Forget Boris, it's Gove vs Hunt

Consider this scenario. Boris is one of the final two and wins the leadership election in the party-at-large on a policy of Brexit for sure (I think this means on WTO terms or something like it). Parliament doesn't agree and passes a no-confidence motion. There is an election.

A wavering-leave Tory Party is squeezed between the Brexit Party .. and the Labour and Liberal Parties, all of whom come out for Remain. They hoover up the votes of Conservative Remainers. Despite all of Boris's alleged rabble-rousing charms, the Tories are decimated: welcome to the new Lib-Lab-SNP government.

If Boris prevaricates in October, the Brexit Party continues to grow: a slow motion version of the above.

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Boris is not the strategic thinker to get out of this hole. Logically therefore, he should not be one of the final two.

Hunt is surely the Remainers best bet. Smart, media-friendly, politically adroit.

He met with Trump - normally the mark of a supposed-winner.

Gove, once he gets past his immediate Class-A difficulties, is more Brexiteer-friendly, more ballot credible, a sop to the party-faithful. His problem is that he's too cerebral for these populist times. He doesn't look like a prime-minister: he's better cast as best-friend.

So logically, the process should return Gove-Hunt for the further party-ballot in the hope that either of them has the intellectual and political skills to navigate the very survival of the Tories where no solution currently presents itself.

Will Tory MPs see it that way, or will they panic and put Boris on the list - hope against hope that empty charisma will by some magic pull them through?

See the title of this post.

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Note: this is an analysis of the best options for an intelligent Tory party interested in long-term survival. It does not represent my personal opinions as to who would be best PM.

None of the above would be a start.

The United Socialist States of Europe

In the mid-1970s when I was trying to escape from teaching, I applied for an executive officer job with the Civil Service. I took the tests and attended an interview where I was asked, "What do you think about Britain being in the Common Market?".

I was conflicted: I was still a revolutionary socialist so I knew the party line was: 'No to the Europe of the capitalists, for a United Socialist States of Europe!'.

On the other hand, I was a disillusioned leftist and inclined to doubt that insurrection was likely to engulf Europe any time soon. In any case, I quite liked the idea of Europe: I'd had some great holidays there.

I responded without conviction that I thought the Common Market was not a good idea for Britain. No doubt that was why I didn't get the job .. (only kidding: there were a thousand reasons for the Civil Service not to employ me).

The left is now all at sea over Europe though; the pristine ideological purity of half a century ago has been shredded.

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If the UK capitalist class was truly united in wishing to stay in the EU, that inconvenient referendum result would have been subverted or reversed well before now.

It's certainly true that almost all economists believe that being part of the customs union, with a say on policy, offers by far the best prospects for the UK economy. It goes with the flow of globalisation, increased market size, lowered transaction costs and just-in-time logistics.

But the UK bourgeoisie has never been quite so committed to that predominantly political project which the EU truly is. The path to ever greater convergence, towards that famed economic and political integration into a 'superstate', is in practice one of transition to a unified European polity under German dominance.

With its global interests - the tepid afterglow of Empire - the British establishment always wanted the economic benefits without the political subordination. That balancing act has become ever more difficult as Germany has become more assertive and other members states more reliant upon it, more subservient to its power one might say.

So apart from the most devoted servants of international finance capital in the City (the George Osborne wing of the Tory Party; the Blair wing of Labour) there is a kind of strategic paralysis gripping most other sectors of the capitalist class.

So-called soft-Brexit, which is essentially the status quo ante but with even less political influence in Europe (or, even more disengagement, to put the positive spin on it), is thus the favoured option.

Smaller, more national and regional businesses get little of benefit from the EU and lack lobbying power there. These are the stalwarts of the Tory Party in the country and the most enthusiastic Brexiteers.

Meanwhile everyone is now familiar with the plight of the traditional, relatively unskilled working class, marginalised by higher-skilled, younger and more energetic competition from Eastern Europe. As they have been pressed back into the reserve army of labour, their resentment has fuelled a visceral 'leave' sentiment: a problem for Labour and a tantalising opportunity for the Tories.

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I don't have any views as to what the revolutionary left ought to be campaigning on here. The theory says that you should base your line on objective political analysis, not the vagaries of sentiment of your base-support. Since the EU is just as much a capitalist/globalisation project now as it was 45 years ago, the orthodox Leninist-Trotskyist position must be to oppose it.

But this implies that there's a viable strategy to supersede capitalism (a United Socialist States of Europe!) which can be meaningfully counterposed - and there is not.

The alternate argument, heard from those bright young revisionists in Labour's Momentum, is that socialism has to build on capitalism - it will be even more global and harmonised etc - so we obviously have to back all movement in that direction under capitalism. This reflects the naive idealism of their middle-class professional base which I myself exhibited (and suppressed) in my interview with the Civil Service.*

I'm not here to give advice to British capitalism on their optimal strategy: they don't need much assistance anyway to converge on 'soft-Brexit' as their preferred way forward.

But any institution which lionises George Osborne, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel is going to find me heading rapidly towards the exit.

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* What's wrong with that argument, I hear you say? Simply this: the purpose of capitalism is always and everywhere the valorisation (the self-expansion) of capital. This single-minded dynamic often cuts across broader human interests and values as you may have noticed.

We don't have to completely roll-over for every project of the haute-bourgeoisie to get the benefits of their development of the productive forces. There's a reason they're called 'the bubble'. With effort they can be constrained and diverted.

National characteristics and MBTI type

In the previous post I mentioned that Theresa May came across as an ISTJ, and that this resonated with ordinary folk. I was sufficiently interested to google the subject of national character and found this.

Obviously countries present different facets of themselves - different national stereotypes - but it isn't completely arbitrary: the stereotypes do have force, a ring of truth. The methodology one instinctively applies is to think of an individual who seems to embody the character of a country, and then personality-type him or her.

For England, ISTJ seems pretty apposite but I think we need to differentiate between the 'England profonde' - England in the large - and the metropolitan and cosmopolitan elites primarily located in London, who are effectively inhabitants of a different country (the so-called 'anywheres').

ISTJ is indeed the type of 'John Bull', the quintessential English person, but the transnational London-elites are much more like George Osborne, an INTJ, or Tony Blair, an ENTP. So in Keirsey's language, those globalist politicians dealing in economics abstractions and cool self-interested logic are Rationals.

The average English person, concrete to the core, has always distrusted intellectuals 😑. One way of understanding the recent turmoil in the Conservative party is to observe that control has passed from that faction which was the government of London (as the UK-based outpost of the global elite) to the faction which considers itself the government of England, tolerating London as a financial entrepôt.

Theresa May is often, pejoratively, called provincial.

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America has numerous distinctive national stereotypes. In political terms, the coastal policy elites (as represented, say, by Hillary Clinton, an INTJ), are plainly NT-Rational. Trump, a clear ESTP, represents the disinhibited force of nature we're familiar with from Westerns; the blustering and authoritarian 'Big Man', impatient with formal authority and rules, demanding personal loyalty. In this he reflects the yearning values of his mostly working-class base, which I visualise predominantly as STJs.

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The EU leadership is part of the global, neoliberal cosmopolitan elite, and so NT-Rational. Emmanuel Macron is a personification of this type, as is the French elite. Beneath the surface, European countries diverge: Germany has, in Angela Merkel's public persona, a profound embodiment of the German national character - very STJ; France en masse, like the other Latin countries, inclines more SFP.

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Does any of this matter? Yes: when interests fracture in a country, national types are strongly predictive of values, which then lend direction to political movements.

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For more about the Myers-Briggs personality scheme, look to the link on the upper right sidebar.