Pastel Mist at Dawn

 

Mist at Dawn - 2022

Pastels help softness, diffusion, and tonal harmony. The mist isn’t just a background effect. Maybe a sense of quiet suspension — a place caught between waking and forgetting. Waiting for the day to choose its shape.

North Sea Oil: Climate, Economics, and the Failure of Long-Term Imagination

The argument over new North Sea oil and gas licences has become another of those strangely binary debates that now dominate British public life. One is invited to choose between climate responsibility or economic realism, between moral seriousness or jobs and energy security. Yet the truth, as so often, lies in the uncomfortable space between these poles — a space our politics has become increasingly reluctant to inhabit.

Part of the difficulty is that the present moment is not simply the product of policy choices but of accumulated shocks. The 2008 banking crisis hollowed out fiscal confidence; the pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains; and the rising urgency of climate change has created a moral pressure that politicians are understandably eager to be seen responding to. Empathy for the climate cause is genuine in many cases, but it is also electorally useful. The result is a political culture that gestures toward long-term transformation while remaining structurally addicted to short-term fixes.

Against this backdrop, the North Sea becomes a kind of mirror in which we see both our aspirations and our failures.

Climate Commitments and the Case Against New Fields

Ed Miliband and others argue that approving new oil and gas fields is incompatible with the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. Their case is not merely technical but moral: how can a country that claims climate leadership continue to invest in long-lived fossil infrastructure. New fields would operate for decades, potentially locking in emissions and weakening the UK’s credibility in international negotiations.

They also argue that more domestic production will not meaningfully reduce household bills, since oil and gas prices are set globally. Better, they say, to direct investment toward renewables — offshore wind, solar, and the grid infrastructure needed to support them. In this vision, the North Sea becomes a managed sunset industry: existing fields decline gracefully while new exploration is paused.

There is a moral clarity to this position, but perhaps also a certain impatience with the messy realities of transition.

The Counter-Argument: Demand, Security, and the Realities We Prefer Not to Face

Critics respond that the UK will continue to need oil and gas for decades, particularly for aviation, shipping, chemicals, and as backup for intermittent renewables. If domestic production falls faster than demand, the UK will simply import more — often from countries with weaker environmental standards. This is the uncomfortable truth behind the accusation of “outsourcing emissions”.

There is also the human dimension: thousands of jobs, regional economies, and the tax revenues that support public services. For communities in Scotland and the North East, the North Sea is not an abstraction but a livelihood.

Economists add another layer: the effect of restricting supply depends on the speed of global demand decline. If demand collapses quickly, new fields risk becoming stranded assets. If demand declines slowly, restricting domestic production merely shifts extraction abroad without reducing global emissions — the phenomenon known as carbon leakage.

Here again, the debate resists simple moral sorting.

The British Paradox: Producing Oil While Importing It

The UK’s position is further complicated by a structural paradox. We produce high-quality North Sea crude, yet we import large volumes of oil and refined fuels. This is partly because:

• UK refineries are specialised and cannot efficiently process all domestic crude

• Some crude is exported for refining abroad while different grades are imported

• The UK’s refining capacity has declined over decades

This means that even if the UK increases production, the direct domestic benefit is limited. We remain tied to global markets, with all their volatility and geopolitical risk.

The Long Shadow of Thatcher and the Lost Opportunity

No discussion of the North Sea can avoid the historical comparison with Norway. The UK’s oil boom in the 1970s and 1980s provided a fiscal windfall that was largely spent rather than saved. Margaret Thatcher used the revenues to fund tax cuts, public spending, and the restructuring of the economy. Norway, by contrast, created a sovereign wealth fund that now exceeds a trillion dollars.

It is tempting to moralise this contrast, but the deeper lesson is about long-term imagination — or the lack of it. Britain consumed its inheritance; Norway invested it. Today, as the North Sea declines, we face the consequences of that choice.

