nail against the modest attempt to fix this by the Obama administration.

It’s all of a piece with a country where congressmen and women are reviled as “commies” for pursuing an agenda with which few UK Tories would have a ­problem. We are not two countries merely separated by a common language as the old witticism has it – the divisions are much more profound than alternative spelling.

It’s all of a piece with the myth still widely peddled that any American can rise to become the president of his/her country. Not without billions of dollars behind them they can’t. The money spent on elections at all levels is nothing short of obscene.

It’s also little short of obscene that tax “reforms” leave the billionaires ­untouched – some of them pay little or no federal taxes thanks to “smart”, ­expensive accountants – whilst the ­working poor are clobbered and have nothing ­resembling an adequate safety net should they lose their home or their job.

The awful truth is that the ­aforementioned super rich feel able to brag about their failure to pay for public services because it’s considered somehow cute to outwit the internal revenue ­service.

It seems the New York state ­prosecution service is finally on Trump’s case and should he find himself in the pokey, Al Capone style, for tax fraud rather than all his other egregious acts it would be a sort of justice.

So America is a much more foreign country than we often pretend to ourselves. Good old uncle Sam is a party to some seriously dodgy practices, not least finding ways to funnel dark money into our own elections and referenda, as Peter Geoghegan’s brilliantly scary Democracy for Sale, flagged up.

What should be seriously worrying us is how many more of these practices have crossed the Atlantic and become ­embedded in the UK value system.

We know from various high-profile leakages about the extent of tax ­avoidance and evasion, and now we find the wife of the man in charge of the UK tax system didn’t feel any obligation to bring her ­foreign earnings to the attention of her husband’s taxation authorities.

We know that various politicians, ­including the odious Nigel Farage, ­Donald’s best UK buddy, are openly ­enthusiastic about replacing our health care system with the eyewateringly ­expensive insurance system which has crippled so much of America.

We know that some US ­pharmaceutical companies already have their mitts on health contracts with the NHS in ­England and are able, post Brexit, to sue the UK Government if they are terminated.

We know that the risible Nadine ­Dorries, surely the most implausible ­culture secretary in history, so admires US behemoths like Netflix that she wants to privatise Channel Four so that it may emulate them.

This despite the fact that Netflix, which carries no news, has just posted a huge loss, whilst C4, which costs the taxpayer zero, being funded by advertising, is actually in profit.

But why let the facts interfere with a bout of ideological vandalism?

So we need to beware this creeping Americanisation. It’s not all about burger outlets and cheesy TV shows. There are fundamentally different moral values in play here, from the impact of the military industrial complex on foreign policy and defence spending, to the manner in which they can plan for and then remove women’s rights over their own bodies.

We may not have the history of slavery which so disfigures race relations to this day in America, but neither are our hands clean in this regard. Honestly ­acknowledging and facing our past is the only acceptable way to atone for it.

We may not have the same inter-racial tensions as the USA, but the uglier scenes during the Brexit campaign showed us how near the surface racism lurks.

And when we have a British Home ­Secretary prepared to export asylum ­seekers to a third country of which they know nothing, and with a one-way ticket at that, we know we are travelling along a very dangerous, ugly road.

Last week a crowd in Edinburgh stopped an attempted deportation of ­migrants, just as one did in Glasgow ­exactly a year ago. So we haven’t quite lost that vein of common decency. Let’s make sure these are the homegrown ­examples we follow.