Matthew Carr's Blog

I never much liked the expression the ‘wrong side of history.’ As much as we might want it to be otherwise, history doesn’t have an intrinsic moral direction leading to the arc of justice or anywhere else. If progress can be made, it can also be undone. Because no matter how enlightened or civilised we think we are, every society contains the potential for barbarism, and when the barbarians appear they may not be wearing leather boots and a black uniform with a death’s head insignia.

Subscribe now

Nowadays, they may take the form of a sweaty, fake-tanned rapist felon, spouting lies and gibberish and promising to make you ‘great again’ while his balaclava-clad minions snatch fathers outside their children’s schools or stand grinning for moronic Instagram selfies in front of men in cages.

Or they may stand before you in a suit and tie against the ludicrous and sinister background of a giant flag, proudly announcing their inhuman proposals to deport ‘hundreds and thousands’ of immigrants, while vigilante mobs terrorize asylum seekers in hotels that they never wanted to be in, and daub St George’s flags on roundabouts and pavements in the name of Inger-land.

We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted by discussions about the workability of Farage’s proposals, or the ‘despair’ and ‘legitimate concerns’ that these proposals are supposedly addressing. The men in balaclavas shouting Rule Britannia and hanging flags from lamp posts are expressing hatred, not despair - hatred incited by Farage and his far-right cohorts, with the gleeful assistance of the right-wing press, and some of the grubbiest politicians this country has ever seen.

‘Operation Restoring Justice’ was an attempt to capitalise on the hatred that they have incited. This brutal reduction of men and women seeking asylum to disposable objects who can be dumped anywhere but here, has nothing to do with justice. What Farage is offering, like Enoch Powell’s corpse with a pint and fag in hand, is state-sanctioned barbarism, and the final transformation of the UK into a dystopian pariah that proclaims its nastiness to the world and doesn’t give a damn.

Because make no mistake about it, barbarism is what will be required if this UK Deportation Command’ becomes operational. Barbarism will be the consequence of the UK’s withdrawal from the ECHCR and the Refugee Convention. There are people - too many people - in this country, who do not care: fascistic goons and reality to stars who will be only too happy to cheer on Farage’s carnival of detention and deportation; pampered Telegraph columnists and Mail rent-a-bigots who think packing refugees off to the Taliban is challenging the ‘elite’; Tory politicians looking to save their party from oblivion by emulating Reform’s brainless savagery; Labour MPs who will say anything, or more likely, say nothing, in order to hold onto their shaky seats.

None of this will make the UK ‘proud, prosperous and powerful’ (again), but it will make it more vicious, more isolated, more shameful, and more arrogantly racist than it already is. Farage’s proposals are not the product of his own depraved imagination. These proposals could have been written in Mar a Lago or the offices of the Heritage Foundation. They are part of an orchestrated attempt by the ethnonationalist right and its billionaire funders to destroy the liberal international order and all the treaties and conventions associated with it, using ‘border sovereignty’ as the battering ram and organising principle.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Farage has promised that the boats will stop as soon as his policies are enacted. There is no evidence at all to suggest that he can do anything of the kind, and no indication of how this leering fascist-in-a-suit plans to persuade other countries to accept the 600,000 immigrants he plans to deport.

But the details don’t matter. The cruelty is the point, and when these policies fail, the cruelty will be cranked up.

‘It’s about whose side you’re on’, Farage brayed last week. This, at least, is true. And a country that aspires to even the most basic norms of morality, legality and decency should not be on the side of the Pied Piper of Clacton and his band of bastards. Asked by an ITV reporter whether the UK should be deporting migrants to dictatorships, war zones or the Taliban, Dubai Dicky - a man who could easily imagine eating popcorn and watching an immigrant drown in a puddle - responded: ‘There are uncomfortable things that happen elsewhere in the world. It is not our job to govern the whole world.’

No it isn’t. But nor is it our job to send people back to countries where they are likely to be killed and tortured. And if this happens, we will be seeing many more ‘uncomfortable things’ in the next few years, right here in the UK. We should not be surprised that this is happening. The seeds have been sown, and re-sown, over many dismal years. Though Reform has succeeded in turning small boat arrivals into a national emergency - the better to reap political rewards from it - the events of this summer are just the latest episode in decades of anti-immigrant ‘take our country back’ rhetoric, in which one group of foreigners has been after another has been described as dangerous and problematic.

None of the three main political parties have seriously challenged this. Very few politicians have even attempted to counter the misinformation and disinformation that constantly surrounds immigration and asylum. On the contrary, every government has responded to public ‘concerns’ with ever-more draconian border policies, to the point when the whole principle of refugee protection is now being called into question.

Labour has been as bad as its predecessors, and in some cases worse. At no point in the government’s response to Farage’s speech, has any Labour minister attacked Reform’s essential premises on moral grounds. All they have done is boast that they can deport and detain more people, do it better, and that they love flags too.

This is the opposite of moral leadership, and Farage’s ICE-style deportations-on-crack are the logical outcome of this collective cowardice.

In allowing the border to become the centre of the national ‘debate’ about undocumented immigration, the entire political class has locked itself into a trajectory that can only lead downwards - to further repression, exclusion, and violations of rights in pursuit of an unacknowledged policy of deterrence that has not succeeded even in its own wretched terms.

The same can be said of the United States, and the European Union. The EU has allowed tens of thousands of men, women and children to drown in the Mediterranean in order to maintain the ‘compensatory’ hard border policies that followed the Schengen agreements. None of this will ever be enough for the likes of Vox, Gert Wilders or the National Rally.

The Obama and Biden administrations were deporting even more people - including children - than Trump has been able to deport - so far. Now, in the US, the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants has become the catalyst for a ruthless fascistic shakedown, which has placed the future of American society in jeopardy.

This is how they roll. And the same outcome is perfectly possible here, in a directionless country that cannot face up to the damage it has inflicted on itself,where council budgets have been so badly cut that even Reform cannot figure out how to cut them any further. In this land without vision, hope or glory, asylum seekers, refugees and foreigners make easy and convenient targets.

Until we have a government prepared to refute the lies and misinformation from which Reform draws its toxic power, the so-called ‘debate’ about immigration will be dominated by the likes of Farage and Jenrick, and this country will continue the collective descent into vigilanteland that we have witnessed this summer.

As in the past, Labour has repeatedly tried to placate the ‘concerns’ of one sector of the public, with harsher and mean-spirited acts of deterrence, while rejecting the concerns of a wider constituency that - in spite of everything - does not view migrants as invaders and criminals, which supports the right to refugee protection, and does not want the country to sink into a racist swamp.

No one should be fooled into thinking that the ‘protesters’ will go home if the hotels close and the boats stop, or that Reform voters will gratefully switch back to Labour. This is a movement that - emboldened by MAGA fascism - feels its time has come, and is gearing up for power.

Put these people in government and, like their mentors in the US, they will find other pseudo-emergencies and other targets, and no community will escape the wrath of the men in balaclavas who are seeking to take ‘their’ country back.

It’s up to the rest of us to do whatever we can to stop this from happening, and become the moral backbone that this pitiful government is sorely lacking.

Share

I wrote this piece just under a year ago, and after everything that has been happening this summer, and the brazen encouragement by politicians and the right-wing media of what is in effect a far-right racist uprising - all going on with no pushback whatsoever from the government - I think these points are worth repeating. I’ve changed a few things for clarity. But one point needs qualifying and revisiting: Though I still think the rapid suppression of the riots last year (assisted by an equally rapid popular mobilisation against it) was a rare example of ‘competence’ from a generally spineless Labour government, that has not been the case since.

On the contrary, the government has echoed many of the far-right talking points that I mention in this piece, and failed to push back against the despicable ‘save our children’ moral panic. Their cowardice, absence of moral compass, and shallow pursuit of their own political interests have all contributed to the disastrous situation we are now witnessing, in which asylum-seekers are being set up as objects of persecution for racist-patriots, and the whole concept of asylum is being called into question.

Without moral leadership, we are moving rapidly towards a Trump-like ‘MEGA’ Farage government, with all the cruelty, authoritarianism and racism that Trump has already demonstrated. We should not deceive ourselves that such things are not possible here. Farage has just promised mass deportations of ‘hundreds of thousands’ if Reform gets into power.

Let no one think he wouldn’t do it, or that he could not find people willing to do to anyone who looks like an immigrant or an asylum-seeker exactly what ICE is doing in the United States.

And if that happened, be in no doubt that the people that I described in this piece last year would absolutely love it.

It’s a truth, generally unacknowledged, yet demonstrated time and time again in British politics, that there is a certain breed of very right wing politician or commentator who will always love the working classes - or at least that section of the working class that shares their racism, bigotry and xenophobia.

Ex-Etonian vicars, army officers from the Raj, gouty Thackerian squires, assorted lords and ladies, hedge fund managers mouldering on the Dubai sea front, ex-pat newspaper editors ensconced in their French chateaux - there is a long history of men and women of means who will always find time to amplify ‘concerns’ about certain categories of foreigner from those of little or no means at all.

These friends of the common people will rarely, if ever, be heard opining on bread-and-butter issues that effect the working class, such as de-industrialisation, stagnant wages, poor contracts and working conditions, zero hours contracts, high rents, the lack of social housing, youth services, social care, child care, maternity leave, or access to public services - unless any of these issues can be linked to immigration.

Don’t expect them to be on your side if you lose your job. End up on benefits and they will likely suggest, as Boris Johnson memorably did back in 1995 in an article on the ‘appalling proliferation of single mothers’ (ahem), that ‘blue-collar men’ are ‘likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment.’

Take a tea break, and they’ll say you’re slacking, as the Gordonstoun alumnus Isabel Oakeshott once did, about NHS nurses. Go on strike, and you become a greedy train driver, a greedy doctor, a union bully boy etc.

But if you’re white and working class and you loathe the EU, immigration, or the liberal/woke ‘elites’, then these same people will swoon over you, politically-speaking, like Constance Chatterley over her gamekeeper.

And when violent racist mobs go on the rampage, only a few weeks into a Labour government, some of these politicians and commentators will inevitably see opportunities in the chaos and disorder - though don’t expect them to express these possibilities out loud. Because riots and pogroms, like collecting the bins, are work for the proles, not them. Their role is to stand on the sidelines and see how far they can go and how much they can get away with.

All of which brings me inevitably to Nigel Mosley-Farage.

Some of Reform UK Party Limited’s critics have looked askance at the ‘anti-elite’ credentials of this man of the people, just because he happens to be the highest-paid MP in Parliament, elected by one of the poorest constituencies in the UK where he has yet to hold a surgery.

Such criticisms are unfair. Mosley-Farage did find time to ‘represent Clacton on the world stage’ at the Republican Party Convention, just as I found time to represent Sheffield on the world stage when I went to Barcelona on holiday this summer - though my trip wasn’t paid for. And, equally importantly, he also found time to ask important questions during the riots, about what the police ‘weren’t telling us.’

Who cannot be grateful for that? Who would be cynical enough to think that he does these things merely for his own political gain? Who can doubt that he genuinely feels the pain of our salt of the British earth, when they feel the need to attack a mosque, rip off a hijab, throw bricks though windows, or burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers, in order to express their ‘concerns’ about immigration?

Not that the frog man would ever condone such acts, but he understands that the oppressed (white) masses - like him - have had enough - enough I tell you - of having to share his country with people who aren’t like him.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

For a few days, Farage saw himself as the man on horseback, bringing severity and order to a troubled nation even as he dripped petrol onto the flames. But now the riots have ended, and the government didn’t collapse. Farage was not called upon to save the nation. And no sooner has all this become clear, than his ‘party’ and all the other pundits and politicians who called on Starmer and Cooper to resign, are now portraying the rioters as victims of state tyranny.

In an article in the Spectator on ‘The persecution of “the plebs”’, Douglas Murray condemned the government’s response to ‘this month’s spontaneous and grass-roots riots’ as ‘anything but intelligible, clear or predictable.’

In cracking down on these ‘grass roots’ riots, the ex-Etonian could not help feeling for “the plebs” who have been marched to court sharpish during the ‘unexpected speeding up of our justice system.’

