RALLIES, shootings, murder, secret services, a defiant candidate, and a whole new world of conspiracy theories … The presidential race in the US has turned into a farce more immediately deadly than I had imagined.

When I watched events unfold over the last few weeks, I was reminded of something my old cycling coach used to say when we talked politics on the way to races in my youth: “America’s a teenager, Matt. It’s the best and worst of it.”

It might have been a little bit of a patronising judgement on a country of quarter of a billion folk, but I’ve always thought there to be a grain of truth in it. The impetuousness, the certainty of cause, the quickness to fall in love or go to war.

If Jimmy was right, though, it has seemed to pass into old age with no intervening period whatsoever. Two old, clearly ill, men in terminal decline fighting it out to run a clearly ill empire on the wane.

One man seems, frankly, to be a victim of elder abuse, surrounded by extraordinarily well-paid advisers telling him what he dearly wants to hear — that he is the only one who can save the great nation.

The other? Well, he’s an East Coast man living in the Old West, desperately trying to relive the nation’s troubled youth.

Either by securing the US’s position as the world’s armourer, or by arming themselves, the candidates prop each other up, quietly linking arms in gunmetal chains for freedom’s sake, to make their nation great again.

There is something vaguely comic about watching a man who wants to run a world superpower again, whine about the growing economic power of China while wearing a Make America Great Again hat manufactured there. His opponent is no less hypocritical of course, because neither wants to face the realities of a system they’ve spent a lifetime milking at the expense of the demographic segments of the population they court.

In moments like this, it’s easy to look across the Atlantic and feel a sense of moral superiority. Liberal commentators will tell us that this sort of thing couldn’t really happen here, and point to the demise of people like Liz Truss and Boris Johnson as examples of how the “men in grey suits” would quietly intervene to see that all was well.

The same people look down their noses at Brexit, and here in Scotland there’s an additional layer, as they look down their noses at the xenophobes of England because we don’t have things like that here. It’s the same people peddling this nonsense on both sides of the border of course, who will do anything but actually engage with the issue.

We are, of course, far further down the road of imperial decline than the US, but our cultural collapse into nostalgia has taken an upswing of late. In recent years, our television screens have been awash with “Great British.”

Great British Bake-Off, Great British Menu, Great British Sewing, and Great British Railway Journeys, to name just a few. I like cake and good tailoring as much as the next guy, but as much as I like a train, I do struggle to cope with the irony of a man who sat around the Cabinet table as our railways were sold off yearning for standards of service he helped destroy.

Riding on this wave of greatness, is the new knight-errant of capital, Sir Keir Starmer. No British Energy or British Rail for him, oh no, instead it would be Great British Energy and Great British Railways.

Alas, any forlorn hope that this would be a renationalisation of energy was swiftly shot down of course. In a remarkable limbo-dance to miss the entire point and while giving the impression of action without actually challenging a failed market, GB Energy will instead be an investment vehicle for clean energy rather than a producer.

We should be on firmer ground on the rails though, shouldn’t we? The economic case for rail staying in private hands is non-existent, and increasingly even Tories struggle to make sense of the absurd system of franchises they once enforced, as support for nationalisation remained high in their stockbroker belt heartlands and the Scottish government followed the Welsh example of taking on the franchise themselves.

Great British Railways will take back the franchises as they expire, or after they have been gently encouraged to have been handled back. I am on board with this very cheap method of getting the job done, and I’m sure that the bargaining power of the massive government subsidies the franchise holders have enjoyed for three decades can be creatively deployed (or not) to speed that process along.

The last Labour government effectively brought the rail into public ownership, forming Network Rail out of the ashes of the privatised Railtrack after a series of catastrophic safety failures and rampant profiteering. Sadly, this was less an act of expanding democratic control over essential public services than a salvage operation after a failure of capital which was impossible to ignore.

The subsidy-addicted private operators of trains and their failures are easy pickings, so it should come as no surprise that even those on the political right can countenance the government owning what it already effectively pays for. It’s another case of nationalising the losses.

We saw this in my old industry, the Royal Mail Group, when the organisation was broken up. Tory chancellor George Osborne nationalised (yes, you read that right) a pension scheme that although very valuable, had a shortfall. He then, at the urging of the Liberal Democrats, sold the profit-making part of the organisation, Royal Mail, to his friends in the market for a pittance, while retaining the loss-making Post Office counters.

What’s this got to do with rail? Well, British Rail used to own its rolling stock, and its engineering works used to build and maintain them. Thousands of jobs and dozens of communities relied on this, and some of the technology developed that way was genuinely world-leading.

Cuts followed by privatisation of these works were idiotic not just because of the immediate impact it had on communities, but because the state lost control of the essential ingredient to a railway — trains.

The Roscos, as they are known, which own the trains, are in turn owned by investment banks and have never made a loss. According to the government’s own figures, they handed out an eye-watering £409.7 million in dividends in 2022-23, and yet the government’s plans for a Great British Railway will leave itself still shovelling countless millions into the back pockets of these companies. Profit must remain privatised, you see.

This week will mark five years since the Caley Works in Springburn Glasgow closed. A site which once employed thousands as the backbone of that community as it exported steam locomotives around the world had gradually given way to a sprawling Tesco employing a fraction of the number next door now stands silent and empty.

A few weeks back I attended a performance put together by a team led by playwright Jack Dickson exploring the community’s relationship with the works going back over a century, what it meant to them, and how they had been affected by the closure of Scotland’s last facility of its kind.

The stories were often comical, tales of trips to the coast, of terrifying nuns in the local school, of tenement clearances, the hope of the high-rises followed by economic decline, and the rebirth of the community as new Glaswegians arrived from the around the world and all the time the steel rails threading through.

In song and performance, we heard of the let-downs. The abandonment of communities like Springburn in the Thatcher years, followed by disappointment in Labour and the final blow being dealt by the SNP as ministers blamed their beloved EU for the lack of intervention to save the final site of its kind in Scotland with it the works that had given the people of the area hope, hearth and identity for over a century.

The death of the Caley works remains a national scandal, just as the conscious, callous destruction of our manufacturing industry has been for decades, but we live in a world where moving money generates more profit than making things.

The crisis in Springburn would seem painfully familiar to comrades in large tracts of the US who find themselves focused grouped to death by presidential, segmented by pollsters as “Rust Belt” marginals, and whose love of their community has been hijacked by the politicians’ patriotism.

It is so much easier to concede to these urges while fanning them for many seeking office than actually deal with the issues and risk a reawakening of class consciousness, but that train is already leaving the station.

In industries old and new, trade unionism is growing and winning, and politicians trying to insulate themselves from reality in saltires, union flags, or the stars and stripes on a screen are in for a rude awakening.

Making things isn’t a museum piece, the wheels are still steel, the rails still band the globe, and when a new world is built, it will not be built on rust, it will be built on workers’ steel.