Stephen Parkinson
Chairman, Lent 2003

Woolton Hill, Hants. and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 2002-3

During the summer of 2001, the Conservative Party conducted its first leadership election under a system of One Member One Vote. Party spokesmen hailed this leap forward and praised the democratic nature of the contest. But to equate democratization so blithely and carelessly with progress was simplistic and, with hindsight, wrong. The new measures put in place under the leadership of William Hague may be consistent with current political faddishness and win transitory plaudits in the fickle world of the media, but their long-term consequences for the party are a strong argument for their revocation.

The inevitable media attention focused on a political party during the election of a new leader is unlikely ever to be favourable, especially as the vacancy tends to arise during periods of low electoral success or in the wake of an election defeat. These should be times of internal reflection for a party - a chance to consider radical reassessments of policy and doctrine. Such discussions have to occur behind closed doors if they are to be taken seriously, away from the inhibiting factors of public opinion and rolling news headlines: when one candidate in the 2001 leadership election mentioned the possibility of reviewing the party’s attitude towards recreational drug use, he was silenced by a media backlash which did not wait for the case to be made. A change of leader can be an opportunity for a change of direction, and any serious political party should take that chance to step back and reflect on its long-term strategy, rather than lay itself bare in its moment of weakness to its vulturine opponents who hover overhead, waiting to swoop down and inflict their damage on its political carcass.

Lamentably, politicians see the sudden proliferation of journalists and cameramen that a leadership election provides as a chance to vent their pent-up anger or to settle old scores. One of the most disheartening things about the 2001 leadership campaign was the sudden and complete disintegration of the façade of unity which had been assumed for the benefit of the preceding general election. Party figures, both known and unknown, came out of the woodwork to denounce the campaign which they themselves had just finished running. Mouths which had been closed for the sake of general election unity were coaxed open by the lure of the microphones foisted in front of them. Colleagues launched attacks on one another with the sort of vitriol which should be reserved for their opponents on the other side of the House of Commons. The general impression was of a party airing its dirty laundry in public.
Of course, the venting of frustration, expression of discontent, and delivery of criticism are essential parts of the cathartic process, but when they are done in the full glare of the media spotlight, the effects on a party’s standing can only be detrimental. There is no reason why grass-roots members should be excluded from this process, but the internal mechanisms of communication are a far less embarrassing method than having newspapers scowl Conservative Clubs across the country hoping for quotes to spice up their unsympathetic columns.

The new system of electing a leader is far too prolonged an affair. Of course, the decision is not one to be rushed or taken lightly, but the demands of multiple-round contest and postal ballot stretched the 2001 leadership election out from William Hague’s resignation on 8 June to Iain Duncan Smith’s eventual election on 13 September, giving the media - during the height of the so-called ’silly season’ - no fewer than ninety-seven days to do its worst to a party shaken by a second crushing defeat at the polls.

A head-to-head contest for the party leadership is also wholly inappropriate to the period following an electoral defeat, promoting a shallow race to win votes over the building of a new party consensus, and giving undue primacy to single issues and abstracting the debate. During the summer of 2001, the European single currency and an obscure section of the 1988 Local Government Act were both given excessive attention due to the candidatures of a European federalist, a Maastricht rebel, and a man who had revealed his homosexual experiences as an undergraduate. None of these issues were necessarily ones on which the foundations of a new platform for government should be built. Alan Clark, in his history of the Conservative Party, describes the changes wrought by the last changes to the system of electing a party leader - the 1964 ‘Douglas-Home rules’, when the leader was elected by the votes of every member of the parliamentary party - and the impact they had throughout the whole parliamentary cycle:

…Members of Parliament would find themselves drawn into assessing contenders on the basis of their approval ratings in the newspapers…The form, the arithmetic, the prospects, the timing - all would endlessly recur, whenever the party hit choppy water, and would take too much of its time and attention in the future. [1]

Now, this endlessly recurring distraction embraces huge swathes of the party’s grass roots, as a cursory glance at the letters page of the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail will attest. The claims made by party figures that a mass-membership election would give the new leader a “clear mandate” are simply not true: as a result of it, talented grandees say they will not serve in a new shadow cabinet at a time when the party most needs its experienced statesman to rally together; the membership is polarized into a set of binary opposites; and, whereas the old practice of presenting the members with a fait accompli may have caused a small faction of die-hards to leave the party, the current system sees constituency associations up and down the country being presented with series of ultimata from members promising to resign “if X or Y gets in”.

