YESTERDAY morning, still blurry with sleep, I shook my children awake to see the fresh snow falling.

Five minutes later, after watching the news, I was checking the flakes weren’t the fallout from the nuclear Holocaust.

America, on the 27th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, voted in a bigoted bully who tapped into the anger of a nation on his road to the White House. This is a country which has welcomed immigrants of every nationality to the land of opportunity, anxious to move past the long, shameful shadow of slavery.

Ninety-eight per cent of the US population are descended from immigrants themselves.

Yet tellingly, frighteningly, the first European to congratulate Trump was Marine Le Pen, followed by the Dutch far right leader.

The disenfranchised, left-out-in-the-cold voters, no longer sitting beneath the radar, turned out for Brexit and they turned out for Trump. Someone has to be to blame for their misfortunes. It’s almost laughable they voted for a multi-billionaire to represent them.

Instead of blaming the businessmen, the bankers and the rich, they blame the Mexicans. They blame the Muslims.

They blame the people who come into their country and take what they see as their jobs.

Trump is helping people make America hate again.

We can no longer be in any denial that our current global system is failing. Our version of capitalism is crumbling. Aspiration, consumerism, an economy based on having more and founded on debt, is unsustainable, and it is starting to come apart at the seams.

People are seen as commodities, either an unnecessary expense or a unit of productivity. Our whole system is based on money being more important than people. Those at the bottom rungs of the ladder are being ground down. So they blame the foreigners.

The rise of the current capitalist system has gone hand in hand with globalisation. The colonialists started this process, plundering countries for gold, tea, diamonds, dividing boundaries by drawing lines on maps and causing long-lasting conflicts which still rage today. Now, beyond the former colonies, the technological and transport revolution sees greater mobility and communication between countries, creating culturally rich, multi-ethnic societies. This change is happening. Neither Trump nor Brexit can stop this. It’s time we embraced it.

A journalist once asked Ghandi: “What do you think of Western civilisation?” He reportedly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

SOME PR companies are quick off the mark. When I got into work yesterday morning an email pinged in entitled “Election Stress Disorder Causing Gray (sic) Hair.”

It read: “Hi Julia, has this election year caused you more grey hairs than ever before? What if you could cover them while using as many natural ingredients as possible?

“I bring to you, a European product to solve this problem a gentle hair dye.”

Dear PR person, my grey hairs are the very least of my worries just now. But thanks for pointing them out.