Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, Books, History, Literature, Scotland

Scottish author says Shakespeare got Macbeth wrong

SHAKESPEARIAN TRAGEGY

AS generations of pupils learned in English classes, Lady Macbeth, the cold-hearted, scheming villain who casts her dark shadow over one of literature’s most famous plays, and driven by a lust for power, persuaded her weak-willed husband to commit murder most foul.

Yet, according to one of Scotland’s illustrious top crime writers, Shakespeare got the tragedy of Macbeth all wrong.

Novelist Val McDermid – with a helping hand from former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon – has written a book exploring the real story of the woman who became Queen Macbeth, first Queen of Scotland.

And part of her aim, she says, is “setting Shakespeare straight”.

According to the Bard of Avon, the Macbeths are motivated by merciless ambition which ultimately leads to their downfall. Their tragedy stems from their decision to seize the throne by killing King Duncan while he is asleep.

But McDermid, whose novels have sold more than 19 million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages, recasts the tale in a feminist light – as a historical romance seen from the perspective of a strong and determined woman fighting for life and love.

As befits a crime writer, the book contains a major plot twist. But in a departure from the gritty “tartan noir” genre for which she is highly acclaimed, McDermid also ventures into the realm of erotic fiction.

In the author’s notes at the start of the book, she claims the Macbeths were “not the power-hungry bloody tyrants that Shakespeare wrote of in his Scottish play”.

And in highlighting other inaccuracies, she says: “For a start, Macbeth wasn’t even his name – it was Macbethad. His wife wasn’t Lady Macbeth – she was Gruoch. If he couldn’t get their names right, how can we trust anything else he tells us?”

She also claims the Elizabethan playwright made an error about the death of King Duncan. “Yes, Macbeth did kill Duncan, but it was on the field of battle, not in the dead of night when Duncan was a guest in his castle.”

Queen Macbeth, to be released shortly, tells the fictionalised life-story of Gruoch Ingen Boite, who is forced into a loveless arranged marriage, but finds true love with a nobleman called Macbeth. In the acknowledgements, the author thanks her friend and fellow book lover Ms Sturgeon, “whose animated dinner conversation resolved an awkward plot point for me”. She added: “It’s amazing how a few glasses of red wine release the imagination…”

The novel contains echoes of Shakespeare but imagined from a feminist perspective. The witches who prophesy Macbeth’s doom are replaced by three women – a healer, weaver, and a seer – whose powers make the men of mediaeval Scotland deeply suspicious.

The tale starts with Gruoch and her companions fleeing from plotters who believe she stands in the way of their ambition for power.

As the narrative develops, Gruoch recalls the stirrings of her love for Macbeth, including a racy description of their first moment of intimacy, saying: “Where our bodies touched it was like a lick of flame running through me.”

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth encourages her husband to commit murder, but McDermid’s version urges caution when Macbeth considers revenge against a rival, saying: “Better to be slow than to shed innocent blood, surely?”

The book is part of Polygon’s Darkland Tales – dramatic retellings of key moments from Scottish history, myth, and legend.

Pre-publication publicity promises McDermid will reveal “a new Lady Macbeth, bringing a schemer in the shadows out into the light and exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history.”

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Aid, Britain, Defence, Economic, Government, Politics

Defence spending is lacklustre. Structural reforms are needed.

DEFENCE SPENDING

Intro: Why do we still send millions to China when we desperately need that money to defend ourselves against countries like… China?

WHEREVER you look, Britain’s adversaries are on the offensive. Russian hegemony and aggression shows no sign of abating. China’s military jets breach Taiwan’s airspace almost on a daily basis, and with its unprecedented defence spending, Beijing’s ambitions evidently stretch further. Iran’s proxies attack British ships in the Red Sea while Tehran is on the verge of gaining nuclear weapon capability. The security threats we face are the greatest in a generation.

In geopolitics, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. And the UK, hands meekly by its side, is yet to muster any credible response. Despite a recent increase in spending, our Armed Forces are still reeling from 30 years of cuts and disastrous unwinnable wars that have steadily eroded our conventional capability. We are shockingly under-prepared for this more contested world.

At the outbreak of the Falkland War in 1982, the Royal Navy had 43 frigates and 12 destroyers. It now has 13 and six respectively.

Russia regularly deploys spy ships to tamper with our undersea cables, yet neither of the two specialist ships needed to protect them have materialised, despite being announced in 2021.