A corollary of the revised leadership election procedure has been a fundamental redefinition of the party’s raison d’être. Allowing every member to exert some influence on the choice of leader gives the impression that the party is something run for the benefit of its existing members. It is not. Rather, the party should be looking beyond its current membership to those people who are not members, and whose votes and support it needs if it is ever to return to government. The party has no obligation to its members. This in no way diminishes their importance, of course - no party can survive in a democratic system without a large body of supporters and activists - but nor does it mean that the party should feel beholden to its grass roots at the expense of broadening its appeal among floating voters, who, after all, are more crucial to the repairing of party fortunes. Existing party members are the worst electorate when it comes to choosing a leader who will be of the greatest benefit to the party. By their nature, the grass roots of any party reflect a distorted image of its outlook and ideology. Party activists are likely to be more strident in their beliefs than figures from its upper echelons, who must daily navigate the rocky waters of national politics. When the Douglas-Home rules were introduced the 1922 Committee minuted its worry that it was “unwise to give an exactly equal vote…to a senior Cabinet minister and to the newest recruit to the Parliamentary Party” [2] - how much more unwise is it to extend this power to each of the party’s three hundred thousand members, many of whom lack any political nous or experience? This introspection can only be to the party’s disadvantage, and lends itself to the selection of leaders who represent a grotesque distillation of the grass roots’ basest instincts and prejudices: “…for as long as the Party’s direction is dictated by its current membership its appeal will shrink into a narrower and narrower rump of the electorate.” [3]

The personalization of the contest - the identification of the fate of the entire party with a single man - undermines the careful balances of the prime ministerial system, leading to the creation of a quasi-presidential figure. When William Hague, announcing his resignation as party leader on the steps of Conservative Central Office in the aftermath of the 2001 general election, declared that “no one man is greater than the party”, he also provided a reminder of one of the core principles of the British parliamentary system: that the premier is no more than primus inter pares. We should heed the words of Baroness Thatcher in November 2002 that “the Tory party will last… I don’t know about Mr Duncan Smith because in the end we all die, but the party doesn’t.” [4]

*

This polemic is a plea to a return to the practices of old, perhaps even to those used prior to 1964. The old system of the ‘Magic Circle’ left the far from insignificant decision of who should assume the party leadership to those MPs with the greatest political experience and shrewdness; men who would take a pragmatic decision, based on what was best for the electoral prospects of the party, rather than the obstinacy of the amateur ideologue, or some base preference for a “normal family man” [5]. Leaders would emerge through a mixture of forging deals with their colleagues, building personal support in Cabinet, and (dare one say it?) political hackery - all of which are essential weapons in the arsenal of a potential prime minister.

William Hague meant well when he introduced his ‘Fresh Future’ reforms which ushered in the new system of leadership election, but as a Conservative he ought to have known better than to rush headlong into reform for reform’s sake. His aims were laudable, but the consequences of his actions unforgivable. The parallels with the last wave of internal party reform - as described by another passage from Clark’s The Tories - are striking:

The purpose of the formula [of the Douglas-Home rules] had been to make the party appear more ‘democratic’… What happened was that a process - the ‘Magic Circle’ - which had been the very embodiment of continuity, of a calm and united authority endowed with these traditional gifts of good judgement and discrimination that made it best suited to govern the country, had been discarded. In its place there were now offered in terms of media coverage a series of gladiatorial battles, with net and sword, before an arena of jeering spectators…
It became all too easy for commentators to depict the party as being divided. That fine line between debate and altercation would soon, at the urging of excitable colleagues and the encouragement of the media, be transgressed; with lasting damage to the party’s reputation.” [6]

It is now even easier to depict the Tory Party as being divided, and its reputation is further damaged with every fratricidal comment by an obscure backbencher or provincial councillor who has scented blood and believes his party leader is under some obligation to him. It could once be said that “loyalty is the Tory’s secret weapon” [7]; for that statement once more to ring true, we must take the power to choose the party leader out of the wider membership’s hands.

