As Donald Trump inflicts 100% tariffs on all films made outside the US, our Writer at Large Neil Mackay argues we must wean ourselves off American culture and defend what’s homegrown.

Back in the mid-1990s, a relative of my wife got married and started a family. It was around the time our own kids were born. We didn’t see this relative often. They lived in Ireland, we lived in Scotland.

Come the Millennium, the extended clans gathered for a family shindig, with our respective kids in tow. Our kids and the kids of my wife’s relative were about the same age - four. I was taken aback when I met the children, however. I expected them to talk with Irish accents. But they didn’t. They sounded more American than Irish.

It was very weird. Later, I asked my wife what the hell was up. ‘It’s the TV,’ she said. ‘They use the Cartoon Network as a babysitter, so the kids sound American.’

It got me thinking about the malign influence of US culture, and how we’d stopped talking about its deleterious effects on us anymore.

I’m not one of these ‘oh the past was so much better than today’ types. The past sucked. Massively. In so many ways. But on one issue the past was different to today: we talked, thought, and wrote about culture much more.

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Part of that discussion often centred on the emptiness of American culture, and the damage it did to our own culture, whether you define that culture as British, Irish, Scottish, English or Welsh.

I certainly remember my own parents - just ordinary working-class folk - watching TV programmes in the 1970s which put the spotlight on tacky American culture.

In the 1980s, as a teenager, the magazines I read regularly sneered at imported American music and film as substandard compared to our own homegrown material.

Then at some stage in the 1990s, we just ceased........

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