I often despair at the state of politics in my country but one thing I Just Don't Get - why are Labour like this? Maybe this is just my ignorance showing but wasn't the whole point of them being different from the Tories? What's the point if they're just gonna do the same shit? What the hell is going on? How did this happen?
An aggressively cynical view would be that the Labour Party previously existed to manage the working class as a voting bloc. I don’t think it’s 100% the case, but I can see why folk would think it.
People will point Tony Blair being elected as the paradigm shift. It was the point when Labour went full on neoliberal where instead of opposing the conservative economic worldview, they accepted that thats how the world works.
So their whole argument shifted to ‘We can just manage the economy better than the conservatives (but in accordance to how they think things should work)’
I don’t think it was purely Tony Blair that started the shift though, I think it started when Labour started to appoint members to the House of Lords.
There’s also a shift in view, from the idea that the party exists to enact the will of its membership to the idea that the membership exists to enable the party.
If you believe that the important thing is the party, then stances on issues are no longer important. (Incidentally, corruption is also unimportant, as long as it doesn’t get punished. Preferably not punished because it isn’t discovered, but the important thing is the punishment.) And that means the party will perform what is called “triangulation” — it will base its positions not on what its membership/voters want to see enacted, but on what it believes will get it the most votes in the general election, which is not always the same thing — if the party’s voters don’t care very much about a contentious issue, it may be better to take a position contrary to their preference if it will bring in votes from outside the party.
The UK government is effectively 2-party; there has not been a government which was not led — usually controlled outright — by Labour or the Tories since the end of the second world war, and the government during that war was basically a coalition of Labour and the Tories; ignoring that, the two parties led every government back to the end of the first world war, when — in essence — Labour picked up the mantle dropped by the Liberal party, which disintegrated because of the war. Before that, every government was led by the Liberals or the Tories back to 1858, when the Liberals were formed as a coalition including the former Whig party; until that time, all governments were led by either the Whigs or the Tories all the way back to when the government was first put into this form. When one or both parties in such a system starts triangulating, very strange — and undesirable, usually — things happen. This is metaphorically illustrated by ice cream carts on a beach.
Imagine a mile-long beach where there are two ice cream sellers, and the people on the beach are more or less randomly distributed. The best arrangement of ice cream sellers for the people on the beach in such a situation is for there to be one a quarter mile from each end — nobody will have to walk more than a quarter of a mile to reach the nearest ice cream seller. But suppose that all customers always go to the nearest ice cream seller, and one of the sellers is in a stand with a fixed position, but the other one is a cart. The cart can maximize the number of customers it gets by moving to be right next to the stand, on whichever side has more of the beach on it. Since the people on the beach go to the nearest supplier, the cart will get everyone on that side of the stand. If the stand is a quarter mile from one end of the beach, the cart will be just barely further in — and every single person on the second half of the beach has to walk more than a quarter mile to get ice cream.
Well, when there are two parties, one of them usually has very fixed positions on most issues, because it will be the party of the rich, devoted to policy beneficial to the rich. As soon as the other party starts triangulating, it will gravitate to positions as close as possible to those of the party of the rich without exceeding them, assuming that the majority of the population will (metaphorically speaking) buy their ice cream from the nearest cart, rather than go to the trouble of building and stocking another one on the other half of the beach. In practice, what this means is that a lot of people on the other half of the beach stop buying ice cream. The Tories have basically entrenched all their positions by trying to enact and then enthusiatically defend Brexit, which influences nearly everything, and Labour is triangulating its way into being a party of unenthusiastic defenders of Brexit, because that’s what “just this side of the ice cream stand” looks like in context.