The Times - UK (2022-02-23)

26 Wednesday February 23 2022 | the times

Comment

Some boats do have small solar

panels or tiny wind turbines, and

caravan-style battery packs, but it’s

piecemeal stuff. Weight is no

problem: canal boats often need

ballast for stability anyway. For heat,

lighting and propulsion, each, like an

electric car, should carry a heavy-

duty battery system beneath the

floor, trickle-charged by solar and

wind, with back-up from canal-side

charging points. Canal boats rarely

move more often than fortnightly so

fast charging should be unnecessary.

I put the idea to a barge-dwelling

friend. His first response was that

30 years ago on my walk I’d have

been knifed. Bargees have

civilised the canal-side. He

added that the average London

bargee couldn’t afford expensive

retrofitting. But if we can phase

out gas boilers with

government grants, couldn’t

we at least make sure

greener technology is

installed on the new-build

narrow boats that will be

lining the London canals

in 30 years’ time?

Bridge hopping

O

n Monday in

London, after

supper with a

friend near Victoria

station, I decided to walk

the five miles back to my

flat in Limehouse. Crossing

Westminster Bridge I walked all

along the south bank of the Thames,

switching back north over Tower

Bridge then walking by the river

through Wapping.

That hour and a half is still

luminous in my mind. Try it, if you

can. You can hug the river for most

of the way. Over the water you see,

all illuminated, St Paul’s Cathedral.

You tunnel through the footings of

fine bridges. Trains rattle above you.

Passing beneath the walls of

Southwark Cathedral, you see the

Shard soaring upward like a blade

of light. Across the river the City

of London rises in glittering

glass and ancient stone, while

the Tower of London sits alone

in a quiet pool of antiquity, silent

visitor from another age.

Through Wapping you

walk the dark, cobbled

streets and converted

warehouses. And,

always at your side, the

Thames slides by,

sucking at its

embankments. Supper

in town was nice

enough. Walking home

was sublime.

Love is in the air

W

riting this, I’m

looking at the

front page of last

I’

m so enjoying life that I’ve
resolved to do all I can to
avoid dying. I must walk more,
starting last week, when I
walked to supper with a friend
in Stoke Newington in north
London, some seven miles, mostly
along Regent’s Canal from
Limehouse Basin. It’s lovely walking
by canals at night; but I’m afraid this
notebook may cost me two barge-
dwelling friends: brace yourselves,
JD and nephew James ...
On long, dark winter nights, air
pollution from narrow boats is
appalling. Most rely on one or more
“smokeless” coal-fired stoves, small
independent petrol generators and
their own diesel engines, left idling.
Much of London’s canal network is
lined on both sides with moored,
inhabited boats. Walking up Regent’s
Canal smelt like walking up a road
with lorries parked on each side,
engines running.
Fortunately there’s an answer.

Putin’s aim is to prove the West cannot win

Some in his inner circle back the aggression, but others fear he has given too much away to China

liking. An invasion and occupation

force of young Russians in combat

with their Slav cousins in Ukraine —

how could that go well? What kind

of civilisational signal would that

send to the West? And what about

the returning zinc coffins?

Worse, Putin seems to have

cleared the operation with Xi Jinping

at the outset of the Winter Olympics.

The securocrats were already

concerned that Moscow, by

becoming essentially a permanent

junior partner to Xi, was in danger of

losing the looming Sino-Russian

discussions about Africa’s resources

and access to the sea lanes of the

melting Arctic. Taken together, how

would an unhappy Ukraine and

Belarus to the west, and a potentially

overbearing partner in Beijing, serve

the cause of a purer Russia?

Putin tried but failed to address

these doubts about his leadership in

a recent 5,000-word essay on Russia

and Ukraine. More than ever he

comes across as an isolated figure at

home, at a time when he is about to

become a global pariah. His monk-

like lockdown seclusion hasn’t, as

some claim, made him deranged but

it does seem to have affected his

judgment. The nimble, opportunistic

hybrid expeditions of the past have

given way to a kind of ponderous

siege warfare that promises little

success and even less honour.