Not since Enoch Powell quoted the ‘decent, ordinary fellow Englishman’ who predicted that ‘the black man will hold the whip hand over the white man’, has such concern been expressed for the men and women who would normally only cross Murray’s threshold through the tradesman’s entrance.

The only example of these ‘plebs’ in Murray’s piece is Bernadette Spofforth, the wretched Twitter/X conspiracy-monger who was arrested for posting the following incendiary tweet, immediately after the Southport murders:

If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.

Southport Stabbings suspect, Ali-Al-Shakati, was on MI6 watch list and was known to Liverpool mental health services. He was an asylum seeker who came to UK by boat last year.

I’m done with the mental ‘health excuse’. You should be as well!

Spofforth is not the most obvious representative of the plebeian class. The owner of a swimsuit company who lives in a £1.5 million house in Chester, she had a long history of out-there Twitter activism, related to pandemic conspiracy theories, climate change denialism, 15 minute cities and globalist plots, before the analogue world exploded in her face.

Spofforth deleted the tweet when she realised that ‘Ali-al-Shakati’ did not exist, was not on an MI6 watch list, or known to Liverpool mental health services, or an asylum seeker who came to the UK in this or any other year. But the key issue in deciding whether or not she is actually charged, relates to her prediction that ‘all hell is about to break loose’, and her final exhortation regarding the mental health ‘excuse’ - a reference to a widespread conspiracy theory, in which the British police (Deep State!) is supposedly concealing the identities of murderers who happen to be Muslims and asylum-seekers.

Spofforth clearly expected her readers to feel as angry as she did, and tweeted in order to feed that anger and build her following. That doesn’t mean she wanted to cause a riot, and it’s up to the police and the CPS to decide whether or not all this amounts to a criminal offence. But that hasn’t stopped this obnoxious troll from becoming a free speech martyr amongst the upper-crust defenders of the proles.

Toby Young’s ridiculous Free Speech Union has promised to pay her defence costs if she is charged. In the Telegraph, Isabel Oakeshott accused Keir Starmer of embarking on a ‘terrifying crusade against free speech’ akin to McCarthyism’ and described Spofforth as ‘the victim of a witch hunt – and it’s all because the Prime Minister is desperate to shut down uncomfortable debate.’

Oakeshott doesn’t say what debate Labour is trying to close down, but she does say this:

This is not about the remarkable acceleration of the normally glacial judicial process for carefully selected “far -Right thugs”. Though there is something quite sinister about the gleeful public parading of a particular cohort of (white) criminals, most voters will be pleased to discover that justice can be so swift when ministers want to make a political point.

It’s a bit much to hear Oakeshott opining about ‘McCarthyism’ when she once helped remove Kim Darroch from his job as US Ambassador by publishing his emails that revealed him to be critical of Trump, but her ‘road to 1984’ hysteria has already become part of the right’s default position on the riots.

In the same paper, ‘Lord’ Frost declared that the UK is ‘no longer a free country’, and quoted Javier Milei’s claim that ‘those crazy socialists in Britain are putting people in prison for posting on social networks.’

Elon Musk, who did do much to try and undermine the government during the riots, has also attacked its treatment of the rioters. When a Sellafield worker was jailed for eight weeks for posting three ‘grossly offensive’ and ‘racially aggravated’ memes on Facebook relating to the storming of a hotel housing asylum seekers, Musk tweeted to his 194 million followers on Twitter/X: ‘The judge is the one who should be arrested!’

Musk has also criticized what he calls the ‘messed up’ sentences handed out to some rioters. Yesterday, he claimed ‘The UK is turning into a police state’ because of the government’s ‘Operation Early Dawn’ plan to hold defendants in police cells before trial. This measure was adopted to relieve pressure on prisons, but Rocket Boy has now dubbed it ‘Operation Orwell’.

No one familiar with the relentless intellectual dishonesty of Brendan O’Neill, will be surprised to find him in the Spectator, discussing the wretched Julie Sweeney, who received a fifteen-month sentence:

The post-riots climate is turning ugly. Yes, many of the rioters deserve stiff sentences, especially the weapon-wielding bigots who descended on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. But when I read about a 53-year-old carer being banged up for a gross post online, and a 13-year-old girl being convicted of violent disorder, and people getting jailtime for ‘dancing and gesticulating’ at a line of police officers, I can’t help but wonder if this is morphing into a judicial shaming of the lower orders.

O’Neill’s tears for the 53-year-old carer would shame most crocodiles, but there is a lot more where this came from in his Spiked columns. Take his observation that:

It is the identity of the rioters that determines whether they receive sympathy or hatred, pity or bile, Starmer’s slavish genuflection or Starmer’s promise of a savage law-and-order clampdown. The reason the post-Southport rioting so horrified the cultural establishment is not because of what was done but because of who did it. Them. The white lower orders. The people we never want to hear from. Ever.

I suspect most people were horrified by the riots because of their racism, their cruelty, and their lawless violence, not because of any animus towards the ‘white lower orders’. Claire Fox, another Spiked luminary, lent her strident contrarian tones to the choir, describing the sentence handed out to Julie Sweeney on Newsnight as an example of ‘judicial activism.’

Just to recall, Sweeney was arrested for posting on a Facebook group, after seeing people repairing the mosque in Southport on television, ‘ Don't protect the mosque, blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ The maximum sentence for the offence ‘sending threatening communications’, under Section 181 (1) of the Online Safety Act 2023, is five years if the message ‘which conveys a threat of death or serious harm is sent with the requisite intention or recklessness.’

It’s difficult to see how a judge could not interpret Sweeney’s message in these terms, regardless of her background. And in these circumstances, her sentence is actually fairly lenient. For an example of ‘draconian’ sentencing’, look at the 55 riot charges that were once handed out to striking miners at Orgreave - an offence which was punishable with a life sentence at the time.

So far only two people involved in this month’s disorder have been charged with riot (a charge which now has a maximum ten year sentence). Yet a grotesque gallery of right-wing pundits have all suggested that (white)working class people are being singled out for special treatment, here:

And here:

Yes that is Turning Point quoting Nelson Mandela in order to legitimize bigots, racists and bullies. Further to the fringes, there is now a go fund me crowdfunder ‘supporting the families of political prisoners UK’ and ‘the recent wave of people being sent to prison for social media posts’ which has so far raised £6, 850. If that ‘political prisoners’ tag sounds familiar, it should. This was how the seditionists at the US Capitol building were and are described.

The UK crowdfunder was set up by Laura Melia, a white nationalist, ‘counter-jihadist’, and co-leader of the white nationalist Patriotic Alternative group, whose husband Sam Melia was sentenced to two years imprisonment in March this year for stirring up racial hatred.

These are not the kind of people that respectable politicians and commentators like to associate themselves with in public, but the ‘persecution of the plebs’ oratorio has room for many different voices. None of these commentators have expressed any sympathy for the men and women of colour - also members of the working classes - up and down the country who were frightened to leave their homes in case some white mob attacked them.

What do these critics of ‘judicial activism’ think might have happened if these mobs had broken into the Holiday Inn in Rotherham or the Mercure hotel in Bristol or blown up a mosque? What, if anything, should a government do when misinformation, disinformation are routinely pumped through social media, with the support and collusion of the richest man on the planet, that result in actual harm to real people?

These aren’t questions that most of them ask, for the simple reason that most of them don’t care.

Where they once sought to undermine the ‘enemies of the people’ who opposed Brexit, and portrayed lawyers defending asylum seekers as ‘activist lawyers’, they now portray (white) rioters are victims of a tyrannical government, in order to keep the resentment boiling over, and detract from a (Labour) government’s competent response.

It’s possible - though none of them would ever admit it - that they know the ‘plebs’ who exploded onto the streets this month were expressing hatred and resentment that they helped nurture.

In this sense, the ‘sympathy for the plebs’ choristers do have a point. It will always be the little people who get punished and go to jail.

Most of those who pretend to care about them, like the world’s richest man, will never pay any price at all, for whatever they have said or will say.

Share

You might have thought, after last summer’s riots, that certain politicians would be more careful about their pronouncements on migrants and migration, but that has not been the case. Since the arrest of a 38-year-old Ethiopian asylum seeker on three counts of sexual assault in Epping in July, protests have taken place outside ‘asylum hotels’ up and down the country. And alongside the usual clusters of Union Jacks and Saint George’s flags, and the familiar demands to stop the boats and take our country back, one theme has repeatedly featured in these protests: migrants as a collective sexual danger to women and children.

Not since Sir Lancelot and the knights of the Round Table rode out from Camelot, have so many men been willing to defend ‘their’ women: Arise Sir Robert of Jenrick, already dinning is armour in the Telegraph in January:

We have imported thousands of people from alien cultures who possess mediaeval attitudes towards women. It’s astonishing that so many self-described feminists continue to defend mass migration, directly or indirectly, even when the risks are now so clear. When forced to choose between the two, they seem to always choose mass migration over the interests of women in this country.

Yes, even the ‘self-described’ feminists won’t defend the ‘interests of women’ as well as Honest Bob can. And here is, more recently in the Mail on Sunday, warning of the migrant threat to his daughters:

I certainly don't want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom we know next to nothing.

And being a man of action as well as words, Honest Bob has been taking time off from his hols to seek out the evil ones. Here he is, on a beach near Dunkirk, in a video calling on the French police to arrest some migrants - accompanied by dramatic music to emphasise the drama and the courage of this bold knight, holding the line at Dunkirk against the new invader.

And here is again, at Epping:

Who says chivalry is dead? But what did Bob get for all this? On Radio 4’s Thought for the Day last week, the woke metropolitan elite theologian Dr Krish Kandiah accused him of promoting xenophobia. When Bob pretended to be outraged, the BBC, once again showing the courage that has so often come to define it in these dismal times, issued a grovelling apology.

Subscribe now

There was no apology required. Jenrick was promoting xenophobia, and he has been doing this for a long time, ever since he realized that it could boost his chances of becoming Tory leader.

Others are playing the same game. All summer, Sir Nigel of Farage has been recycling dubious statistics from the Centre for Migration Control suggesting that Afghans and other migrants are more likely to be rapists and sex offenders than us Brits - the better to present ‘broken Britain’ as a dystopian nightmare that only he can save us from.

These statistics have been critiqued here and also here, for their misleading and inaccurate conclusions. But no one is bothered with facts amongst this crowd. And it’s not just the men. Here is Reform MP Sarah Pochin, one of ‘Farage’s fillies’, as these women inexplicably call themselves, claiming that migrants put ‘women at risk of sexual assault.’

And here is Andrea Jenkyns, a politician as malignant as she is dim, in an interview with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru Murthy, who asked her:

Krishnan Guru Murthy: I mean the vast majority of sexual crimes are committed by British-born people, aren’t they?

Andrea Jenkyns: Well I think the issue there, I’d correct you there in the fact that the issue there…

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Well that’s a fact, there’s nothing to correct.

There is indeed nothing to correct. According to Rape Crisis England and Wales, 1 in 4 women in the UK have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16, and 1 in 6 children have been sexually abused. 1 in 2 rapes are carried out by their partner or ex-partner, and 6 in 7 rapes against women are carried out by someone they know. Out of the 71,227 rapes recorded by police last year, only 2.7 percent resulted in charges. When Guru Murthy suggested once again that these figures ‘had nothing to do with migrants or anything like that’, the following exchange occurred:

Andrea Jenkyns: No, but some have. Of course.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Some have, but they’re to do with society and everybody here.

Andrea Jenkyns: No, but it’s… Yes, to do with society, one is too much.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Exactly, what I’m saying is the vast majority of these crimes…

Andrea Jenkyns: But some is cultural as well.

Could the fact that so many women are raped by people they know be ‘cultural’, as well? Don’t expect the likes of Jenkyns et al to care. As ex-Reform MP-turned-migrant boatstopper Sir Rupert of Lowe posted on Facebook last week:

Of course there are British rapists. OBVIOUSLY we know that. Sadly, they are our problem - they are scumbags, and should be treated as such, with an incredibly harsh sentence.

