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Richard Drayton has an article criticizing the neocon game in today’s Guardian. Two things annoyed me in what he had to say.

The first was this:

Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance — a key strategic document published in 1996 — aimed to understand how to destroy the ‘will to resist before, during and after battle’. For Harlan Ullman of the National Defence University, its main author, the perfect example was the atom bomb at Hiroshima. But with or without such a weapon, one could create an illusion of unending strength and ruthlessness. Or one could deprive an enemy of the ability to communicate, observe and interact — a macro version of the sensory deprivation used on individuals — so as to create a ‘of impotence’. And one must always inflict brutal reprisals against those who resist. An alternative was the ‘decay and default’ model, whereby a nation’s will to resist collapsed through the ‘imposition of social breakdown’.

All of this came to be applied in Iraq in 2003, and not merely in the March bombardment called ‘shock and awe’. It has been usual to explain the chaos and looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld’s planning. But the evidence is this was at least in part a mask for the destruction of the collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation, and the manufacture of disorder to create a hunger for the occupier’s supervision. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in May 2003, US troops broke the locks of museums, ministries and universities and told looters: ‘Go in Ali Baba, it’s all yours!’

But while the article in question (original German or handy English translation) does provide some evidence of the apathy and even the collusion of American soldiers with the looting, it offers no evidence that this encouragement was a deliberate part of neocon strategy. Drayton needs to provide much clearer evidence on that point.

And secondly there’s Drayton’s treatment of Hobbes:

For the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes’s Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men’s chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful.

I think this involves a rather odd reading of Hobbes’s version of the social contract. Fear was the key passion in Hobbes’s political theory: fear of other men, of sovereigns, of God, and of spirits (Hobbes spills a lot of ink in Leviathan trying to assure his reader there’s no such thing). I suppose it’s true that ‘Hobbes saw authority as free men’s chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy’, but this doesn’t mean what Drayton wants it to mean, because Hobbes redefined freedom in entirely materialistic terms as the ‘the absence of … externall Impediments of motion’ (Leviathan, Chapter 21). Consequently, a man who submits to a conqueror at swordpoint is just as bound by the social contract as if he had elected his sovereign.

Fascinating little nugget in the latest YouGov poll on the wayward Conservative Party (confirming again that, yes, Cameron is likely to win), as reported by the ever informative Anthony Wells:

YouGov asked whether the Conservative party should act to ensure more female candidates are selected in winnable seats. 66% of party members said they were in favour of the Conservative party increasing the number of female candidates, with 19% opposed. Asked what measures to increase the number of female candidates they would support however, suggested that most Conservative members would be opposed to anything that approached compulsion. 82% would be happy with simple encouragement from CCO, 35% would support a rule forcing winnable associations to put at least one women on their shortlist. More extreme measures than this met with very little support indeed - only 14% supported target seats being forced to chose candidates from a ‘gold list’ of candidates, made up of 50% women and a minute 3% of members supported the use of women-only shortlists.

So a fifth of Conservative party members are not merely indifferent but actively opposed to increasing the number of Conservative female MPs! (Judging by the experiences of Amanda Harland and Sue Catling, I wonder how many of them were from West Yorkshire.)

So are women thinking what they’re thinking? Apparently not. The Guardian has obtained a report by the Conservative Women’s Organisation. In their 2,000-strong survey of Tory politicians, activists, and supporters, as well as floating voters, 90 per cent of respondents thought the last Tory election campaign had offered nothing to women, and only 2 per cent of respondents thought the party had woman-friendly policies. Unsurprisingly, women’s support has flagged:

Analysts believe it is impossible for the party to reclaim power unless it improves its standing with the female electorate. Its victories from 1979 to 1992 depended on a share of more than 40% of the women’s vote. This year it won only 32%, compared to Labour’s 38% share.

Whether the next Tory leader prefers blondes to brunettes, or boxers to briefs, is less important than whether he adopts an aggressive strategy to bring women back to his ailing party. Judging by the attitudes of local Conservative Associations, that task will take more than a boyish smile. It will require the Conservative Party to become less conservative, and that could only be a good thing for British society.

Update (3 Janurary 2006, 6.32 p.m.): When I discussed the YouGov poll in the comments to a post about Tory attitudes over at The Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke made a persuasive argument that I was being overly harsh in my interpretation of these statistics, and Anthony Wells helpfully revealed that the PDF report of the YouGov poll is inaccurate in a crucial respect. As Chris argues, of the 19% of members who answered the question ‘Are you in favour of, or opposed to, the Conservative Party increasing the number of women candidates fighting winnable seats at the next general election?’ with ‘Opposed’: ‘It’s perfectly possible that many of them think that there ought to be more women candidates in winnable seats, but don’t think that it’s any business of the national party to interfere with local selections in order to bring this about.’

A subordinate question offered a choice of methods to increase the number of female candidates (the report erroneously fails to state that this question was only to be answered by the ‘In favour’ group). In addition to the more interventionist options and ‘None of the above’, there was this: ‘General encouragement from Conservative Central Office to winnable constituencies to select more women’. According to the strict logic of the survey, given that this was an option, we should be able to deduce that those who were ‘Opposed’, were opposed even to Central Office even encouraging the selection of women candidates

Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that people re-evaluated their position on the first question in light of the subordinate question. So all we can tell from the survey is that 19% opposed the party’s high command taking action to increase the number of women candidates. Whatever my suspicions, the poll was too ambiguous to confirm that a fifth of the party object to there being more women MPs.

Former Monday Club secretary John Bercow, now Conservative MP for Buckingham (BBC profile here), has taken another step on his accelerating journey towards the liberal wing of the party by writing a pamphlet calling for the Tories to do a U-turn away from their revolting rhetoric and policies against immigration and asylum (for a summary, see Bercow’s piece in The Independent). What’s a good Guardian columnist to do? Well, if you’re Polly Toynbee, apparently you call for a clampdown on immigration. I guess now New Labour has no more use for unionisation, international solidarity, effective education, or aggressive redistribution, all that’s left for a earnest campaigner for the poor to do is to dress up right-wing xenophobia as left-wing idealism, demand restrictions on semi-skilled immigration, and hope employers foot for the bill for retraining. Or not.

Update (19 October 2005, 4.18 p.m.): In the comments, Neil Harding of BrightonRegencyLabour returns a favour by explaining how I was overly harsh to Toynbee in this post.

That MSN Search referred a forlorn inquirer on the subject of Liam Fox to a post by yours truly is probably a sign of his poor public profile. But in case anyone is looking here for updates on all things Foxy, I subjected myself to the BBC video of his speech at the Conservative Party’s conference.

In a telling phrase, Fox’s list of post-hoc justifications for the war described Saddam’s Iraq as ‘almost certainly sanctions-busting’. Almost certainly? Perhaps those with bloody paws would do best not to mention the war …

The speech itself could have been worse. Its real problem was the audience. While the zombies clapped enthusiastically when he hinted at tax cuts, frightened them with the EU bugbear, and declared his desire to see the Union Jack flying over British schools, the same audience seemed underwhelmed when he mentioned his interest in human rights and mental illness, and completely nonplussed when he highlighted domestic violence:

Now you’ve all just been through a general election, where law and order was supposedly one of the big issues. So how many of you know that 40 per cent of all the murders in our country are women who are murdered by their partners? … Did Newsnight run specials on it? No. And in our capital city there are more places of refuge for pets than there are for women fleeing violent partners. What does that tell us about our priorities?

Indeed. The fidgeting audience’s silence spoke volumes about the Tory party’s priorities.