Early yesterday, as an armoured

“peacekeeping” force rolled into

Donetsk, it looked as if nothing in

our western armoury could stop

Putin. Perhaps what is left of his

inner circle can find the guts to tell

him he is on a destructive track that

will disgrace Russia for a generation.

of Nord Stream 2 was the most

potent of the financial measures

unveiled yesterday by the European

Union, Britain and the United States.

Not just because income from gas

and oil, both understandably rising in

price yesterday, is central to Putin’s

power but also because it marked a

symbolic end to the German Social

Democratic Party’s unsavoury

relationship with Russian

hydrocarbons. The former chancellor

Gerhard Schröder, who once partied

with Putin and who is still big at

Gazprom, set the tone. The pipeline

was declared to be a business rather

than geopolitical matter. Now it’s

where it belongs.

There is, however, no longer any

cohesion to the Putin clique. They

supported the snatching of Crimea

because they saw it as essentially a

Russian peninsula. Ukraine and

Belarus were part of the Slav

nationalist heartland, moulded (in

the east of Ukraine rather than the

western part) by Orthodox values.

Putin, they thought, understood this.

He kept strong ties to the Orthodox

patriarchy and was fighting a

civilisational struggle.

The Crimea 2014 operation was

run by special forces and was an easy

way of demonstrating to Ukraine

that Russia could not accept it

embracing western institutions. But

the present operation makes them

uneasy. They agree with their boss

that the Ukrainian government,

erratically led, armed with tank-

busting Turkish drones, is far

stronger than the separatists in the

east. It could one day try to push out

Russia’s friends. Putin’s way of

solving this is not, however, to their

T

he Ukrainian crisis has
become an exercise in
western hopelessness. We
stood by when the Warsaw
Pact put down the
Hungarian uprising in 1956 and
when Soviet tanks crushed the
Prague Spring in 1968, and the West
was so grateful that Moscow didn’t
send its heavy metal into Poland in
1981 that it did little more than shrug
as a military junta jailed thousands
of Solidarity activists.
Again we’re reaching for the
smelling salts. There was a naive
hope that Vladimir Putin’s troop
build-up, supposedly training
exercises along Ukraine’s long
borders, was harmless. That Putin
was a late convert to the teachings of
the ancient Chinese strategist Sun
Tzu: “Ultimate excellence lies not in
winning every battle but in defeating
the enemy without ever fighting.”
But day by day his mask slips a
little more. That was clear when the
military blood banks were erected
for the troops, now at more than
200,000, most of them in full battle
order, and clearer still at Monday’s
cringeworthy spectacle of Putin
pretending to seek advice from his
security council. The plainly pre-
scripted session was supposed not
only to legitimise Russian recognition
of the enclaves of Luhansk and

Donetsk in eastern Ukraine but to

accept Moscow’s sacred duty of

protecting the inhabitants. Putin’s

televised comments made plain that

he doesn’t accept Ukraine’s existence

as a sovereign state and accepts

diplomacy only if it wins him

territory.

This is not so much a Ukrainian

crisis as it is a Putin crisis. He

calculates that he can damage the

Ukrainian economy more deeply and

more quickly than western aid can

benefit the country. For him it’s a

sure bet, a nihilistic one that will

allow him to make a single point:

that although the Soviet Union may

have collapsed irrevocably, the West,

with all its rules and smug principles,

did not win the Cold War.

Are his confidants on board with

this? One squawking set of hawks

certainly argues that sanctions

should strike no fear. Rather, western

sanctions could be a spur towards a

desirable goal: socioeconomic

autarky, deglobalisation of Russian

elites, a more robust nationalism, a

freeing of Russian genius rather than

a copy-catting of western trends.