The usual suspects seem to think that just because there are British rapists, we must blindly accept the foreign ones too.

The existence of British rapists does NOT mean that we have to continue importing thousands and thousands of foreign rapists.

STOP importing, START deporting.

There will always be British rapists. That is a fact of life.

We do not have to harbour foreign rapists.

That is a choice.

Deport them all.

It’s safe to assume, when a man dismisses ‘British rapists’ as a ‘fact of life’ while calling for the deportation of ‘thousands and thousands of foreign rapists’, that the protection of women is not his primary concern. In a debate on Europe’s consent laws in 2020, Amnesty International’s Women’s Rights researcher Anna Blus called for ‘a society where we are free from rape, and where everyone’s sexual autonomy and bodily integrity are respected and valued.’

This is what we should all want, but the radical right’s knights in shining armour have a very different agenda: to convince the native population that they are being ‘invaded’, and possibly ‘replaced’ by non-white immigrants who might also be sexual predators.

This is why, in 2015, Gert Wilders described young Muslim immigrants as ‘testosterone bombs’ intent on ‘a sexual jihad.’ In Germany, in 2015-16, a wave of robberies and sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, sparked widespread condemnation of ‘rapefugees’. In the US, ‘angel moms’ whose daughters had been killed by ‘criminal illegal aliens’ were paraded in support Trump’s deportation agenda. In Spain, the Vox leader Santiago Abascal tweeted last year:

SPANIARDS are fed up with being victims of assaults, machete attacks, robberies and rapes. Almost always at the hands of the same people; illegal immigrants that the PP party and the Socialist Party insist on bringing to Spain with a pernicious magnet effect that is only growing.

These iterations of the foreigner as sexual predator have a long and toxic historical pedigree, in the ‘white slavery’ stories that accomapnied anti-Chinese ‘yellow peril’ campaigns in nineteenth century America (note the bestial features of the Chinese here):

In the American south, both during and after slavery, the image of the black sexual predator haunted the white imagination. DW Griffith reprised it in his love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation:

In Nazi Germany, the figure of the ‘lustful Jew’ as a threat to women and young girls was a persistent theme of antisemitic propaganda and publications such as Der Sturmer:

This is the bottom-of-the-historical barrel that the likes of Jenrick, Farage, Abascal and Lowe have been scraping from. By representing migrants as a ‘cultural’ sexual danger to the (white) community ’, radical right politicians can stir racist hatreds and phobias without ever mentioning race. By attracting mothers and even children to anti-migrant protests, far right activists on the ground can present these protests as the expression of legitimate public concerns.

To recognize this usefulness is not to deny that sexual crimes have not been carried out by migrants and asylum seekers, but the safety of women and girls is not enhanced by exaggerating the scale of such crimes in order to portray them as an ‘ethnic’ phenomenon.

And the movements that do this are rarely as committed to women’s rights or the safety of women as they claim to be. For years, Tommy Robinson and the EDL presented themselves as the protectors of British children against ‘Muslim paedophiles’ and ‘rape jihad’, but at least 20 members of the EDL have been convicted of child sexual exploitation - 10 of whom were active members while Robinson led the organization. Over 40 percent of men arrested during last summer’s riots had previously been reported for domestic violence. In Bristol, two thirds of the 60 arrests between July-August 2024 had been reported for a range of similar offences.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Such men were clearly a danger to women and children before they went out to burn mosques, and terrorize asylum-seekers. Reform is equally infested with these types, and who can be surprised, when its leader has described Andrew Tate - a man actually charged with rape and sex trafficking in two countries - as an “important voice for emasculated men”?’

In the United States, the American electorate - fuelled in part by QAnon conspiracy theories about elite paedophile networks - elected a convicted rapist as their president, who promised to protect American women and children.

For the last few months, Trump has frantically trying to conceal his historic involvement with the most notorious paedophile of the modern era, while moving towards a pardon of that paedophile’s closest associate. Hypocrisy is the very least you can say about an administration in the midst of the biggest rollback of women’s rights in the modern era.

Its supporters include Christian nationalist groups that believe women should be subordinate to their husbands and fathers, and should not even vote. Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also been accused of sexual assault. Hegseth has previously attacked ‘woke’ generals and DEI programs that have left the US military weak and ‘effeminate’. And earlier this month, this paragon of masculinity reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church, in which various pastors said that women should not be allowed to vote, with the accompanying message ‘All of Christ for All of Life.’

Trumpism has also breathed rancid new life into the toxic manosphere, where white supremacists like Nick Fuentes taunt women with the slogan: ‘Your body, my choice. Forever.’ Following Trump’s victory in November, Trump supporters in Texas State University raised signs proclaiming ‘women are property’, and school officials in Minnesota warned parents of an upsurge in ‘misogynistic…transphobic, and homophobic memes and messages,’ in which young boys echoed the phrase ‘your body, my choice.’

In Brazil, the former president Jair Bolsonaro once described his only daughter as a product of his wife’s ‘weakness.’ Bolsonaro has also said that women should be paid lower salaries for getting pregnant and should stop ‘whining’ about femicide. In Spain in 2019, Vox refused to sign an agreement on violence against women because it supposedly focussed exclusively on women and assumed that men were guilty.

Vox’s main representative in Andalusia is a former judge named Francisco Serrano, who has denounced ‘gender jihadism’, ‘female-chauvinism’, and ‘feminist supremacy’.

This how they roll. And when these knights in shining armour come riding to the rescue of ‘our’ women from migrants, we should be very clear about the game they are playing. Because sexual violence is a serious issue - too serious to be left in the hands of men (and women) who use the acts of a handful of individuals as a pretext for the dehumanisation of thousands.

Share

There was a time when diplomacy was a confidential and very hush hush business, conducted behind closed doors by a handful of men whose decisions affected the destinies of entire countries. Writing in 1922, in the aftermath of World War I, the political scientist Paul Reinsch asked whether secret diplomacy was ‘the evil spirit of modern politics’ or whether the concept was merely a ‘clever method of surrounding with an aura of importance the doings of the diplomats, a race of men of average wisdom and intelligence who traditionally have valued the prestige of dealing with “secret affairs of state”.’

In any case, Reinsch considered secret diplomacy to be ‘incompatible with the democratic theory of state’, and he was contemptuous of the diplomats of the early 19th century who ‘while they talked much about humanitarian principles, continued to play a barren game of intrigue.’

In the 21st century, diplomacy is neither entirely secret nor entirely public. In democratic societies, the diplomatic intrigues of the past have been replaced by photo ops and staged spectacles in which politics and media overlap. This may not constitute intrigue, but it is often equally barren. We may not get to hear what is said behind closed doors, or we may hear part of what is said, such meetings tend to conclude with pre-prepared statements and tv appearances in which diplomatic correspondents analyse the body language, handshakes, smiles and scowls, of the protagonists.

Was the atmosphere frosty or warm? Was there evidence of rapport or bonding? Did they like football? Was there something in their past that might indicate a friendly relationship? As Britain seeks to navigate its way through the stormy seas of Donald Trump’s America, such nuances - and banalities - have become even more important than usual.

Over the last few weeks, a number of commentators have congratulated Keir Starmer and his team on their skills as ‘Trump whisperers’ - a dreadful insult to the men and women who work with wild horses instead of criminals. A state visit; Peter Mandelson’s PR accent purring in Trump’s ear; ‘shared prayers and tears’ between David Lammy and JD Vance - two Catholic bros with a ‘similar working class background’ - at Chevening- all these strands are part of the silken web that Starmer and his team have supposedly woven around the rapist criminal-in-chief.

The UK is not the only country to respond to Trump’s madness with flattery and guile. ‘I want to thank President Trump personally for his personal commitment and his leadership to achieve this breakthrough,’ gushed Ursula Von der Leyen last week, after the US president imposed a fifteen percent tariff on EU imports while also obliging the EU to buy US weapons. ‘He is a tough negotiator, but he is also a dealmaker.’

He is many other things, but don’t expect the likes of Von der Leyen to mention them. Nor do the Brits, who often like to imagine themselves as the intellectual guiding force in the ‘special relationship’, bringing centuries of imperial diplomacy, accumulated wisdom and good breeding to an untamed and headstrong America. So when the president of our most powerful ally happens to be a convicted felon and an authoritarian lunatic, it’s only to be expected that our leaders will attempt to stroke, cajole and soothe the kicking beast in the collective stall.

Some commentators have suggested that this was real diplomacy conducted by grown-ups, who understand how the world works, as opposed to the one we little people would like it to be. In an article for Foreign Policy in 2023, the then-shadow foreign secretary David Lammy coined the term ‘progressive realism’ to describe Labour’s approach to foreign policy:

Progressive realism says we must use realist means to pursue progressive ends. Instead of using realism for transactional purposes and the accumulation of power, we want to use it in the service of progressive goals: countering climate change, defending democracy, advancing economic growth and tackling inequality.

Lammy warned that ‘progressive policy without realism is empty idealism’, and that ‘realism without a sense of progress can become cynical and tactical’. He nevertheless insisted ‘that when progressives act realistically and practically, they can change the world.’ At a time when the US election was yet to be determined, Lammy reminded his readers that ‘the US will remain the UK’s most essential ally, whoever occupies the White House. Pursuing ideals will be futile, without first guaranteeing our own security.’

Subscribe now

These seem to have been the underlying principles behind Labour’s attempts to court Trump. So how do they stack up after more 200 days of Trumpian mayhem? As Lammy well knows, but no longer admits, the rapist-criminal-in-chief doesn’t share any of the ‘ideals’ that Lammy lays claim to. Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, but he loves the fossil fuel companies which funded his campaign. His administration is in the throes of the fiercest assault on American democratic institutions since the Civil War. He has more in common with authoritarian leaders and dictators than he does with democratic leaders. He is only interested in advancing American economic growth, has no compunctions about inhibiting or even crippling the economic growth of America’s competitors, and is more concerned with exacerbating inequality than he is with reducing it.

It’s difficult to win a president like that over to progressive goals, and it’s difficult to be ‘realist’ if you don’t accept that this is the kind of president he is, and that these are the goals that America now has. Like the US Democrats, Labour continues to act as if Trumpism is an aberration, and that Trump’s arbitrary, erratic and downright insane decisions all emanate from his ‘unpredictable’ character. But there is a broader picture here. America’s transformation into the bully-in-chief is part of a wider assault on the post-World War 2 liberal democratic order that goes way beyond the monstrous current occupant of the White House.

To say that that order was flawed is something of an understatement, but it contained things worth keeping: the United Nations; conventions and treaties that attempted to limit the impact of war and the military treatment of civilians; new legal concepts such as genocide and crimes against humanity enshrined in international law; refugee rights; multinational economic alliances and agreements that set out to avoid the brutal nationalist confrontations of the first half of the twentieth century; attempts at international cooperation to address global problems such as climate change.

Now all that is vanishing in front of our eyes. Some of the damage was already done before Trump came to power, in the reckless and lawless violence of the war on terror, and the Biden administration’s support for the Gaza genocide, in the cruel border policies enacted by wealthy democracies. If Trumpism is the product of a global political and moral gangrene, it is a qualitative escalation of the disease, that has brought ethnonationalism, authoritarianism, white supremacism, Christian nationalism, and savage libertarianism to the heart of the American government.

After decades in which fascist and far-right movements were tarnished by the experience of World War II, the beast is well and truly back in the political mainstream, fuelled by an international movement that is driving country after country, including the UK, towards the same disastrous path. If ‘progressive realism’ means anything, it means recognizing and understanding these developments, working out how to combat them, and facing them unflinchingly by building the alliances and coalitions, both inside and outside the country, that can chart a way to a better course.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Trump whisperers have not even begun to do this. In the UK, Labour has mimicked Trumpism in its treatment of migrants and protesters, in an attempt to scoop up votes from the party which has borrowed most obviously from Trumpian rhetoric and practice. Instead of fighting the nativism of Trump and Farage, it has echoed it. Too cowardly to denounce the horrors unfolding in Gaza with British complicity, it has placed a protest group engaging in direction action on the same plane as al Qaddafi or Islamic State.

