Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, Books, France, History, Scotland

Book Review: The Thistle and The Rose

LITERARY REVIEW

HISTORY has taught us and we have become accustomed to the idea of Henry VIII being so vile and dastardly to his wives that it has been easy to overlook the fact that he was equally cruel and beastly to his sister.

Margaret Tudor was born two years before Henry, and he never seems to have forgiven her for arriving first. Add in the fact that she became Queen of Scotland at the age of just 13 when he was still only Prince of Wales and you have the makings of a sibling rivalry that stretched until Margaret’s death in 1541.

Instead of squabbling over who was better at Latin or who had the nicest pony, the royal brother and sister indulged in vicious politicking which descended into their respective kingdoms taking up arms against each other.

Henry outlived his sister by just over five years, but it was long enough to ensure that he won the PR war. Consequently, Margaret Tudor has gone down in the historical records as a silly woman who spent her time buying clothes she couldn’t afford and of being highly promiscuous.

Repugnant of all, Henry accused his sister of writing him begging letters and whingeing about being short of money. What he didn’t mention was that he had deliberately withheld from her the fortune that she had inherited under the terms of their father’s will. In the circumstances, she had every right to complain.

In this passionate act of rehabilitation, Linda Porter argues that Margaret Tudor was a lot more than an airhead who didn’t know where to stop with the diamonds.

From the moment she arrived north, barely into her teens, to marry James IV of Scotland, she developed a subtle but powerful sense of what needed to be done to prevent Scotland from fracturing into warring clans. You have only to know that the people around her were called things such as Archibald the Grim, James the Gross, and Robert Blackadder to soon realise that this was a wild and wuthering place.

The one saving grace in Margaret’s new life north of the border was her husband, King James. Modern alarm bells will ring when it is known that he was 30 and she 13 years old, but the record documents that he seems to have been a genuinely loving and attentive husband.

He also appreciated the subtle power that came with dressing well, and he showered his young wife with expensive furs, silks, and jewels so that she looked as glamorous as any French princess. Readers will recall that Scotland and France were historically bound together in the “Auld Alliance” which, naturally, gave Henry the jitters.

Of more significance, and from a tactical point of view, was that Margaret produced a string of babies in the first few years of her marriage, ensuring the Stuart dynasty’s security for the next generation and beyond. One of her grandchildren became Mary, Queen of Scots.

It was his sister’s fertility that made Henry especially furious. Despite having been married to Katherine of Aragon for seven years, he was still childless, which meant that, should anything happen to him, Margaret would inherit the English throne, quite possibly with James ruling alongside her. For such a competitive man, the thought was unbearable.

This simmering bad feeling came to a head in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden between the English and Scots, which led to the bloody death of James and most of his nobles.

For the rest of her life Margaret found herself in a tenuous position. Her baby son was now crowned James V and she was installed as his Regent. But this arrangement was never going to please ruthless Scottish clansmen, who now vied to see who could dethrone her.

At this point Henry could have stepped in to help his sister. Instead, he took perverse pleasure in making things difficult.

When she announced her intention to divorce her next husband, a rotter called Archibald Douglas who had siphoned off what remained of her money, Henry delivered a condescending lecture on her low moral standards. This was particularly rich given the way that he was going through wives like a hot knife through butter.

Ironically, in the long term, it was Margaret who won this deadly sibling feud. Despite his multiple marriages, Henry failed to establish a secure Tudor bloodline – none of his children produced an heir.

By contrast, Margaret’s great-grandson, ruled Scotland as James VI and, in 1603, on Queen Elizabeth I’s death, was invited south to become James I of England.

Within a year he decreed that he would be known as the King of Great Britain and insisted that Scotland and England would walk together in unity. But as history clearly shows there have been many subsequent attempts to divide. Certainly, the monarchy in Scotland is seen very differently to how it is perceived in England.

Linda Porter has drawn on the latest scholarship and offers an entertaining book that lights up a shadowy and fascinating corner of Tudor history.

– The Thistle and The Rose by Linda Porter is published by Head of Zeus, 400pp

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Britain, Economic, Energy, Environment, Government, Politics, Society

Great British Energy risks decimating energy security

UK ENERGY POLICY

KEIR Starmer’s aspirations for a carbon-free and energy-secure nation fulfilled at a stroke through the creation of his new quango, Great British Energy (GBE), is at odds with the reality of the situation.

The UK would, of course, welcome a green and pleasant land with cleaner air, lower carbon emissions, cheaper fuel bills, and a reduced dependence on Vladimir Putin and his gas pipelines that run from Russia to the West.

But the truth is the creation of GBE will deliver few, if any, of the bold pledges that Sir Keir Starmer and his Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, are making.