The British Army has shrunk to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era. Of serious concern, there is a £17billion black hole in the Ministry of Defence’s ten-year procurement plan. By some estimates, if Russia invaded a NATO member – a very real and distinct possibility – our stockpile of ammunition would last just eight days.

Most scandalously, the foundations of our defence, our Trident nuclear deterrent, has been appallingly neglected. Just two of the four submarines that deliver our continuous at sea deterrent are functional. They are so stretched that our Vanguard submarines are being sent on longer deployments than ever before. Submariners now have to spend five months continuously at sea – three months more than in the past. The next generation of Dreadnought submarines set to replace our old and creaking fleet is well behind schedule.

The dangerous and humiliating collapse of our nuclear deterrent is a catastrophe waiting to happen unless we urgently grip this crisis. A reckoning is inescapable.

The cost of sustaining Trident is cannibalising the rest of the UK military budget. We have no choice but to increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP to deliver the uplift we need to defend ourselves. If Greece and Poland can do it, why is it beyond the UK’s reach? Most in Parliament agree; that’s the straightforward part.

What’s much harder to explain is how to fund this increase when money is tight. Hard trade-offs will need to follow.

Strong defence rests upon a strong economy that can fund military upgrades. To provide the type of defence we need the UK will need to relentlessly pursue pro-growth, supply-side reforms. This will include liberalising planning to build more affordable homes, roads and factories, reforming welfare to get abled bodied people back into work, and cutting regulation that stifles entrepreneurs and small firms.

We cannot continue shovelling more money into increasingly bloated public services. The UK must drive through radical reforms. The security of a nation depends on having a strong military capability.

Strong economic growth will not appear overnight. We cannot wait until tomorrow to tackle today’s crisis. The choices are stark: either taxes are raised hitting an already squeezed middle class, borrow more upon the trillions we already have as public debt, or divert spending from elsewhere.

We mustn’t add to the national debt with interest payments at already astronomical levels, nor increase taxes when the tax burden is at an unacceptable high. Neither should we divert existing spending on the NHS or policing.

Instead, we should cut the foreign aid budget, and redirect that money to defence. While the aid budget does provide vital resources for alleviating extreme poverty that we should continue to support, a significant chunk of our “development” spend is incoherent, wasteful, and not necessary. It’s beyond ludicrous that we send hundreds of millions of pounds to nuclear powers China, India, and Pakistan.

Almost a third of our foreign aid budget goes on the ballooning costs of supporting asylum-seekers in the UK. If we ended the abuse of the system by economic migrants and closed the farcical asylum hotels, billions of pounds could be freed.

Another third goes to multinational organisations such as the UN and World Bank. An estimated 15 per cent of that aid is spent on managing humanitarian crises, the rest we have little control over.

Only ten per cent of the total expended by the Foreign Office on aid goes specifically and directly to deal with humanitarian emergencies. Other uses of taxpayers’ money include nebulous spending on “open societies” and “research and technology”.

Halving the aid budget would free about £7billion a year and immediately push defence spending above 2.5 per cent of GDP. When growth returns, or a crisis unfolds, we could make carefully targeted increases in overseas aid spending.

In a world of difficult choices, we should view our contribution to global peace and security as primarily through hard power and free trade. After all, the expansion of global commerce has been the biggest alleviator of extreme poverty.

There’s an argument, too, that we should also bring back “patriot bonds” which enabled citizens to invest in their security during the World Wars. We should stop guilting City investors out of putting money into our defence industry through warped environmental, social, and governance regulations. Instead, they should be encouraged to support British manufacturing jobs, and our military.

We need to continue reforming our defence procurement systems to ensure taxpayers’ money goes much further and bring an end to the indignity of the MoD having to beg the Treasury for money every year. Nonetheless, billions could be saved in procurement efficiencies if proper structural reform was carried out.

In the words of Churchill, we appear “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift”. If we continue to dodge the difficult political decisions that need to be made, they will only come back as greater crises in the future.

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Arts, Britain, Economic, Government, Society, United Nations

The plunging birthrate will usher in a terrifying dystopia

SOCIETY

FOR MANY PEOPLE the cities of the future will be a landscape of glittering skyscrapers, bullet trains whizzing past green parklands, flying taxis and drones for deliveries, and limitless clean energy.

If this is the picture you envisage, then I’m afraid you may be disappointed. A century from now, swathes of the world’s cities are more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to decaying houses set on empty, weed-strewn streets, much like Detroit is today.