Notes:

1. Alan Clark, The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State 1922-1997 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 337
2. Philip Goodhart, The 1922: The Story of the Conservative Backbenchers’ Parliamentary Committee (1973), p. 203
3. Nigel Fletcher, ‘Living in the Shadows: How to make the most of Opposition’, in E Vaizey, M Gove, N Boles & I Dale (eds.) A Blue Tomorrow: New Visions from Modern Conservatives (London: Politico’s, 2001)
4. Baroness Thatcher, speaking to veterans of the Falklands war, 6 November 2002 (BBC News online)
   as Lord Tebbit dubbed Iain Duncan Smith at the start of his leadership campaign.
5. Clark, op. cit., p. 431
6. Lord Kilmuir (formerly Sir David Maxwell Fyfe) in Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (1962), Ch. 6

Matthew Jamison
Peterhouse

Matthew Jamison was CUCA’s Campaigns Officer for 2002-3

The Iron Lady in 1990 said of Saddam Hussein “This man is a loser… a person who has taken hostages cruelly, brutally, a person who has hidden behind the skirts of women and children.” Today in 2003 thanks to the Iron Texan of the White House, the “loser” is about to lose the most important thing in the world to him, his power.

After a 24-year dictatorship of the most vicious barbarism Saddam Hussein’s time is finally, nearly up. What brought us to this point? How did we in the West arrive at Saddam’s curtain call after a play filled with scene upon scene, act after act of naked evil? The answer can be found in the hours of that dark eleventh day of September 2001. The intellectual élite of Europe, perhaps the world, has not grasped the profound changes which have occurred in the American psyche since 9/11. These changes have penetrated right to the heart of US government policy-making. Never again will threats to US national and international security be allowed to fester, breed and grow as al Qaeda was allowed to do throughout the 1990s within the haven of Taliban Afghanistan.

This simple gut reaction after such a horrendous, unjustified terrorist attack has morphed and manifested itself into the Bush doctrine of pre-emption. No longer will the United States act after the event has happened; instead America will aggressively, actively deal with grave and gathering dangers before they launch deadly attacks. The doctrine of pre-emptive action is one I strongly support. It has been calmly but doggedly applied to the rogue state of Iraq in reaction to Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction programme. As President Bush said at the UN on 12 September 2002, the first time we know Saddam has a nuclear bomb is “God forbid when he uses one”.

The Bush Administration’s tough, uncompromising and muscular foreign, defence and security policy is one I greatly admire and urge all democratic governments to take up. Gone are the incoherent, weak, shilly-shallying days of the Clinton foreign policy. In its place we have a hawkish, robust platform of plain-speaking diplomacy backed up with the implicit threat of severe military force. Multilateralism - in effect, the use of force only under the authority of the United Nations and for international not just national purposes - is not the God of the Bush White House, as it was for Bill Clinton and his Secretaries of State Christopher Warren and Madeline Albright. However, it is still the preferred first option for dealing with great matters of international importance as has been illustrated by Colin Powell’s superb navigation of the labyrinth of bureaucracy, vested interests and lilly-livered spinelessness which passes itself off as something grandly called the United Nations. However, this multilateralism is different to the policy championed by naïve liberal internationalists like Mr Chris Patten of the European Commission and President Chirac of France.

Underneath it lurks the realism and stridency of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice unilateralism. It is the last option, a US go-it-alone, but thank heavens for the peace loving, law abiding, decent, hardworking citizens of this planet - within the Bush mind it is an option seriously countenanced and if necessary acted upon. The hawkishness of the Bush foreign, defence and security policy is returning us to the glory days of the Reagan/Thatcher formula of peace through strength. A formula that brought the Soviet Union crashing down and ended the Cold War.

Gone under the current American government is the woolly-minded notion of using the US military as a branch of Social Services engaging in “humanitarian interventions” such as the misguided operation conducted in Somalia in the early 90s. In its place a revamped policy of nation-building based upon key strategic, tactical and security interests such as the present exercise in Afghanistan. Behind the scenes more of this sensible, sound nation-building is going on with regards to Iraq. Thanks to the coordination of the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office by the end of this year we could well have the first Arab liberal democracy based upon consociationalism and pluralism.

Just in case we have any Baghdad apologists reading these lines let me state clearly the nature of the Saddam Hussein regime. This is a regime which invaded a neighbouring country, Iran, in 1980, triggering an eight-year regional war which cost 500,000 lives. This is a regime which gassed 3,000 of its own citizens in the spring of 1988 and used chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers. This is a regime which launched scud missile attacks upon the states of Israel and Saudi Arabia. This is a regime which is in violation of 23 out of 27 UN resolutions, a regime which brings new meaning to the term “human rights abuses”. And now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is a regime which revels in its rogue status, secretly developing biological weapons such as anthrax, plague, and small pox; chemical weapons such as mustard gas, VX nerve agent, and saurian gas. But forget all that, if you can, the deadliest weapon of all is yet to come but believe me, it is well on its way. The nuclear bomb. Yet the Iraqi Foreign Minister stands in front of the UN General Assembly, the exalted international community, and proclaims to the world Iraq “has no weapons of mass destruction”.