In the King’s Speech, Sir Keir’s new government confirmed that GBE, the state-owned energy company, will develop, own and operate energy projects such as wind farms, using public money to help spur further private sector investment.

But the £8.3billion of money promised by the Exchequer for Britain’s energy transformation over the term of the current parliament will be a mere drop in the ocean.

In spite of the overblown language, this is a fraction of the sums of money already devoted to “climate reduction” goals by our UK-listed oil firms Shell and BP, as well as domestically owned power suppliers Centrica and Scottish & Southern Electricity (SSE).

Some argue it is reassuring that GBE will be headed up by Juergen Maier, the former boss of German multinational Siemens’s British arm, who might bring some much-needed private-sector experience to the job.

What is less reassuring, however, is the disastrous financial performance of Siemens Energy. It ran up losses of £3.7billion in 2023 alone. Combined with the desperate track record of past Labour governments to command and control the economy through grandiose quangos such as the National Enterprise Board of the 1970s, it looks almost inevitable that GBE will become yet another vast black hole, drawing vast public cash at the expense of other strained public services.

Most critically, by blocking future North Sea oil licences, as Starmer has done, and holding fire on the prospects for new nuclear production, the nation’s energy security is being sacrificed in order to pursue unproven green energy “solutions”.

In doing so, the UK is exposed to the danger of factories being closed, the elderly and poor freezing in their homes, and the lights going out when the wind fails to blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

It is also critical that the UK can maintain a minimum level of electricity production at all times – especially if the Government pursues a mad rush towards electric vehicles which, in many cases, are proving notoriously unreliable.

That is why Centrica-owned British Gas is investing heavily in renewing the nation’s gas storage capacity at Rough off the East Yorkshire coast and exploring other potential sites in Wales.

Not to mention that Starmer and Miliband appear willing to trash 100,000 North Sea oil-related jobs, sabotage Aberdeen, and lose £30billion of new investment in fossil fuels, and the engineering services which go with them, to drive the “green revolution”. Labour believes that by signing an agreement with the Crown Estate – which has command over most of the nation’s coastal waters – it can generate £60billion of new investment. The link to the monarchy alone could potentially attract some foreign investors on the grounds of offering a kind of royal imprimatur. But we shouldn’t get carried away by Labour’s hoopla.

The Crown Estate has much more skill and expertise on redeveloping real estate, such as Dumfries House in Scotland, than it does in energy projects. Despite its prestigious reputation, the Crown Estate’s new agreement with Labour, is at the hands of hard economic facts. The only thing that will attract investors is a competitive entry price. If the price at which energy generated at the offshore windfarms can be sold is set too low to make the projects viable, it will deter bidders.

We learnt this the hard way in a crucial auction last year, when not a single company bid to run a new offshore wind farm. That was because the Tory government had set the energy price too low. Even more seriously, a major proposed investment off the Norfolk coast was temporarily put on hold.

The same thing happened in the US last year when Ørsted cancelled £3.3billion of wind projects because it could not make the financial returns.

Earlier this year, BP also pulled out of its involvement in New York state wind farms – at a heavy cost to investors – because of the difficulty of getting decent returns.

The ultimate goal in all of these wind farm projects may have been lower prices for consumers. The reality is that only by offering a higher energy price to investors will they come forward – and the projects be built. It’s an uncomfortable truth for Labour, who want to be seen to be providing the cheapest energy possible to its citizens.

They have been repeatedly questioned about when, or even if, their “Green New Deal” would deliver lower prices for consumers, but Labour have been unable to answer. So much for cheaper bills and the election manifesto pledge that consumers would be £300 a year better off.

A secondary aim of GBE is to boost our manufacturing sector, creating new skills and employment opportunities to replace those in fossil fuels.

Certainly, this is a perfectly noble aim. But in Britain, we have already sold ourselves out. Most of the solar panels being installed on the roofs of homes and factories across the UK are being built in China at a fraction of the cost they can be made in the UK.

One only has to look at how Beijing is dominating the market for electric cars – and the 50 per cent tariffs imposed by the US and Europe to slow imports – to understand how difficult it is going to be to compete with Asian production.

There is also evidence that Chinese suppliers of wind farm equipment are using cheap Uyghur labour to manufacture wind turbines. It will be all but impossible for UK manufacturers to compete (currently responsible for less than 10 per cent of wind farm components).

There is one area of green technology where Britian does have a competitive quality and engineering advantage. Rolls-Royce, with the assistance of government funding, leads the world in the development of “small modular reactors”. These are mini, simple-to-construct nuclear reactors based on the turbines that power nuclear-powered submarines.

