The killing of US citizens by ICE agents puts a spotlight on Reform plans to copy Trump’s mass deportation policy. Our Writer at Large, Neil Mackay, says Farage’s loyalty to Trump will ruin him.

Once madness is loose on the streets, a nation only finds peace again when it is bled white. Today, America reminds me of nothing so much as Northern Ireland in 1969, a country ready to blow.

What was the killing of the nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis but a scene straight out of the worst horrors of the Northern Ireland Troubles? The world watched a masked gang shoot their victim in the head in the street in broad daylight.

It’s understandable, even logical, why once staid voices now talk of America sliding into civil war. The Trump administration has unleashed terror in the shape of the paramilitary force ICE, which has been granted “absolute immunity”.

Social media is full of ordinary Americans comparing ICE to Nazi Storm Troopers. Images of Pretti about to be shot in the head have been set alongside pictures of SS officers executing kneeling victims.

When I was a child in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, I watched in bewildered horror as my country tore itself to bloody shreds. I feel the same sense of sickened disbelief now as I look at America, a country where I have family and friends, a country I know well.

The American chaos being wrought internationally is simply a reflection of the American carnage which is happening on its streets. How can a nation engaged in self-destruction provide anything approaching leadership globally?

Who would have imagined Northern Ireland acting rationally........

© Herald Scotland