Ask yourself this. If Iraq had possessed a nuclear deterrent in 1990 do you think the West could have successfully forced Iraq to disgorge Kuwait? Operation Desert Storm would never have happened just as for the same reason the West was unable to intervene in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979; Russia was a formidable nuclear power.

Now ask yourself another question. What happens if we go on with the failed policy of containment through sanctions and weapons inspections for the sake of inspections and two years from now Iraq achieves nuclear status? Are we in the West so gutless and ignorant, so “decadent” as Osama Bin Laden would have the whole Muslim world believe that we would allow Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to effectively wield a loaded gun to our head? As the great British statesmen Edmund Burke once remarked “The only thing for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.” Thankfully we have our good men. Under President George W Bush’s strong, clear sighted, courageous and conviction-driven leadership that gun will not be allowed to be loaded. Tribute must also be paid to Prime Minister Blair who has recognised the Anglo-American special relationship must always be upheld and maintained. It is heartening to see Britain and America share the same perspective and fundamental core values and beliefs. The weak, feeble European democracies should take notice of the words of Dr. Brendan Simms of Peterhouse, Cambridge: “Hawks save lives, doves don’t!”

Alex Wright
Peterhouse

Peterhouse, Cambridge, January 2003

Here we go again. It’s been dubbed Gulf War II, the latest saga in the Oil Wars or the continuing crusade that is the War against Terror. Whatever you want to call it, the truth is now that we roll inexorably towards Iraq: the dogs (poodles?) of war are out. But let’s take a few steps backward. Why are we invading Iraq? Mr. Blair, give me one reason.

So three possible vaguely logical motives have been raised. The first is humanitarian, the second is self-defence and the third is old-fashioned realpolitik and self-interest. Yet on all three counts, Gulf War II fails the test. It cannot be said to be necessarily humanitarian, it cannot be said to be acting in self-defence and it even cannot be said to benefit us in a cynical and self-interested way.

The humanitarian ground is the one upon which Mr Blair seems the most comfortable. The claim is that by replacing Saddam’s regime with one more humane and democratic, the Iraqi people will benefit as a result. The standard argument against the humanitarian strand is the simple but effective: ‘but people will die in war’. I don’t acknowledge this refrain. The simple fact is that people always die in wars, but they often benefit over time. The institution of a more humane regime, one built upon solid democratic principles can justify intervention, if only for the simple matter that people will be saved in the long run. There is no need to revisit the catalogue of horrors which is Saddam’s regime. He has killed over one million in his time as Iraqi leader, used chemical and biological weapons against his own subjects and his regime has torture and institutional rape as routine tools of repression. No one can possibly dispute that the Iraqi regime is one of the most brutal in the world today.
The cynics would correctly point out that Saddam has always been brutal since the ’80s. They seem rightly contend that we used to tolerate his regime so long as it was friendly towards the West. They correctly argue that there is no inherent reason why post-Saddam Iraq would not simply end up as an Islamic fundamentalist theocracy or ruled by another military dictator. These all are valid and solid arguments. Yet the point when a shaky argument falls is when we ask the question of cost-effectiveness. The Congressional Budget Office, hardly a bearded leftie organisation, estimates that initial deployment would cost $12.5 billion, the first month of war cost $9.2 billion, subsequent months $7.5 billion each, redeployment $7.3 billion and occupation between $1.4 billion and $3.8 billion per month. Let us take very pro-American estimates. Let us assume that the war is wrapped up in one month and that it takes just one month of occupation at minimum cost to put in place a suitable alternate government. Let us assume that the forces required are less than those required for Desert Storm (which lasted three months). The net cost to the US alone is thus a mere $30.4 billion. Now the fact is that that money if channelled to, say, debt relief, could pay off the national debts of Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Chad, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Rwanda, Senegal, the Seychelles, Swaziland and Uganda. This would seem a far better use if humanitarian aims are really the desire for war on Iraq, especially given that the new regime may not even be any more humanitarian than the previous one. So the ‘humanitarian’ argument falls.