Toward a Synthesis: Beyond the Binary

The present debate is framed as a choice between climate virtue and economic necessity, but this framing is itself a symptom of our political short-termism. The real challenge is to hold multiple truths at once:

• The UK must decarbonise rapidly

• The UK will still need oil and gas for some time

• Domestic production has limited but real benefits

• New fields risk undermining climate credibility

• Abrupt withdrawal risks economic and social harm

The question is not whether to choose one side or the other, but how to design a transition that is morally serious, economically realistic, and historically aware.

This requires something British politics has struggled to cultivate: a capacity for long-term planning that survives electoral cycles and resists the temptation of symbolic gestures. The shocks of the past two decades — financial, epidemiological, environmental — have made this harder, but also more necessary.

If there is hope for a synthesis, it lies in recovering that lost habit of thinking beyond the next headline. 

The Bettertons of Hatherop, Gloucestershire: A Family History Snapshot

 

In the late eighteenth century, the quiet Gloucestershire village of Hatherop was home to a small cluster of families whose names appear again and again in the parish registers. Among them, the Bettertons stood out — not because they were wealthy or titled, but because they were numerous, rooted, and unmistakably woven into the life of the Cotswold countryside.

At the centre of this family was Richard Betterton, born around the middle of the 1700s. He lived in a world of small farms, malt houses, and inns that served the coaching roads between Cirencester, Fairford, and Burford. Richard’s sons — including William (born c.1775) and Thomas (born c.1779) — grew up in this landscape of agricultural labour, brewing, and village trade. Their lives would set the course for two very different branches of the family.

The Rural Branch: William’s Line

Richard’s elder son William stayed close to home. He raised his family in Hatherop, and in 1803 his son John Betterton was baptised in the parish church. John lived the life of a Gloucestershire working man, moving between Hatherop, Cirencester, and the surrounding villages. His children — including Daniel Betterton (1843–1932) — carried the family into the Victorian era as labourers, tradesmen, and smallholders.

This branch of the family remained firmly tied to the land. Daniel’s son Edwin worked in the Cirencester area before settling in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Edwin’s son Kenneth William Betterton was born in Clanfield in 1920 and continues this line today. I am reminded of my family’s modest means, and deep roots in the rural counties of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.

Kenneth Betterton: 1920-2000 My Father

The Ambitious Branch: Thomas’s Line

William’s younger brother Thomas, however, took a different path. While still connected to Hatherop, he moved into the world of publicans, maltsters, and small‑scale brewers — trades that offered opportunity to those with energy and ambition. By the early 1800s, Thomas’s family had left Gloucestershire for the Midlands, where brewing and malting were expanding industries.

Thomas’s son, also named Thomas (born 1807), established the family in Leicestershire and Warwickshire. His own son, Henry Ince Betterton, continued the upward trajectory, entering business and public life. And it was Henry Ince’s son — Henry Bucknall Betterton, born in 1872 — who completed the family’s remarkable rise.

A successful barrister, Member of Parliament, and later a key figure in government during the interwar years, Henry Bucknall Betterton was elevated to the peerage in 1935 as 1st Baron Rushcliffe. From a Hatherop maltster’s son to the House of Lords in three generations — a striking ascent by any measure.

Henry Bucknall Betterton, 1st Baron Rushcliffe

                                                                                                                 © National Portrait Gallery

Two Branches, One Origin

Though their paths diverged, the two branches of the Betterton family share the same roots:

Richard Betterton of Hatherop, the eighteenth‑century patriarch whose sons carried the family name in different directions.

•              William’s descendants remained close to the land, forming the line that leads to myself and siblings today.

•              Thomas’s descendants embraced trade, industry, and public life, culminating with the creation of Baron Rushcliffe.

The story of the Bettertons of Hatherop is, in many ways, the story of England itself: rural beginnings, the pull of opportunity, the rise of industry, and the persistence of family ties across centuries. Even as the branches grew apart, they never lost their shared origin in that small Gloucestershire village where the name Betterton first took root

Edwin Betterton 1880-1941: My Grandfather

Daniel Betterton 1843-1932: My Great-Grandfather