Congratulations, Donald Trump and Theresa May. You've made your countries into centres of state-sponsored child abuse

While the world looks on through its fingers in mesmerised disbelief at what America is becoming, each day in Britain brings another parental account of the terror and agony of watching a severely epileptic child nudged closer to death by monumental cowardice and gargantuan imbecility

Children in America are being held in tents and converted supermarkets (Reuters)

Every relationship, however special, needs the oil of a shared interest to lubricate it through the difficult times. So it may be a relief to Theresa May that she and Donald Trump have a hobby in common to grease themselves though the tricky moments when the president arrives for his delayed visit in little less than a month.

The hobby is state-sponsored child abuse.

Their precise modes of practising it are markedly different, Trump’s being actively wicked and May’s passively cruel to the verge of sheer and literal madness. But if an individual behaved towards a child as both in their singular ways are doing, any halfway competent social services department would take the child into care and refer the parent to the police.

On the face of it, Trump’s legalised kidnapping of Hispanic immigrant children on his southern border is much the more chillingly and obviously disgusting.

It is genuinely hard to find words capable of adequately expressing the rage and revulsion anyone in the same postcode as normality must feel at the sights and sounds of babies being pulled from their mother’s breasts, and toddlers howling in petrified perplexity as they watch their parents being bundled off to penitentiaries.

Ordinarily, and by and large extraordinarily, no temptation demands resistance like the one to compare an outrage to the Nazis. The reductio ad Hitlerum is the idlest and most self-defeating ploy in the entire analogy playbook.

Yet this is so unconscionably beyond the ordinary, by every modern standard known to a western democracy, that resistance is futile. When Laura Ingraham, a thoroughbred in the capacious Fox News stable of Trump apostles, describes the barbed wire-ringed detention centres – the semi-glorified kennels from the perimeters of which tiny children have been heard screaming – as “essentially holiday camps”, how are you not to be reminded of the Third Reich films elegantly portraying the concentration camp as an earthly paradise?

Seventy-three years after Goebbels commissioned such a film of the Theresienstadt camp, and 73 years after US soldiers joined the British in liberating the survivors of paradise, the irony of a US president savaging a German chancellor for being too humane towards alien ethnic groups speaks with brutal poignancy for itself.

Trump’s barely veiled attack on Angela Merkel for welcoming the desperate and persecuted, with ritual whopper duly appended (that the influx is causing German crime figures, currently at a 30-year low, to soar), is designed to vindicate the enforced separation of parents and children his legendarily bigoted Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, so imaginatively sources to scriptural teachings.

While the world looks on through its fingers in mesmerised disbelief at what America is becoming, it won’t bother gracing this shrunken little island’s version of governmental child abuse with a glance. But Britain’s burgeoning irrelevance on the global stage does nothing to shrink the size of the cannabis oil abomination.

Each day brings another parental account of the terror and agony of watching a severely epileptic child nudged closer to death by monumental cowardice and gargantuan imbecility. Reflecting on his defeated efforts as coalition deputy PM to change the law, Nick Clegg describes the refusal to sanction cannabis with even a minuscule THC component for therapeutic use as “boneheaded”.

God love him for the restraint. “Boneheaded” suggests no more than the average level of bovine dimness we are schooled by experience to expect from our rulers.

This is something else. This is the point, or beyond the point, at which hypocrisy and idiocy mutate into criminal negligence. A government that profits, via tax revenues, from licencing the manufacture and export of almost half the planet’s stocks of medical cannabis products simply will not acknowledge the unmistakable benefits of medical cannabis products. Joseph Heller could scarcely have dreamed of such cultivated insanity.

So it is that the Today programme now devotes a daily portion to another story of a child enduring 20, or 50, or 100, or more seizures a day, with the real and mounting chance of death, because a far more effective drug with fewer recorded side effects than any Big Pharma conventional treatment contains far too little THC to give a weevil the munchies.

When a Jehovah’s Witness denies a child a life-preserving intervention, such as a blood transfusion, social workers and the courts step in to countermand fatally maniacal religious conviction. When the government does the same, it does so in the name of legislation so luminously deranged that William Hague – hardly one of life’s natural stoners, and never knowingly nicknamed Billy the Bong – reverses his previous objections to argue powerfully for the legalisation of cannabis.

To stand on the sidelines watching the needless physical suffering of a child one has the power to end in the few hours it takes to pass emergency legislation may be less morally repugnant than wilfully inflicting irreversible psychological suffering, as Trump is doing, for purely political ends.

But the distinction between active and passive cruelty is so thin as to be effectively meaningless. Child abuse is child abuse is child abuse is child abuse is child abuse.

It is a monstrous crime against both the individual and humanity. If those enforcing the strict letter of atrociously immoral law on either side of the Atlantic can persuade themselves they are merely obeying orders, history’s verdict on that defence could not be clearer.