Many of these hardliners found a

nest in the security services. Their

ideological figurehead is Nikolai

Patrushev, head of Putin’s security

council and former KGB hand.

Others at the Putin court do care

about energy sanctions. The German

decision to suspend the certification

His monk-like Covid

seclusion may have

affected his judgment

week’s Matlock Mercury, our paper of

record now and 45 years ago when at

29 I became the parliamentary

candidate for West Derbyshire —

nervous about being gay and hoping

nobody would ask.

The front-page splash is “Loved-up

couple start cable cars”. I should

explain. Decades ago, a local

entrepreneur proposed a project for

constructing a cable car from near

Matlock Bath railway station by the

rushing river in the valley to high up

the hillside, where there’s a great

limestone cave system you can visit.

Privately I thought his dream was

nuts. The economics would surely

never work. But he raised the

finance; and the Heights of Abraham

cable ride is now a firm fixture in

holidaymakers’ itineraries, its season

running from now until the autumn.

The couple who started the cars

for the new season were Beth-rai

Rowlands and Kate Thompson. Now

engaged, “Beth had popped the big

question to Kate” at the top of the

ride last May (reports the paper).

I fetched the Mercury in our new

all-electric Fiat 500, driving a vehicle

the likes of which I never thought I’d

live to see, to collect a paper

reporting a romance I never thought

would be celebrated in my lifetime,

on a cable car I never thought would

be built. That’s why I want to live

longer: to see what else I thought

impossible comes to pass.

Matthew Parris Notebook

My views on

canal boats

will lead to

argy-bargee

Trans athletes

have no place in

women’s sport

Debbie Hayton

T

he febrile transgender

debate tends to unite

politicians only in their

quest to obfuscate the

truth. But at last we have a

prime minister who is willing to be

honest with the public. It’s not Boris

Johnson — not yet, anyway — but

Scott Morrison who has thrown

caution to the wind. The Australian

PM has declared that trans sheilas

are not sheilas. Not in sport, anyway.

Sport focuses the mind because

sport concerns the body, and male

and female bodies are not the same.

Last year in Tokyo, the female

Olympic weightlifting competition

was overshadowed by the presence

of Laurel Hubbard, born male.

Hubbard won nothing but the

transgender swimmer Lia Thomas is

smashing records in the pool, leaving

women to compete for second place.

The future looks bleak for women in

sport. Trying harder is not an option

when your rival has the advantage of

male puberty. Testosterone leaves a

legacy that cannot be erased: larger

muscle mass and stronger bones, not

to mention a skeleton that never

developed to carry children.

Claire Chandler, a Tasmanian

senator, has been making this point

valiantly. Her private member’s bill to

amend the sex discrimination law

would allow sporting bodies to do

something they should never have

been stopped from doing: operating

single-sex sport on the basis of

biological sex.

When put on the spot, Morrison

was unequivocal: “I think it’s a

terrific bill ... Claire is a champion

for women’s sport and I think she’s

been right to raise these issues in the

way that she has. Well done, Claire.”

And well said, Morrison. The

transgender thought police might

not agree with me but trans rights

need to be protected in the context

of everyone’s rights. While we should

be protected from less favourable

treatment, we need to accept that

nature has dealt us a more favourable

hand when it comes to body strength.

So what should we do? If sport is

for all then let’s maintain an open

category that excludes nobody. What

could be more inclusive than that?

But crucially, keep a separate class

for women in which they can

compete as a sex. Because the

problem is not about the inclusion of

trans women in sport — that should

be a given. What is wrong is the

inclusion of male bodies in female

sport. And, despite the protests from

Equality Australia, this should apply

to all ages: girls’ rights matter, too.

Maybe the next time the Labour

MP Rosie Duffield is harassed for her

views on trans women, Sir Keir

Starmer might follow Morrison’s

example. Female politicians standing

up for the rights of women and girls

should be applauded, not ignored.

Debbie Hayton is a transgender teacher

and journalist

Roger

B oyes

@rogerboyes