Rolls-Royce believes it is capable of capturing a £250billion global market if it receives the go-ahead from Whitehall for UK production. The Czech Republic has already expressed an interest in buying them.

Tens of thousands of real jobs – not the Potemkin quango roles envisioned by the UK’s new Government – are there to be created.

We can only hope for the success of Great British Energy and the zero-carbon nirvana envisaged by our mission-driven Government.

But there are huge fears in creating a taxpayer-funded white elephant which will decimate our energy security.

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Books, China, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: Autocracy, Inc

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Standing up to the tyrants in the East

THERE isn’t a more rigorous and engaging analyst of the crimes of the erstwhile Soviet dictatorship than Anne Applebaum, the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer prize-winning history of the Gulag, and also of Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine.

For her gifts, the historian is also rooted in the present, as a fearsomely active journalist, and the writer’s latest work is an up-to-the moment examination of how modern-day autocracies, not just that of Russia’s President Putin, but also including China, North Korea, and Iran, act as a kind of informal bloc to challenge what they see as the West’s “hegemony”.

It’s unfortunate that the phrase “axis of evil” has already been taken, since that would be a befitting description. Alas, it was inappropriately used by George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to join together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea – which actually had no military or financial links at all.

Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, do, however, connect in this way, accelerated by Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

The only minor criticism of Applebaum’s formidable book is that it never mentions the Iraq War of 2003–2011 or the later Western intervention in Libya. For these were the developments which not only gave fuel to the anti-Western agenda, but also convinced many – including in the West itself – that we had little moral authority to criticise the military escapades launched by the Kremlin.

Applebaum is especially adept, however, in setting out the remarkable success of modern Russian propaganda – beyond the scope that Stalin could ever have dreamed of – using the worldwide web, and of China’s ability both to control its own people through technology and to censor what was thought to be unstoppable.

At the dawn of the millennium the ever-optimistic U.S. President Bill Clinton proclaimed that the internet would liberalise China, by exposing its people to all the possibilities and opportunities the free world had to offer.

When arguing, on similar grounds, for China to be admitted to the World Trade Organisation, he gave an address in which he ridiculed the idea that Beijing could keep a lid on things.

“Now, there’s no question that China’s been trying to crack down on the internet,” he declared. At that point, as Applebaum records, Clinton gave a wry smile, adding: “Good luck!” – and his audience joined in the laughter.

They are not laughing now. The Great Firewall of China, and even more sophisticated tools than that, have allowed Beijing to succeed, keeping billions of its citizens in a form of intellectual slavery.

In a similar vein, the German political establishment had long believed in the doctrine known as Wandel durch Handel – “change through trade” – the idea that making nice with Moscow in terms of market access would inevitably lead to political and cultural liberalisation. This was most notable with pipelines taking Russian gas to Europe. That dream, or self-interest, in terms of the aspirations of German business, has also been shattered. The kleptocracy just got richer and far  more ruthless. 

As the deputy mayor of St Petersburg in 1992, and in his first public role, the former KGB officer Putin argued that “the entrepreneurial class should become the basis for the flourishing of our society as a whole”. That was music to the ears of Western investors, but Putin was then, already, creaming off vast sums for himself and his associates, via his control of local export licences for raw material.

As Applebaum notes, under Putin’s perpetually renewed presidency this ultimately developed into “a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a Mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leadership”. It was for his leading role in exposing this that Alexei Navalny paid with his life.

Despite his apparent personal austerity and regular crackdowns on colossal financial corruption within the Chinese Communist Party – the inescapable consequence of permanent one-party rule – Xi Jinping is only too happy to make common cause with the multibillionaire plutocrat Putin.

Central, this is because they share a primordial terror of a popular uprising against their regimes: in this context, it was striking how in 2022 Xi suddenly abandoned his hitherto iron-cast Covid lockdown measures after a public revolt threatened to spread to the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.

And the “no limits” friendship which Xi entered into with Putin on February 4, 2022, was specifically designed to demonstrate a kind of solidarity among autocracies, against what they both constantly refer to as the West’s “attempts at hegemony”.

Their joint communiqué denounced “the abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states”. Weeks later, Putin sent his tanks towards Kyiv.

There was a tantalising glimpse of a possible fracture in the relationship at that moment: it seems likley that Xi was not given a warning by Putin of what was about to happen and, some months later, Beijing made public its grave concern about the Kremlin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, as Anne Applebaum concludes, the challenge to “Autocracy, Inc” must come from within the West itself.

And, yet, if the forecasts are right, the American people seem likely to elect to the White House (again) their own version of Autocracy Inc: Donald J. Trump.

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