It may only be coincidence that Palestine Action was banned only a few months after defacing Trump’s golf resort in Scotland, but this grotesque judicial overreach was entirely in keeping with Trump’s paranoid style, and there is nothing ‘progressive’ about it.

Last week, the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that it would be broadcasting GB News in the US. A government that aspires to ‘realism’ might ask itself why the US president that our diplomats are courting is facilitating a media outlet that is platforming the government’s most dangerous domestic opponent. But there is no sign that Labour is concerned with such questions, as it continues to look at Trumpism through the narrowest conception of the national interest.

For a brief period this summer, the Trump whisperers, both in the UK and Europe, could claim some success. After hectoring NATO and being comprehensively played by Putin, Trump seemed to be turning against Russia. First, he engaged in a little nuclear headbutting with the monstrous mediocrity Medvedev. Then he hinted at further sanctions on Russia and the possibility of resuming weapons deliveries to Ukraine. When Starmer threatened Israel with the recognition of a Palestinian state, apparently with Trump’s acquiescence, there were those who argued that this was another skilful démarche - an adult response to the childish protesters whittering on about genocide.

Never mind the ethics of using recognition as a bargaining chip. Never mind the fact that recognition is a useless symbolic gesture, in the face of the calamitous massacre that Britain has helped to enable. Never mind that when Israel and the US bombed Iran, Starmer instantly offered to ‘defend Israel’, even though Iran had not attacked it in the first place. We got a ten percent tariff, compared with the EU’s fifteen, didn’t we?

Yet now Netanyahu is preparing to escalate the assault on Gaza, with US acquiescence. And Trump, who seemed at first to accept Starmer’s recognition proposal, even if he didn’t endorse it, has criticized the UK for ‘rewarding Hamas.’ And as for Ukraine, Trump has invited Putin to a one-to-one in Alaska, in which he has already promised ‘land-for-peace’ - a key Russian demand, before the meeting has even taken place.

All this suggests that the Trump whisperers have not been so strategic after all, and that regardless of the ten percent, it may not be possible to be Greece to America’s Rome, especially when Rome is ruled by Caligula.

No country is obliged to behave like this. It is possible to stand up to Trump, instead of flattering and pandering to him. The Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has repeatedly drawn red lines in her dealings with the new administration. So has Mark Carney in Canada.

Both these countries are even more exposed to the malign power of this radicalized lunatic administration than the UK. Yet they defended their national interest on the basis of principle, rather than unctuous sycophancy. And a Labour government that really wanted to be ‘progressive’ would not remain silent in the face of the egregious horrors being inflicted on American society by the Trump gangsters.

And when we see the Trump whisperers being played so comprehensively, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that they aren’t realists who see the world as it is - they see the world as they want it to be, a world where the old rules and expectations still apply, if only our leaders can be unctuous enough and connected enough to charm a few concessions from the rapist-in-chief.

But America is no longer what it once was, and it will take more than flattery to turn it round. And unless this government, and so many others, face up to the dangers that are now looming, the world will not become the better place that David Lammy predicted, and may become very much worse than it already is.

Share

It would be something of an understatement to say that I don’t hold my schooldays in much esteem, yet I couldn’t help but notice that my old boarding school Mount St Mary’s college went into administration last week, after 183 years in existence. This is a school with a lot of history. It was established by the Jesuits in the village of Spinkhill, just outside Sheffield, in 1842. Gerard Manley Hopkins taught there briefly, and complained that smoke from Sheffield factories was making him ill. When I was there from 1968-1972, it was surrounded by collieries and slagheaps - little microcosm of middle-class Englishness in one of the most intensely-mined regions in Derbyshire.

Today, all that has gone; if you drive out to Spinkhill towards Staveley, you pass through a featureless conglomeration of former mining villages where car showrooms, building yards, fast food restaurants and identikit housing estates have largely swallowed up the old industrial core of Victorian terraced houses, workingmen’s clubs and nineteenth century chapels.

Just beyond Killamarsh and Renishaw, the houses give way to gentle hills and cultivated fields, and you can see the cupola of the 1924 Memorial Chapel, modelled on the Duomo in Florence, rising up from the playing fields of Mount St Mary’s. Today the slag heaps and colliery towers that once dominated the landscape have all disappeared, the old school buildings have been modernised, and newer annexes have been built.Since the late 70s, the school has been co-educational, and the Jesuits have relinquished direct control of the school to a charitable trusteeship, which offered an education in the Jesuit tradition rather than a Jesuit education per se.

I arrived there in September 1968, with my fees paid for by Cambridge City Council, because my mother did not want to follow a psychiatrist’s advice to send me to what was then known as a school for ‘maladjusted children’. As an emotional casualty of my parents’ catastrophic marriage in the West Indies, I certainly did not meet late sixties standards of an ‘adjusted’ boy, but I can say with some certainty that the school did not transform me into a faithful soldier of Christ.

Subscribe now

In Guyana, I had gone to a Jesuit day school, where corporal punishment did not exist, and Jesuits and lay staff alike were young, idealistic and empathetic. ‘The Mount’ was very different. Within a few weeks of my arrival, I was flogged with a strap by a notoriously vicious priest for talking to another boy in the dorm after lights out.

This was a harsh punishment for a 12-year-old, but I quickly learned that this was how things were done. Violence was embedded in the school from top to bottom like a stick of rock. In my first swimming lesson, I was held under water by an older boy who I had even never spoken to before. On one occasion, I was doing my homework in an empty classroom when the same boy came into the room with two of his mates, dragging a boy named Kelly who they regarded as a swot.

I sat in silence at the back of the room while they made him strip to his underpants, and he cried and pleaded with them to leave him alone. But they threw his clothes out the window and forced him to run outside to get them.

I had never seen anything like this before. The Jesuits didn’t approve of bullying, but some of it was built into the school system. Prefects or ‘captains’ were entitled to slap you around and impose unlimited ‘PE sessions’ as punishments for whatever infraction they found your responsible for. I remember many winter afternoons, holding a brick in each hand with an outstretched arm, or performing endless press ups, while these petty sixth form tyrants stood by eating jam and toast.

The school still proclaims its commitment to ‘improvement in living and learning for the greater glory of God and the common good.’ I didn’t learn much about the common good, but I often wrote out the initials AMDG, for the Latin motto ‘Ad maiorem Dei gloria’ that accompanied the chits we were obliged to write out, as part of the Jesuit system of corporal punishment.

On the appointed day, we were expected to present these ‘bills’ at the punishment room, where some bryl-creamed Jesuit would sign them and administer the specified ‘cracks’ on the hands with the shoe-shaped, rubber-cased whalebone ferula. Six and sometimes nine was the common number, though it had been known in the past to reach twelve or even twice twelve.

We then made our way out into the corridor, past the gauntlet of gawkers looking to see who cried and who didn’t, and bathed our stinging, swollen hands in cold water.

All this was entirely normal, in this school and many others, at a time when the rod was not spared, and few parents questioned it.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I often received these punishments, which oddly - and 21st century readers in a more educationally-enlightened era may not be at all surprised by this - did not fill me with a greater appreciation of God’s glory. Nor did I benefit from the Jesuitical commitment to ‘develop the whole person’ and ‘create an awareness of God’s presence in all things.’

My experience was closer to Blake’s description of the ‘Garden of Love’ where ‘priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds/And binding with briars, my joys & desires.’ Like Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s If, I learned to despise the school and most of its ways, whether it was high mass or the militarist antics of the CCF.

I left school at sixteen, and year later I heard from former ‘Mountaineers’ who I had known in those days, that I had missed out on the best part of the school. I also learned that the school has changed for the better. The ferula and its variants have long since passed into history. Some years ago, I visited the grounds with my young daughter, and was amazed how wealthy it had become. Everything about oozed wealth and modernity, from the gleaming modern classrooms and the state-of-the-art sports facilities.

For these reasons, I was surprised to discover last week that the school had closed with immediate effect, along with its prep school Barlborough Hall. In the statement announcing its closure, the school attributed its decision to go into administration to ‘increased financial pressures, in line with the wider challenges affecting the independent education sector in the UK, including the addition of VAT and the removal of business rates for independent schools.’

I didn’t feel the sadness that many people connected to the school have expressed, but nor did I take any satisfaction from it. I recognize that many people will have very different memories to my own, and whose sadness is entirely genuine. But there are also those whose sadness is not genuine, and whose outrage at the school’s closure is mainly due to its usefulness as a stick to beat the Labour government with.

In an article last week, the Mail lamented the fact that a ‘prestigious independent school’, which has ‘served the community for nearly 200 years’ has ‘suddenly shut down, blaming financial pressures of Labour’s tax raid on fees.’ The fact that Mount St Mary’s school fees are £21, 420 a year might raise questions about which ‘community’ the school is serving, but that was not the purpose of the Mail’s crocodile tears. Its journalist made it clear that another independent school has gone down because of Labour’s imposition of VAT, and a depressingly-rabid pack of commentators rushed to the Mail’s below-the-line section to gnaw on these chunks of red meat.

Some ranted about ‘commies’, ‘3rd form Marxist illiterates in the Labour party’, and ‘communism lite’; others condemned Labour’s ‘politics of envy’, and ‘Labour’s brain dead voters.’

‘This what communism is all about - total state control and liebour is getting there’, observed someone from Albania. Well no, it really isn’t what communism is about. And whatever Keir Starmer is, he he is not Enver Hoxha.

Others - no guesses who they will be voting for in the next election - predicted that the school will be turned into an ‘immigration hotel’ and that ‘Starmer will be itching to fill this beautiful building with boat people’.

Were it not such barking racist nonsense, this would be a perfect symmetry in the minds of these suburban swamp-dwellers: commie Labour shuts down our historic schools and then turns them into migrant hotels.

Facebook also overflowed with messages from parents of former pupils and other commentators, expressing their sadness at the school’s closure, some of which echoed the ‘politics of envy’ line as its principal cause. Once again, I don’t deny these people the right to their sadness, but their outrage is misplaced, and more often than not, entirely disingenuous. Because there are many reasons to be critical of this Labour government, but requiring independent schools to pay VAT and business tax is not one of them.

In a 2024 parliamentary debate on removing the VAT exemption, the then-shadow education secretary Helen Hayes claimed that average independent school fees were £15, 200, compared with an average of £8,000 in state school spending per pupil.

These differences matter. A 2019 report by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission on ‘elitist Britain’ found that 39 percent of the government’s cabinet were privately educated; that 44 percent of newspaper columnists, 59 percent of permanent secretaries, 52 percent of diplomats and 48 percent of FTSE 350 CEOs had attended independent schools.

In effect, independent schools are one of the ways in which a class-bound English society perpetuates the social distortions that result from class privilege, by paying for an elite education - and the connections that often come with it - that is unavailable to those who cannot afford it and that places a disproportionate number of independent school pupils in positions of power and leadership.

Supporters of independent school often comment on the sacrifices that parents make to put their children through these schools, but these are voluntary sacrifices, intended to give their children a heads up. Nor is Labour opposing meritocracy and ‘dumbing down’ by removing the VAT exemption. In a true meritocracy, every child would have the same quality of education, regardless of whether they enter the educational system from a different social background.

We don’t have that. In fact, we don’t even come close to it, and removing the VAT exemption is the least that any government can do to bring about some level of parity in opportunity.

It’s not even clear that VAT brought about the downfall of Mount St Mary’s. While I am not privy to its internal finances, the school has been in financial difficulties for the last nine years, despite what it calls a ‘generous’ £3 million loan from the Jesuits.

It has a capacity for 400 pupils. Using my crude maths, 400 pupils paying £21,000 a year gives you an annual income of roughly £8,400,00. If you can’t run a school on a budget like that, then it’s very likely that you have been doing something wrong. And there is another factor at play here, which was missing from the Daily Mail’s ‘going to the dogs’ lament.

In theory, Mount St Mar’s has capacity for 400 pupils. Yet in 2016 an Independent Schools Inspectorate report found that it had 315 pupils, including 79 boarders. Another inspection in April this year found that the number had increased to 329 pupils, only 38 of which were boarders. The removal of the VAT exemption may have accelerated the drop in numbers, but it clearly did not cause it.