According to a new report from the Lancet medical journal, by the year 2100, just six countries could be having children at “replacement rate” – that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing.

All six nations will be in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe and across the West and Asia, the birthrate will have collapsed – and the total global population will be plummeting.

Eco-activists and environmentalists have long decried humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up vital resources and despoiling the natural world with their activities. Greens purport the message that “human population growth is our greatest worry… there are just too many of us. Because if you run out of resources, it doesn’t matter how well you’re coping: if you’re starving and thirsty, you’ll die.”

Activists seem to think that if we could only reduce the overall population, the surviving rump of humanity could somehow live in closer harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse will presage a terrifying dystopia.

Fewer babies mean older and ageing populations – which in turn means fewer young people paying taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly. And that means that everyone has to work even longer into old age, and in an atmosphere of declining public services and deteriorating quality of life.

If you worry that it’s hard now to find carers to look after elderly relatives, this will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will face when they are old.

In modern industrialised society, it is generally accepted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the average number of children born to each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a stable population.

By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half the world’s countries.

In Britain, it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21, and in South Korea a desperate 0.82.

Even in India – which recently overtook China as the world’s most populous nation – the TFR is down to 1.91.

There are now just 94 countries in which the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers far higher rates of infant mortality.

The dramatic fall in Britian’s birthrate has been disguised until now because we are importing hundreds of thousands of migrants per year to do poorly paid jobs that the native population increasingly spurns. In 2022, net migration here reached more than 700,000. The Office for National Statistics expects the UK population to reach 70million by 2026, 74million by 2036, and almost 77million by 2046 – largely driven by mass migration.

Unless migration remains high, the UK population is likely to start shrinking soon after that point – especially as the last “baby boomer” (born between 1946 and 1964) reaches their 80th birthday in 2044. This mass importation of migrants to counteract a falling domestic birthrate spells huge consequences for our social fabric.

In years to come, Britain is set to face a pitiless battle with other advanced economies – many of them already much richer than we are – to import millions of overseas workers to staff our hospitals, care homes, factories, and everything else.

And once the global population starts to fall in the final decades of this century, it will become even harder to source such workers from abroad. At that point, we may find hospitals having to cut their services or even close.

So, while medical advancements will likely mean that people will be living even longer, we face a grim future in which elderly people will increasingly die of neglect or be looked after by robots – an idea that has been trialled in Japan already.

How has this crisis crept upon us so stealthily? It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations and other world bodies were voicing concern at overpopulation.

For decades, self-proclaimed experts have warned – in the manner of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus – that global supplies of food and water, as well as natural resources, would run out. Graphs confidently showed the world’s population accelerating exponentially, with many claiming that humankind had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilisations as we inevitably outgrew our world.

They could not have been more wrong.

Amid all the activist-esque hysteria about a “population explosion”, many failed to notice that birth rates had already started to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, and then elsewhere.

As societies grow wealthier and the middle classes boom, women start to put off childbearing. This means that they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain especially, there are the added costs of childcare and the often-permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.

The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has, in fact, already peaked.

The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as the one in which more babies were born than any other: 142million of them. By 2021, the figure was 129million – a fall of 9 per cent in just five years.

To be clear, the global population is for the moment still rising because people are living longer thanks to better and improved medical care. We are not dying as quickly as babies are born.

According to the UN, the global population reached 8billion on November 15, 2022. It should carry on growing before peaking at 10.4billion in the 2080s – although the world will be feeling the effects of the declining birth rate long before that.

On current trends, the world’s population will start to fall by the 2090s – the first time this will have happened since the Black Death swept Eurasia in the 14th century.

What, then, if anything, can be done to stop ourselves hurtling towards this calamity?

For one thing, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to have families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, lavish child benefit payments, and better and cheaper childcare, are all a must. This would mean that many mothers wouldn’t have to stop their careers in order to start families.

Britain could, if it chose to, lead the way on this.

But that seems highly unlikely with the imminent prospect of a ruling Labour government: the statist Left habitually loathes any measures that could be seen to benefit the nuclear family or that incentivise people to have more children.

In truth, however, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the issue so widespread – that effectively counteracting it may be next to impossible.

Bar some extraordinary shift, the gradual impoverishment of an ageing and shrinking population seems the planet’s destiny. It is not an attractive thought.

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