The self-defence argument is a truly feeble one. It is based on the fact that Saddam Hussein will either directly attack the UK, or that he will fund Islamic terrorist organisations which would attack the UK. The pro-war lobby claim that no one foresaw 9/11, and no one will foresee the future attacks by Saddam (except them, of course). Occasionally, the coda is added that the authority of the UN needs to be upheld. The really dim hawks resurrect the spectre of Hitler and allow a direct comparison.
Hang on though. Saddam is not a terrorist per se, nor is he an Islamic fundamentalist. There is a very clear distinction between being a suicide bomber and a suicide leader. The al-Qaeda terrorist network’s operatives are religious extremists, driven by fanaticism. Saddam is not a religious fanatic, but a highly devious ruler who is determined to preserve his power at all costs. Given the hawkish administrations in both the UK and the US, if Saddam were to even attack a neutral country in the Middle East with chemical weapons, let alone an ally, and let alone the UK or US, it would lead to his obliteration. There would be little doubt that any aggressive act on Saddam’s part would lead to his destruction- something he very much wishes to avoid. As for illicitly selling these weapons on, this is unlikely. Saddam is despised by the mullahs of Iran due to the Iran-Iraq war. He has actively persecuted the Shiite Muslims, the extremist elements of which are dominant in the Islamic terrorist groups. It is hardly credible that he would now give them weapons. What of the authority of the UN, the hawks cry? This seems an odd argument. The authority of the UN has only come into question because the US pushed the UN into this situation in the first place. For four years since Desert Fox, the UN has been entirely unconcerned with Iraq- why now should his violations be so acute? Why too, should his violations be any more acute than those of North Korea, Israel, China- or the US? Whilst the comparison is a trifle unfair (Bush has not, to my knowledge, gassed his own people), if it is truly the authority of the UN that Bush wishes to uphold, he would be well-advised to adopt the motto of ‘think globally, act locally’. Of course, in the highly probable event that the UN inspectors do not conclude Saddam to be in material breach, and the US and UK go it alone, the entire notion of upholding the UN becomes invalidated. With regard to the Hussein/Hitler connection, this is an entirely baseless assertion. There is no evidence to suggest that Saddam Hussein is not on the verge of invading the Middle East. Neither does Iraq pose nearly as much threat as Nazi Germany. Hitler posed a genuine threat to the free West. Saddam, whilst certainly an unsavoury character, clearly does not.

If worst come to worst, the true hardcore hawks fall back on good old-fashioned realpolitik. Here, of course, you can raise two issues: the possibility of a puppet regime in the Middle East, and the possibility of lower oil prices. For argument’s sake, let us leave aside the moral minefield about an entirely self-interested foreign policy. Yet even ignoring the considerable and legitimate moral objections, the argument does not make sense.
The possibility of a puppet regime may be attractive to those advocates of realpolitik, but we have to bear in mind two key factors. Firstly, that puppet regime would have its foremost loyalty to the US, and not to Britain. Whilst the interests often coincide, often they do not (anyone remember the steel fiasco?) More to the point though, there is a very strong possibility that the regime would turn against us. We would do well to remember that Saddam was ‘our man’ in the 1980s- just a few years turned him from a useful if distasteful ally to a national hate figure. A new democratic regime, given the popular antipathy towards the UK/US in the Middle East, may well return a regime hostile, or at least unfriendly towards the UK/US. A puppet dictator may well turn against us, as Saddam has already done. The risk is hardly worthwhile. Even if a friendly regime were put in place, the only key resource the US could obtain would be oil (hence the relative disinterest in North Korea). Indeed, in the long run, the US economy may well benefit from the war. Yet Britain will not. Britain is a net exporter of oil. In 2000, Britain made a surplus of £6.6 billion from net oil exports. When oil prices fall, as they would in the long run following a war with Iraq, Britain would actually lose out. The last major reduction in oil prices (1996/7) saw our net oil export profit fall by £2 billion. So even if the US manage to institute a friendly regime, and even if that regime remains friendly, Britain still loses.

So, Mr Blair, you seem to have no arguments left. On humanitarian grounds, the cost would be best used for actual humanitarian relief, and the new regime may be little better than Saddam’s in any event. On issues of international defence, Saddam poses no overt threat to us, nor does his regime undermine the UN any more than it is already. On the concept of national self-interest, even if a puppet regime is put and remains in place, Britain suffers. I like to keep an open mind though - give me one good reason and I’ll think about backing you.