While the actual numbers are not entirely clear, there is evidence to suggest that numbers of pupils at independent and state schools are falling, in the former case because parents who would normally send their kids to such schools were already cash-strapped, like everyone else, before the removal of the VAT exemption, to the point when they can no longer afford the ‘sacrifices’ required. And also because, demographically, the number of pupils in all UK schools is falling.

The extent to which falling enrolment unravelled Mount St Mary’s remains to be seen - if it ever is seen. Amid the outpouring of sadness and anti-Labour outrage, the school’s administrators have escaped largely unscathed. Yet the trustees announced that the school was going to administration only days after it had been advertising an open day in September. Teachers only learned that they had lost their jobs on Facebook, and pupils in the middle of their education have effectively been left to fend for themselves.

A quick search on Facebook yesterday found at least two creditors have not been paid by the school for services rendered. As the National Education Union has pointed out, this is not the way a responsible organization behaves. In short, there is clearly a lot more to be revealed about why Mount St Mary’s fell apart, but the manner of collapse is very much in keeping with the dysfunctional management that characterises so many British institutions.

And there are many reasons to criticize this Labour government, but the ignominious collapse of my old school is not one of them.

Share

Politically-speaking, England has always been a difficult country, where disillusionment and disenchantment seem to be built in, and whenever I return to it, I always feel the same sense of weary familiarity as I once again come to terms with my homeland’s dismal norms.

Why come back then? You may ask. Or, as so many rightwing Twitterati love to say - if you don’t like it, LEAVE. There are various answers to this. Firstly, I will never leave because some rightwing troll tells me to, so just forget it. And it’s worth mentioning also that, thanks to them, it’s actually really difficult to leave.

But the real answer lies in friendships and personal circumstances, in bonds of memory, and connections to the past that are part of who I am and that still persist, regardless of who is in government and who might be in government soon.

There is also the language - the crucial bond that connects me to the homeland and all the cultures that belong inside it. And there are things about English life that I like and love: its music, its landscape, its humour, its traditions of dissent, and many other things that constantly remind me that the English are not always as bad as their political choices indicate.

At the same time, the facts remain: that collectively-speaking this is a politically-impoverished country that defers far too easily and readily to the rich and powerful, that prefers to kick down than up , a country that has become increasingly spiteful, mean, and irrational as it sinks into a political morass of its own making.

This used to be a conservative country with a small c, and sometimes with a capital C. But since Brexit, the Conservative Party has become a mad, hollowed-out shell that has effectively paved the way for its own astonishing political downfall.

This might be good news, were it not for the increasingly morbid iterations of its moral collapse, and the equally astonishing failure of the Labour government to use its huge majority to make a definitive breach with its predecessors and set the country on a new and more progressive and hopeful path.

Physical distance from your country does not mean mental and emotional absence, and during my weeks trekking through the Atacama desert, I followed developments in the mother country pretty much daily. I watched the British media work itself up into its usual frenzy of fake-indignation, following the Bob Vylan Glastonbury set, when it claimed that Vylan and the Glastonbury audience had called for the mass killing of Jews.

For the record, I don’t think much of the chant that caused the ‘row’, but it was clearly not ‘effectively a call for a second Holocaust’ as Andrew Neil put it, on the feeble grounds that ‘the IDF is all that stands between Israel and a second Holocaust’. Nor was Glastonbury a ‘Nazi-style rally, more Nuremberg than Glasto’. This is mind-crushing gibberish, so intellectually-debased and dishonest that it kills the will to even engage with it. The only question of any value is whether such observations stem from ignorance, stupidity, collision with Israel’s war of annihilation, or perhaps a combination of all three.

But this is the level at which public debate has been conducted in the UK for a long time, and Labour politicians have had no problem stooping to it. So it was no surprise to read that culture secretary Lisa Nandy had called on the BBC to sack somebody - who didn’t seem to matter - because the Beeb live-streamed the Vylan ‘row’ and because of the documentary featuring the 13-year-old son of a Hamas minister - a rare act of political courage from the BBC that infuriated Israel and its supporters.

Had Nandy actually seen this moving and powerful piece of work? Did she know that Yaqeen Hammad, the remarkable 11-year-old girl who appears in the film recording cooking videos for social media - has since been killed?

If she knew, she clearly didn’t care, in her eagerness to kick the Beeb in public. Because like so many members of this craven, cowardly and mediocre government, she has taken sides - or at least she knows what side she needs to support to further her own political career.

The same can be of about the Labour government’s outrageous decision to declare Palestine Action - an activist organization dedicated to non-violence - as a ‘dangerous, terrorist organization’. According to Yvette Cooper - a textbook case of bureaucratic competence combined with the absence of a moral compass - this was done because her government ‘will always take the action needed to protect our democracy and national security against different threats.’

This designation defined Palestine Action as a similar risk to the white supremacist Maniacs Murder Cult and an ethno-nationalist paramilitary organization the Russian Imperial Legion. As a result, an 83-year-old retired woman priest has been arrested protesting the Gaza genocide, and a retired headmaster had also been detained under the terrorism act for holding up a Private Eye cover at a Palestinian solidarity rally.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

If national security needs protecting against people like this, then this country is in an even more precarious state that it knows.

That Palestine Action has committed crimes is beyond doubt, because direct action will sometimes involve criminal acts, whatever their motivation. But motivation does count. Or at least it did in 2003, when a human rights barrister named Keir Starmer once defended the five protesters who attempted to sabotage US bombers at RAF Fairford air base before the Iraq War, on the grounds that they were attempting to prevent war crimes.

In his remarks during a 2006 Court of Appeal against these convictions, Lord Hoffman cited the Suffragettes and noted that ‘civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country’ and that ‘it is the mark of a civilised community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind.’

This judgement was reflected in the light penalties and ultimately in two acquittals. But that was then, and this is now. And twenty-three years later, the entire British political class and much of the fourth estate are more concerned with people protesting Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza than they are with the actions themselves.

In placing protesters trying to prevent war crimes in the same category as Al-Qaeda or Islamic State, and conflating ‘direct action’ with terrorism, Cooper & co have drained terrorism of whatever meaning it still possesses.

But that is what the UK government - a Labour government no less - did. Never mind that UN legal experts warned the UK not to proscribe Palestine Action for ‘Mere property damage, without endangering life.’ Because as everyone knows, post-Brexit Britain doesn’t take advice from foreigners, unless they are Donald Trump, in which case we can only admire the subtle genius with which Starmer has flattered and insinuated his way into the rapist-paedophile’s affections.

Because that three-dimensional chess has been rewarded, first with a trade deal, and now with praise for Starmer’s immigration policy from a president who has effectively turned Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a paramilitary organization terrorizing communities across the United States

Trump admitted that he knew nothing about small boats - no surprises here - but he nevertheless insisted that ‘if the boats are loaded up with bad people - and they usually are’ then Starmer was ‘doing, not a good thing, you’re doing a fantastic thing,’ in stopping them.

The rapist-in-chief may not have read messages like this:

But this is his hymn-sheet, and it isn’t surprising that Starmer accepted the rapist-in-chief’s praise, and boasted that the government had done a ‘lot of work’ to stop people crossing the Channel. Once again, there will be those who will praise Starmer’s strategic brilliance in co-opting the messages of his opponents - regardless of whether that calculation turns ‘illegal immigrants’ into precisely the dehumanized stereotypes that the right has done so much to propagate for so many years.

But even if you put these arguments about morality and principle aside, even if you effectively replace the principle of solidarity that has always been the hallmark of the labour movement with the toxic slogan of ‘fairness for British people’, the ‘strategy’, if that is what it is, clearly isn’t working.

Because as things currently stand, Reform is likely to gain the most seats in a general election, and there is a very real prospect that Nigel Farage will be the next British prime minister. Richard Tice as Chancellor? Lee Anderson in the Home Office? Alex Phillips as culture secretary?

Are you ready for this?

These are not possibilities than any serious country should embrace, but as Trump and co have demonstrated so well, if you regard politics as a circus, you will get clowns, even if they are the kinds of clowns who normally belong in horror movies.

For a party like Reform to be polling double figures is bad enough, but the fact that it is leading in the polls is a blood-freezing indication of political, intellectual and moral failure - and not only Labour’s. Some commentators see this surge as some kind of cry for help from ‘left-behind’ voters, and it’s certainly more comforting to see it like this than it is to consider the depressing possibility that whole swathes of the British public have learned nothing from the failures of Brexit - to the point when they are willing to elect the individual most responsible for that failure.

It’s not just that these voters want ‘change’, millions of them want a very particular kind of change. They have looked across the Atlantic at the horrors perpetrated by the Trump administration, and essentially decided, yep, let’s have some of that over here.

Meanwhile, a Labour government that reserves nothing but contempt for the left, somehow believes that it can turn back the rightwing populist tide by aping its toxic messages. Hiring a former Sun journalist as your permanent communications secretary will not stop this. Telling people who believe that all asylum seekers are living on benefits that you understand their ‘legitimate’ concerns will not stop it. You can write all the op-eds in the Sun you like, but its owners and its readers will still hate you.

In the week I got back, the rightwing press was still in the midst of its latest spasm of hate and fearmongering regarding the ‘one million immigrants on benefits’ - a classic Farage trope. Naturally, this was based on a lie. Most of these ‘immigrants’ are EU nationals who can access universal credit and other benefits because they have settled status.

But the lie has done its work, stoking those ‘concerns’, and Labour has done nothing to fight it, but has chosen instead to reinforce and legitimize the attitudes that make such lies possible.

As a result, the UK, and particularly England, is still trapped in the trajectory that preceded Brexit - a small island subject to invasion by the immigrant hordes, in which each party seeks to compete with the other through performative demonstrations of toughness. This is why the country is coursing with hatred, why ‘concerned locals’ stalk asylum hotels while callow pundits fantasise about the coming ‘civil war’, and the far-right calls for ‘national action’ on asylum hotels.

This is the country of Rod Liddle, Brendan O’Neil and Julie Burchill, the country of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and the leering lynx-eyed pied piper with the fake grin, who continues to recycle fascist talking points while maintaining the veneer of respectability.

And knowing this, and seeing it unfold, under the auspices of this hapless and cowardly Labour government, is to be reminded that the real desert was not in the Atacama - it’s right here, in this small island that cannot and will not learn that it is not as great as it thinks it is, that is being as thoroughly grifted as it was before the Brexit referendum, and which - unless a collective and coherent political response can be found - is now poised to put Nigel Farage in Downing Street. .

Share

This is the last of my ‘letters from the desert.’ Yesterday morning I arrived back in the UK. After spending the best part of six weeks, travelling through the desert, I had become accustomed to empty, treeless spaces. Looking down on England as we descended on Heathrow, I could saw trees everywhere, lining roads, parks and stately homes. I saw lawns, woods, the familiar rows of houses dissected by major and minor roads, factories, football stadiums, and all the paraphernalia of an advanced modern society where nature has been comprehensively subjugated, ordered and domesticated.

But the desert was still very much on my mind, and so even though I am writing these lines from my study, I can still, figuratively-speaking, describe what follows as a letter ‘from’ the desert. I also wanted to thank some of the readers of this newsletter for the very kind words that accompanied their financial pledges. I’m not planning to make this newsletter subscriber-only for the time being, though I may decide to do that at some time in the future. But I don’t want anybody to think that I take their pledges for granted. Writers need a certain kind of reader, just as readers need a certain kind of writer, and I feel that I must be doing something right when I read these messages of support.

I hope we can stick together, as we try to navigate these wild and very-far-from-uplifting times without allowing ourselves to be crushed by them. We may not always agree on everything, nor do we have to, but I’m grateful for your presence, your comments and your attention.

LIFE ON MARS?

I’ve never had much interest in space travel. As a boy, I wasn’t enamoured with rockets, space dogs or moon landings. Cosmonauts and astronauts left me equally cold. I regarded the space race as a vainglorious waste of resources and an extension of the Cold War, and I didn’t really care who got there first.

I regarded Mars with the same indifference. I didn’t feel the allure or the fascination, and I didn’t share the urgency to get there or know what was up there. Like the girl with the mousy hair in David Bowie’s song, the Red Planet seemed to me to be a godawful small affair, and nothing I have ever heard about it has made me change my mind.

But here in the Atacama, it’s difficult not to think about Mars. This is partly because so much of the surface of the desert looks like Mars, or at least a more beguiling and attractive version of it. As Oliver Morton observes in Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of World:

The Martian surface looks like one great big Atacama, except worse. It is not only arid and frozen, but bathed in harsh ultraviolet radiation; the Martian atmosphere, lacking oxygen, necessarily lacks an ozone layer.

This is true, and for decades the similarities between the Atacama and the Red Planet have attracted scientists to the desert. In 2003, the NASA Ames Research Center began its ‘Life in the Atacama’ project, which used the desert as a testing ground for robotic Rovers to be used on Mars. In 2017, NASA scientists conducted field research in the desert under the auspices of the Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS) program, in an attempt to detect microbial life that might also be found in the Atacama, and possibly on Mars.

For the record, I’m not opposed to any of this. I have no objection to scientists looking for life in the desert. Nor do I dismiss the significance of Mars as an object of scientific study. It’s an interesting place, even though there are other places that are also interesting, and certainly - in my humble opinion - more worth visiting, right here on Earth.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

But when it comes to the fantasy of Mars colonisation, I reach for my revolver. And I’m particularly repulsed by the new impetus that these fantasies have attained in a historical period, when humanity is facing so many problems that threaten its survival, and the survival of so much life that humanity has become indirectly responsible for.

I have a special loathing for the ‘Mars or bust’ urgency associated with the richest man in the history of humanity, who also happens to be one of the worst individuals that contemporary human society as to offer. As many people will already know, Elon Musk (for it is of him I speak) is obsessed with Mars. Peering at the Red Planet through a haze of ketamine and weed, this ‘visionary’ has had a dream: to transform humanity into an ‘interplanetary species’ and establish a colony on Mars within ‘20-30 years’, with a population of one million.

Because Musk is a rich man, his proclamations are often greeted with a quasi-religious awe, but before we go into that, let’s consider the following: According to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2024 Living Planet Report, there has been a 73 decline in the average size of monitored global wildlife since 1970. 73 percent. In 55 years. And what has caused this? The WWF cites:

Habitat loss and degradation and overharvesting, driven primarily by our global food system are the dominant threats to wildlife populations around the world, followed by invasive species, disease and climate change.

Speaking of climate change, this month a report published in the journal Nature Communications, warned that humanity may be approaching a ‘point of no return’ comparable to the 250 million-year-old ‘massive extinction event’, which caused a 90 percent loss of life on Earth. Also this month, a report by the National Drought Mitigation Center and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification says that since 2023, the world has experienced some of the largest and most destructive droughts in recorded history, and that more than 90 million people in Eastern and Southern Africa are at risk of acute hunger.

‘Point of no return’ warnings like this come and go, and in the world of disinformation and misinformation that too many of us inhabit, they tend to be ignored or played down or dismissed as some sort of wokeist ‘scam.’ But the real scammers are the billionaires who are now transforming space into their playpen, and presenting Mars as some kind of bolthole to escape from problems that we should be solving.

As the astrophysicist Adam Becker, the author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, put it, these are men who ‘think that money is some sort of metric that tells you how worthwhile somebody is and how smart they are, and that if somebody else has less money, that means that you don’t have to listen to them.’

The great problem that 21st century society has, is that too many people are listening to them, and oohing and aahing at their cosmic antics like spectators at a Cirque du Soleil spectacle. As one CNBC reporter gushingly declared: ‘In Musk’s view, going to Mars is tantamount to preserving humanity and escaping the ever-growing threats to Earth, including natural disasters and warfare.’

There are several problems with the Great Man’s ‘view.’ Firstly, a species that trashes a planet with an abundance of natural resources that no other known planet possesses, is unlikely to prosper on Mars, and is more likely to reproduce the same damaging behaviour that it is supposedly escaping from. Secondly, the ‘threats’ that Musk is concerned with are to some extent the consequence of unbridled capitalism and militarism that men like him have facilitated and actively profited from.

In March this year, a report in the New York Times claimed that 3 million people could die of sickness and starvation within a year, as a result of foreign aid cuts overseen by Musk’s DOGE agency.

And we should believe that this ‘visionary’ wants to ‘save humanity?’ Come on.

By presenting these ‘threats’ as inevitable and unstoppable, the Musks of this world suck in resources that could be spent elsewhere and condemn us to abandoning humanity. They distract attention from the collective effort required to eliminate and mitigate these threats, and they encourage what is in effect a gross dereliction of duty.

And this brings me back to the desert. Over the last 6 weeks, I have often asked myself what I was doing in the Atacama. At first sight, the reasons were obvious, I wanted to immerse myself in the desert and gather material for a book about this amazing place. In researching and writing about the Atacama, I have often found myself thinking about time. Jung once wrote of a journey through the Sahara, that 'The deeper we penetrated into the Sahara, the more time slowed down for me; it even threatened to move backward.'

I found something similar in the Atacama. This is perhaps a feature of deserts: On the one hand the absence of distractions immerses you in the immediate present. At the same time, the desert provides constant evidence of older time spans that preceded humanity and will also succeed us. Looking at the fantastic rock formations and empty spaces of the Atacama, I felt conscious of a world that is so much older than I could ever mentally encapsulate.

Looking up at the night sky, I imagined the new born stars and pieces of dead planets that astronomical telescopes in the Atacama have identified for, some of which are millions of years old. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by these vast time scales. As brief as a human lifespan is in comparison, I didn’t feel paltry or insignificant. Walking along the burial grounds of the Chinchorro, I thought of the mummified remains that had once reminded each generation of the constant presence of their ancestors - and also of the future which awaited them.

We don’t have that certainty, in our febrile global society. Too often we live as if humanity had just got here, as if our cities and highways have always been here. Living in a world of constant distractions, cosseted by machines and inventions and computer screens and our systems of knowledge, we too easily inhabit an endless present, with no connection to what came before and what comes next.

Even in the supposedly ‘barren’ desert, I felt, as I have often felt in the Pyrenees, the Himalayas, the Peak District, and so many of the magical places that I have been fortunate enough to visit in my brief time on Earth, that there is no better planet than this one, and that it remains our urgent collective responsibility to preserve these spaces and the abundance of life that they contain.

But to do that, we need to be aware that our fleeting present is part of the Earth’s deep past and also of its future. We will learn nothing of this from the likes Elon Musk, Richard Branson or Jared Isaacman.

I spent my last day in the Atacama in Yungay, where NASA carried out some of its ARADS drilling trials for the Mars rovers. This was the ‘hyper-arid core’ of the Atacama, where temperatures can reach 40 degrees and 50 degrees below earth. Yet even here, in this dead zone, of nitrate ghost towns, abandoned railway stations and forgotten cemeteries, scientists from NASA and the University of Antofagasta have discovered microorganisms that have adapted to extreme desert conditions.

And even in Yungay, water has flowed - the last time was only a few years ago. The desert still bears its traces, and trees and shrubs still grow. And walking across the hardened soil, I was, as I was so often, mesmerised by the beauty of the desert, and fascinated by the human communities that have come and gone there and the historical and economic forces that brought them into being.

Because this was the Atacama, a desert on the fringes of the modern world, which was also a mirror of that world, where it was possible to see the forces that have placed our world in jeopardy and also the life forms which have improbably managed to thrive here, and which will continue to survive even if we don’t.

And if some scientists see Yungay as an ‘analogue’ to Mars, I saw its severe, desolate beauty as something else: another reminder that this great Earth remains our common home and that it is our collective duty to save it, not only for ourselves, but for those who come after us.

If we cannot find a way to prevent further devastation, and reverse some of the damage we have already caused, then perhaps we may deserve Mars after all. But until then it is up to each of us to preserve these wild places, even if we never see them, and allow what Wallace Stegner called the ‘geography of hope’ to guide us to a better future.

And if I scrape away at all the reasons that brought me to the Atacama, that is the one which still stands out.

Share

.

Many years ago, in the mid-80s, I sneaked into the deserted Royal Albert Dock in London’s East End, while researching an article about the London Docklands Development Corporation. The dock had been closed since 1981, but it looked as it had been evacuated overnight. There were papers strewn across the office, discarded boxes and hessian sacks, and signs in the wind-blown, moaning warehouses that indicated vanished imperial trade routes: Buenos Aires, Nairobi, ‘Tanganyika.’

It was an eerie spectacle, the historical counterpoint to Joseph Conrad’s ironic evocation of the Thames as the gateway to Empire, carrying ‘hunters for gold, pursuers of fame, they had all gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.’

Now, as everyone knew even then, the spark had gone out, and the abandoned dock seemed like a haunted incarnation of imperial decline and Thatcherite financialisation - the hub of empire reduced to mere real estate, soon to be transformed into upmarket housing to serve the City, and a windsurfers’ playground.

Since then I’ve seen a fair amount of ghost towns or ‘dead towns’, as the Sierra Club founder John Muir once described the deserted mining towns of Nevada. I’ve visited bombed villages in El Salvador, abandoned Aragonese hamlets and former French Second Empire spa towns. I’ve also seen photographs of ruined places that course regularly through the Internet. Like many people, I find these ruins irresistible and compelling, because who doesn’t love a good ghost town?

Nowadays we seem to love them more than ever. Some writers have used the terms ‘ruin porn’ or ‘ruin lust’ to describe the 21st century fascination with ruined, decayed places such as Chernobyl, Detroit, or Flint, Michigan. Others have criticised such terms for trivialising the places they describe and the people who once inhabited them.

Whatever you think of the term, it’s difficult to ignore the connection between ‘ruin porn’ and an age haunted by visions of catastrophe. Because when we run out of real ghost towns, we are constantly imagining and re-imagining them, in zombie-haunted shopping malls, airports, and post-pandemic city scapes.

On the one hand, these places are testaments to the fragility and transience of human communities, dreams and projects. They remind us that an unforeseen disaster, or a change in economic fortune can reduce proud cities, towns and villages to haunted relics.

In providing anxious indicators of our own possible future, ruins and ghost towns also provide a gateway into the past - a gateway shrouded with mystery. Who were the people who left in such a hurry, scattering papers on office floors, leaving tables still laid, empty theatres, shops and services? Why did they leave and where did they go?

The Atacama is filled with dozens of pueblos fantasmas (ghost towns). Most of them are mines and former oficinas salitreras (nitrate factories) and accompanying company towns. Some are bare ruins and stumps of walls, the remnants of mining settlements whose names have been forgotten:

Others, like Humberstone, near Iquique have become UNESCO World Heritage Sites:

Because this is the Atacama, many of these towns have not decayed as much as they would have anywhere else. In fact, some of them are in such good condition, that you feel they could be inhabited again within a few months, if there was anything to sustain them.

Subscribe now

Humberstone was built to serve the nearby salitrera Santa Laura. It once housed 3,500 workers, managers, and their families. It had its own theatre, hospital, hotel, swimming pool, pulperia (bar-cum-grocery stores) and school (divided into separate classrooms for English and Spanish children). It had houses for the workers, which varied in size according to whether they were married or single.

As a designated national monument and world heritage site, much of Humberstone has been cleaned up and made visitor-friendly. You can have yourselves photographed with smiling mannequins serving at the bar or baking bread – an opportunity that our guide insisted we avail ourselves of.

Humberstone has become a marker of regional identity, and it’s also a packaged, playful version of the past, part-museum and part-tableau, intended to give the visitor the illusion of time-travel - and a goofy selfie with a mannequin.

There is little indication in this tableau of the fierce, harsh labour that the nitrate industry involved. It’s not for nothing that the Atacama, and particularly the Tarapacá region, is viewed as the crucible of the Chilean labour movement. Because extracting nitrate in desert conditions was harsh, backbreaking work, and it was also dangerous - workers often died or suffered serious injuries during the boiling process.

Workers were often lured to the north by false promises of wealth and high wages, only to find themselves isolated in these company towns, paid with the hated ‘fichas’ (tokens) whose value was determined by their employers.

Pablo Neruda later recalled the ‘ men with burned features, their loneliness and remoteness shows in the darkness of their eyes’, who asked him to represent them in the senate in 1944. These miners often went on strike, and when they did, they were likely to be massacred, usually with the approval of the mostly European – particularly British – owners who dominated the nitrate industry.

Yet these remote towns, scattered across the desert, provided European and North American farmers with nitrate fertiliser that enabled them to feed their populations. Nitrate was essential for munitions and dynamite.

Mines and railway tunnels were blown open with Chilean nitrate. In an area in which dynamite became the anarchist super weapon, nineteenth century ‘propagandists of the deed’ also had reason to be grateful for the nitrates of the Atacama.

Had the British navy not sunk the German Pacific fleet in 1914 and cut off German access to the Atacama, Britain would not have had enough explosives to keep the German army at bay on the Western front, and the Schlieffen plan might have succeeded. The British victory forced Germany to adopt the Bosch-Huber method, and industrialise artificial nitrogen, which enabled Germany to survive the war.

That same invention hastened the death of these desert towns, as artificial nitrogen broke the Chilean near-monopoly of nitrates. By the early 1930s, the nitrate industry was already in decline. Though some salitreras lingered on, catering to niche markets, other towns were emptied almost overnight. In her account of the politics and historical memory of the Chilean north Salt in the Sand, Leslie Jo Frazier writes how:

Under state reorganisation, the few nitrate camps that had survived the worldwide economic depression became vulnerable to shifts not only in market demand but also in state policies. From the 1950s to the 1970s, workers were forcibly removed from their homes as the camps were dismantled and sold for scrap in a concession to entrepreneurs.

Though ‘the people of the pampa [desert] demanded work and insisted that their communities not be destroyed’, their protest marches were ignored, and the former salitreras sank into the destitution described by a local poet:

Now that the pampa is is desert without life

Through the government’s own decisions

the dynamite no longer breaks the silence

that was the sonorous song of national strength

This is why the company towns of the Atacama became ghost towns. Like the Royal Albert docks, they are dusty monuments to the rise and fall of economic empires, of markets that came and went, leaving them with no other way to sustain themselves.

A few lasted longer than most. One day, we drove through the desert from the city of Calama to Pedro de Valdivia, the last salitrera to close in the Atacama. Built in 1931 by the Guggenheim Brothers, Pedro de Valdivia once had 14,000 inhabitants, with all the facilities expected of a modern company town: a sports stadium; a cinema-theatre, a hospital, school and children’s playground:

And the inevitable swimming pool:

In 1996, the last inhabitants left the town. Most of them moved to the nearby salitrera town of Maria Elena, 25 kilometres away - the only nitrate plant still functioning. There was a time when Pedro de Valdivia looked like this:

Now, the town has become another national historical monument. You can still the houses where the managers and administrators lived:

And the humbler buildings that housed the workers:

And now the swimming pool looks like this:

Yet every year, the town is visited by the children and grand-children of former residents. Facebook and YouTube videos are often accompanied by expressions of nostalgia for the town, some of which are written by Chileans from as far away as New Zealand. Because the history of these nitrate towns is not just the history of exploitation and class conflicts. Real communities were forged in these towns, with a culture and society that is still a source of pride to pampinos who lived in these towns.

Some of them became concentration camps during the dictatorship. Now, most of them have been abandoned to the desert. And in our synthetic post-modern world that often feels like a perpetual present without a past, there are visitors, like me, who will drive for miles to see these towns, and ponder the lost worlds that they were once part of.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It’s this apparent proximity between past and present that, to my mind, explains their irresistible allure. In terms of our practical ability to be able to ‘go back in time’, something that happened five minutes ago is as inaccessible as something that happened five hundred years ago.

We can remember, but we can never go back.

The ghost towns of the Atacama suggest otherwise. In their dusty streets, abandoned playgrounds, and empty theatres, we feel closer to the people who once inhabited them. Take this street sign, in the abandoned mining town of Chuiquicamata, which proclaims ‘Cecilia is spring’ at the foot of a mountain of copper tailings.

It was erected by friends of a young woman called Cecilia, to boost her chances of winning the ‘queen of spring’ competition.

Cecilia didn’t win. But even though she never became spring, her name remains. And even if none of us who see it will ever know who she was, the sign speaks to us from out of the past.

Like the empty cinemas and playgrounds, we are able to feel a kind of kinship with a living community conjured into existence by flows of commodities and capital. And perhaps part of that kinship stems from the realisation that our own communities - even in our seemingly impregnable megacities - may one day disappear.

Share

Before I came to the Atacama, I hadn’t looked at stars for a long time. From time to time I saw a few stars through a haze of urban light pollution. But there were never enough of them to hold my attention. Out here in the desert, it’s a different matter.

One night last week, we lay on our backs on wooden palettes outside San Pedro de Atacam, looking up at a sky brimming with stars, while an Indigenous astronomer expertly guided us with a laser pen through the lunar calendar, the motion of the celestial Equator, the location of the Southern Cross, the Diamond Cross, Sagittarius and other constellations that I’d heard of but never actually seen. Afterwards, we looked up through telescopes at the moon, a time-lapse image of a nebula and a galaxy containing millions of stars.

Our guide also talked us through Indigenous ‘dark constellations’ – the great lama and its baby; the fox chasing the baby; the serpent and the toad. We saw the sheen of dust covering the Milky Way, which Indigenous Atacameños regard as a river containing the spirits of their ancestors. As my untrained eye followed our guide’s laser pen, I found myself wondering what else was up there.

I thought of Kurt Waldheim, the war criminal-turned UN General Secretary, whose voice is now circling deep space on the Voyager Golden Record, along with Chuck Berry, Glenn Gould, and the Bavarian State Orchestra. I thought of the Chilean writer Nona Fernández’s remarkable memoir-essay Voyager: Constellations of Memory, in which she links the constellations that she observed in the Atacama to the neurons in her mother's brain, to individual memory and to Chile’s collective memory of dictatorship and the disappeared.

Subscribe now

Her book culminates in an account of the Carl Sagan series Cosmos, which she watched as a teenager during the Pinochet years, as she imagines the two Voyagers that Sagan helped prepare, ‘moving through space at this very moment, travelling with their golden records bearing our attempts to register the best of humanity.’

Today, there many objects moving through space that do not necessarily represent the best of humanity. In May 2025, the Union of Concerned Scientists Satellite Database listed about 9,800 active satellites in Earth’s orbit - a figure that rises to 27,000 according the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, if older satellites, rockets and space junk are taken into account. Governments, universities, private corporations such as SpaceX, Starlink, One Web and Amazon are all filling the skies with satellite constellations.

From my desert vantage point, I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were out there: comsats (commercial satellites): Starlink/Netflix combos; military satellites and space shuttles. Some of them were spying and gathering intelligence, or guiding bombs to their target in Gaza or Ukraine. Others would be streaming Better Call Saul or Sex Education, promoting Amazon Prime or GPT Chatbot, or enabling users to post selfies on Instagram.

In the coming decades there are likely to be more and more of them, as the militarisation and commercialisation of space intensifies. But here in the Atacama, there are also organisations that are looking at the stars for entirely different reasons.

Because of its high altitude, dry climate, generally cloudless skies, and lack of light pollution, the Atacama has become the location for some of the most advanced astronomical observatories in the world. Last week, I was lucky enough to visit the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) - the most powerful radio telescope in the world. Established in 2011 and fully-operational since 2013, the observatory is a multinational project involving the European Southern Observatory (ESO), America, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile.

The ESO’s stated mission is ‘to enable scientists to discover the secrets of the Universe for the benefit of all’ , and the ALMA is the jewel in the crown of the Atacama’s observatories. In an era in which space is dominated by military and commercial agendas, I was curious to see an international observatory dedicated entirely to the search for humanity’s cosmic origins.

From the main road leading through the Salar de Atacama, we could see the ALMA’s Operation and Support Facility nestled on the slopes of the Andean Cordillera, beneath the Licanbur and Lascar volcanoes. After screening at the entry gate, we drove up the dirt road past the ruins of old Indigenous shepherd hits, towards the offices and hangars - the only part of the observatory visitors are allowed to see.

We couldn’t see the huge radio telescopes on the Chajnantor Plateau, further up, at an altitude of 5,000 metres. There are 66 of these mighty telescopes, which are moved back and forth and clicked into fixed bases, across a distance of 16 kilometres:

These telescopes are moved by giant transportion vehicles with 1,000 horsepower engines, whose drivers - most of whom come from a mining background - need oxygen to work at such high altitudes. Their movements are scheduled months in advance, according to the requirements of scientists across the world, who make use of the facility. The ALMA is essentially a data-collecting centre, which gathers information for others. Every year, proposals are submitted to the observatory and then peer-reviewed, and accepted projects will then determine the movements of the antennae, which will be scheduled months in advance.

This mobility, coupled with the exception e results have often been sensational. It’s antennae have captured images of new-born stars from 500 years ago:

And ‘rotating galaxies’ that existed only 700,000 million years after the Big Bang:

The combination of bandwidth and mobility has enabled the ALMA to take unprecedented high-resolution images, zooming in on planets, stars, and galaxies in the ‘cold universe’ that are invisible to the naked eye. As a result, the ALMA has become both a cosmic narrator and ‘time machine’, piecing together and reshaping our understanding of the earliest stages of the Universe. These achievements have enormous scientific value, but to what extent does the ALMA contribute to ‘the benefit of all?’

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I asked our guide Nicolas Lira, the ALMA’s Education and Public Outreach Coordinator. Lira has been working for ALMA for twelve years now. An eloquent and thoughtful former journalist, he has a background in physics and science and used to work in the tourist industry, television newsrooms. None of this suited him. ‘ I started to seek some purpose, where I could combine my skills, and I found a home here, combining science and science communication skills, and working for humanity and not for profit.’ I asked him how ALMA’s work benefited humanity.

We are trying to explain how life came to be in our universe, because everybody has these fundamental questions: about how we came to be on earth, about how we came to be alive, and what will happen to civilisations in the future. Of course the timescales are so big that it might not seem important for a single life, but I think what differentiates humans from other species is that we actually ask ourselves these questions, and we can actually project ourselves into the future and into the past.

But how would he explain the significance of these discoveries to the lay person?

If you want to improve life or how to understand life, you have to understand the origin of what can sustain life. And that cannot be done without astronomy. Or course, neither can it be done without biology or a fundamental science. But astronomy is one of the buildings blocks of that knowledge.

Given the shortness of a human life, was it really possible for ordinary people to comprehend the significance of astronomical discoveries that ranged back and forth across unimaginable timescales? Again, Lira had an answer:

Most people are able to understand that we are a small part of a very big universe. That’s what makes us look at the sky or at the ocean, and whenever you look at the moon you see the vastness you do feel that you are something small in something very big. And humanity has been trying to build a heritage over the centuries, over millennia. When we started writing on walls, 30,000 or 3,000 years ago, that was the beginning of building a heritage. So I think most people do have a sense of making a small contribution to a bigger heritage.

Though Lira pointed out that this sense of contributing to a heritage was not limited to astronomy, he nevertheless insisted that astronomers occupied a unique and privileged position that enabled them to ‘take a picture of the universe, so complete and so detailed that it will allow humanity to guess how it was before and how it was going to be afterwards.‘

These were fine words, and as Lira showed us round the laboratories and control rooms where data from the radio-telescopes was collected, 24 hours of every day, I was impressed by the technical expertise that had been directed to what was essential an altruistic exercise in pure science: It was a thrilling and awe-inspiring sight to see one of the antennae, some thirty foot high, next to its transportation carrier:

This was technology at the cutting edge, with no military or commercial implications. In a world increasingly governed by yahoos, it was a testament to the benign possibilities of international scientific cooperation. As we drove away, I thought of Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth century astronomer, and mathematician who discovered the laws of planetary motion.

Kepler’s personal and professional life was marked by tragedy, financial insecurity and constant setbacks and reversals. He lost three children before the age of six within a six-month period. His first wife died of fever in 1611. He lost three more children with his second wife Susannah, who also died young.

He was financially dependent on various patrons, and subject to the shifting winds of religious intolerance. He lived in an age of violence and fanaticism – against a background of imperial conflict and the barbarism of the Thirty Years War. His mother was put on trial for witchcraft - in part because of a reference to a herbalist in his ‘science fiction’ novel Somnium.

And yet Kepler never stopped looking at the stars, and studying the cosmos that be believed had been created by God. Our technology-saturated age is also an age of violence, religious fanaticism, moronic quasi-religious superstitions pumping endlessly through a supposedly interconnected world, that continues to generate polarisation, conflict and division.

Where Kepler’s peers once tried his mother for witchcraft, tens of thousands of people in the 21st century believe that viruses are carried by 5G, that the world is governed by cannibal celebrity-elites. We live in an age in which men run down pedestrians in the name of God, and target abortion clinics that they believe are the work of the devil. The day before I lay in the desert looking up at the stars, Israel obliterated a café in Gaza with a 500 lb bomb - guided by satellite.

The ALMA belongs to a different world, and to different possibilities, that are still present even in our new age of barbarism and our wilful embrace of malevolent stupidity. From the world’s driest desert, it is probing the spaces between the stars in an attempt to tell humanity where it came from and where it might be going. As I returned to San Pedro de Atacama, I felt privileged to have seen it. And I took some consolation from the endless reminders of our fractured and increasingly demented world, in the knowledge that Kepler’s heirs were using this mighty outpost of science in the Andes ‘for the benefit of all.’

Share

From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to the Mad Max franchise, deserts are ubiquitous components of our worst imagined future - the barren lands where civilisation dies and feral bands engage in violent competition for scant resources, almost none of which come from the desert itself.

Deserts lend themselves easily to these fictional scenarios, because deserts have long been imagined by outsiders as dead lands that are unfit for humans. But the Atacama has other stories to tell, and I was keen to hear them.

Before coming here, I was intrigued by the atrapanieblas (fogcatchers) - a Chilean invention which uses Raschel mesh to ‘catch’ fog moisture and turn it into water. This mesh is commonly used in athletics and sports wear, and agricultural packaging. The Chilean variant uses vertical panels, stretched out like hides between two tall pillars, to trap the moisture from the fog known as the Camanchaca , which drifts in most days from the Pacific Ocean along some 1,200 kilometres of coastline.

Subscribe now

I wanted to see how this technology worked in practice, but my attempt to do so turned out very differently to what I expected - a near-disaster, followed by an experience of the desert that I won’t easily forget.

The day began in Iquique, when I sent a request to the Universidad Católica del Norte, asking to visit the UC Atacama Desert Station at Alto Patache, where one of Chile’s ‘fog oases’ were located. I had applied before, without much luck, and nothing seemed to be happening this time, so I went off to the famous Zofri shopping mall, basically because I had never seen a shopping mall in a desert before.

Iquique is one of the largest duty-free ports in South America, and the docks were stacked with containers some seven stories high, alongside a garish Macworld mall containing all the commodities that you would expect to find anywhere - except that some of the mobile phones and computers would have been made with components extracted from the desert itself.

Shortly after that, I got a surprise call from Milton Aviles, the station manager at the Alto Patache station, to say that the station’s director in Santiago had given me permission to spend the night there.

I immediately accepted. Jane was ill with a cold, so I went alone. Around 8 o’clock, Milton and his mate Jorge picked me up. We drove south for about 45 miles along the notoriously accident-prone coastal road from Iquique to Antofagasta, before turning eastwards along the ‘salt route’ that connects the Salar Grande salt mine to the Puerto de Patillos.

To see these giant trucks laden with salt, moving down to the coast, while empty trucks headed up to the mine from the opposite direction to fill up, was to bear witness to Chile’s gargantuan extractive operations in the Atacama, and the 24/7 supply lines that connect the desert to the most far-flung ports with relentless precision. After about half an hour, we left the road and drove along a bone-crunching service road that followed the direction of an electricity pylon.

Finally, I made out a cluster of geodesic domes in the darkness. When we got out, a cold wind was whipping through the compound. I could see the Milky Way above my head, but not much else. It could not have been more different from the fluorescent consumer dreamworld of the Zofri mall. This station had been built in 2016, to replace the previous one that had been destroyed by flash floods the previous year.

I was thrilled and disoriented in equal measure, as Milton turned on some electric lights that dimly illuminated the domes and the wooden walkway that connected them. It felt as if I had arrived on Mars, but I had hardly installed myself in one of the domes when I missed my step and fell off the walkway, cracking my forehead on the corner of a nearby bench. Milton was distraught, thinking that I might have concussion, and he had reason to worry. The bench had caught my forehead just above my right eyelid - an inch or two lower and it would have probably crushed the eye.

My first reaction was intense disappointment that I might not see the station the next day. Blood was seeping through my fingers, and I was minded to patch up the cut with a homemade butterfly stitch and tough it out, but when I looked in the mirror I saw the cut was deeper than I thought. So Milton kindly drove me to a polyclinic about half an hour away down the salt route.

Once again we set out into the dark, and veered in and out of the growling trucks. When we got to the clinic, the paramedic gave me the usual tests. I was still dazed from shock and adrenaline, and he made me lie down and asked me what was needed to become a writer. Why would anyone want to do such a thing? He asked, in a concerned, and faintly pityingly tone.

He had a point. But as I lay there with a makeshift plaster on my throbbing head, I tried to defend my chosen profession and explain the qualities required. Surely he must have some stories he would have liked to write about? I asked, hoping to end the interrogation.

He did, and he proceeded to regale me with some tales of unbelievable carnage and tragedy drawn from his long career pulling people from crashed cars and motorbikes along the Iquique-Antofagasta highway. It was almost a relief when he finally told me that I would need stitches, and that we would have to go to Iquique to get them.

So the noble Milton drove me all the way back to Iquique, where a doctor named Doctor Alegre ( Doctor Happy - and no, I’m not making this up) gave me two stitches and sent me on my way at about 4 in the morning. Once again we headed down the highway of death, up the salt route, and onto the dirt road leading into the howling void. Finally, I got a few hours parody of sleep, huddled on a camp bed with the desert winds tugging at the dome.

The next morning, I woke up and looked around at Alto Patache station, and it all seemed worth it. Because this was the desert in all its raw, majestic splendour. From the compound, I could see banks of low cumulus clouds being pushed out to sea by the wind. By mid-afternoon, Milton confidently assured me, the winds would reverse direction, the Camanchaca would descend on the hillside, and the fogcatchers would begin to work their magic.

I left Milton and Jorge assembling another geodesic dome, and walked up the path to the greenhouse and the two largest fogcatchers. I don’t know if it was the blow to my head or the sleeplessness, but I felt exhilarated and even euphoric. To the east, the dry hills stretched out endlessly, and I could see dried up river beds, ancient llama trails, and paleo-runoffs etched like scratch marks into the dry slopes.

At first sight, the terrain seemed utterly barren. But then I saw patches of orange, green and yellow from a distance, and moving closer I could see lichens clinging to the rocks, occasional shrubs, and little pieces of black silicate rock that might have been left by meteorites.

This was not the barren land of The Road or Furiosa. All around me, living organisms had found enough moisture to cling tenaciously to the rocks and dry stony earth, and it was this unlikely capacity for survival that has inspired the UC Desert station and other similar experiments in the Atacama and beyond.

In a hyper-arid region where there is rarely enough rainfall to support human life, Chilean scientists have learned how to extract moisture from the camanchaca fog, which settles for some 1,200 miles of coastline. Fog moisture is not heavy enough to fall to earth and become rain, but scientists saw that lichens and cacti were able to ‘catch’ enough liquid to enable them to survival, and fogcatching technology sought to do the same for humans.

The invention is ingenious and also very simple. Mesh panels are fixed into the upper slopes of the station, which trap moisture as the fog passes through them. These microscopic droplets fall into a plastic gutter, and drain into hosepipes, which connect storage cisterns. When the water in these tanks reaches a certain level, it is transported by high-pressure hose pipes into the station’s sink, showers, and toilets.

Amazingly, this system produces an average of 45,000 litres of water annually - enough to sustain the station and its visitors throughout the year. The water also enables a cactus garden, a greenhouse filled with strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes and herbs, and a small plot of maize. Electricity is provided by solar power, which makes the station - potentially - entirely sustainable.

I felt strangely moved by this experiment, as I stood listening to the wind ‘singing’ through the mesh on the largest fogcatcher. I walked around, examining lichens, past the small fogcatchers, the seismograph that measures tremors and earthquakes, and the meteorological station measuring humidity, temperature, and radiation levels. I saw the ‘art in the desert’ house created by the Catholic University’s architects - the prototype for a sustainable habitation in extreme environments that eventually became a larger house presented at this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture.

At the end of my walk, I stood on the cliff overlooking the salt port at Puerto de , .and the nearby copper port. Further south, I could see the Pabellón de Pica, graveyard of so many Chinese workers who were tricked into slavery to work in the lethal guano industry that provided fertiliser for European and American farmers in the nineteenth century.

Incredibly, it was only 20 years ago - following intervention from the Chinese government- that the remains of Chinese workers who had been left to dangle from the ropes for more than 150 years where they died were finally taken down and given a decent burial.

From guano to copper and salt, this was the history of the Atacama: the ruthless extraction of minerals and metals, from nitrates, silver, copper, and lithium, that have decisively shaped the modern world. The Alto Patache station told another story - a little marvel of human adaptability with implications for Chile and beyond.

At one point in my wanderings, I came across a large bush that seemed to owe its existence entirely to the fogcatching cistern alongside it. Rising up out of the stony ground at a height off nearly four feet, it seemed nothing short of miraculous.

But there is no miracle here - just scientists using their intelligence and knowledge to solve local problems that are also global problems. This is why Carlos Espinosa, the Chilean scientist who first invented fogcatchers in the 1950s to address the problem of water scarcity in Antofagasta, donated his patent to UNESCO, so that others could use it. The Alto Patache station has been instrumental in creating the AMARU (water snake in Quechua) ‘Fog Catcher Map’ which uses data from the 25 stations of the Chile Fog Water Monitoring Network.

As Milton told me, fogcatching is not a catch-all solution to hyper-arid spaces. Not every desert has the regular fogs that descend on coastal Chile, or the coastal cordillera that prevent them from dissipating, and the winds that push the camanchaca into the traps. But in demonstrating human adaptation to an environment that is generally considered to be unsuited for human habitation, it also offers a relatively low-tech micro-solution that could potentially be applied to other countries with similar conditions.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In the years to come, we will need this kind of ingenuity and creativity, and altruistic science. Last week the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) delivered another of its increasingly grim warnings on global desertification and drought. Coming in a summer when even Europe is sweltering under record-breaking temperatures, the report was further confirmation that desertification is part of our present and future.

By the late afternoon, the Camachaca had not appeared, and I was amazed to count four drops of rain on my face and hands. Milton and Jorge eyed the clouds gloomily, and said that there would be more where that came from.

It didn’t seem likely, but as I drove back to Iquique, I felt encouraged and hopeful by what I had seen. In the future we will need the fogcatchers far more than we will need Mad Max and Bartertown. In a world facing ecological catastrophe, we will need people looking for practical, accessible solutions to natural problems and the problems that humans, and not for profit or glory, or the benefit of shareholders, but to help others.

As we approached my hotel, a man dressed as Predator was pretending to attack passing cars. It seemed a fitting end to my wild ride into the desert. Once again, I thanked Milton, who had done so much to help me. And as I walked into the hotel lobby, the privilege of seeing this experiment with my own eyes was well worth the crack on the head.

Milton and Jorge were right, of course. That night it rained in Iquique, Alto Patache and in other parts of the Atacama. Such events do happen from time to time, but they are never enough to make a long term difference.

This is why the fogcatchers are needed. And in the years to come, many Chileans in the north will be keen to see how Amaru the water snake wends its way up and down the coast, and other communities around the world may also have reason to see how this experiment unfolds.

All photographs taken with permission of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Norte.

Share