Mirth Cheers Mirth, that's a rarity in this thread and I appreciate it.
Not that I'm holding myself up as a prognosticator, but the issue for Labour and the Tories is that the "centre" or the "safe pair of hands" is a concept that relies on historical conditions that began slowly vaporising more than fifty years ago.
The best way to look at it is in terms of the parties' social or political bases. Back in the post-WWII era there was a resurgent labour politics, Attlee and so on, driven by wartime exigency and energy, the ongoing strength of the early 20C labour movement, and the tangible external threat of communism.
Peacetime in the so-called Global North enabled the establishment of common markets and more open trade agreements at the same time as decolonial movements surged in the Global South in response to Europe's self-preoccupation. As political domination retreated in relative terms, economic modes of domination were normalised, including institutional loans and bailouts due to the "international community" of the increasingly US-dominated world order.
Around 1970 things reach a tipping point with the oil crisis, stagflation, the Bretton Woods reforms. I don't claim to be any kind of expert on this history, but to me it corresponds to the acceleration of industrial offshoring from the North, which in turn weakens the labour movements of the North as it turns the attention of left-wing politics to minority rights movements. It's both funny and sad these two symptoms of the same turn towards globalisation are now interpreted by many idiotic grifters as minority rights movements undermining union power.
The "centre" of parliamentary politics and its importance really had its era: that era started in the 60s, and continued to about the 2000s, and the definitive role in the centre during this period was managing the decline of labour movements and the established programs and instruments of New Deal- or trente glorieuses-style institution-centred left-nationalist social-democratic politics.
The management of this decline has been accomplished across the floors of most of our parliaments I reckon, for example in Australia it was Labor that achieved most of our "Thatcherism" … Labor took down several big unions head to head in the 80s, floated the currency, privatised the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, established the Accord on wages together with a tall pile of legislation that neutered the right to industrial action, and so on.
In the UK and Europe, after Thatcher you have big moments like Blair convincing Labour to drop Clause 4 among countless others, not to mention the trajectory of the EEC, Maastricht, the eurozone, and so on, set against the celebrated backdrop of the "end of history" and Clinton's Third Way politics.
By the time we arrive in this millennium, the parameterising mode of neoliberal policy really clarifies itself. Neoliberalism at first seems to leave laws and institutions in a similar condition or even rationally optimised when its Bills pass through parliaments. Thing is, as its wagons roll along, neoliberalism also installs mobile parameters, rates or discretionary powers in the regime of policy and law, degrees of undemocratic freedom fostering the possibility of undemocratic changes.
These days a federal Cabinet in Australia can do things like double the dole then halve it again over three months, all with only the Budget and supply to worry about. In the US, little changes few people understood like the repeal of Glass-Steagall … in Europe, a lot of debate about sovereign risk, Basel II and Basel III.
Managing all this decline in what seemed like a wholesome and caring way, having a "centre" made up of charismatic left-wingers "business could work with" and conservatives with "compassionate values", that was pretty important to getting all this over the line from about 1960 to 2010. That's because for a while there were still labour and social movements it was worth negotiating with, public goods it was easier to be diplomatic about. The job's been 80–20 complete since around the GFC. Democracy has been extremely circumscribed in many post-industrial Global North countries for a long time, and elite economic domination has become a norm. When was the last time Global North countries went to war and their publics agreed it was a good idea?
The labour share of GDP speaks volumes, and it's dropped from 70% to 45% in Australia during the period in question. More than our annual federal Budget in extra receipts for the investor class instead of workers, year on year.
Labour parties are no longer much needed as the carrot to coax along the last of mass-political power, and conservative parties are no longer much needed as the stick with which to beat it down. It's these Punch-and-Judy parties varying between hybrid spectacles of the pseudo-left and pseudo-right who feign or fantasise the continuation or restoration of mass-political power that have become much more useful to the power-brokers.
What a useless self-exonerating well-meaning c**t Starmer is. He's encouraged a chorus of morons to congratulate him for being "electable" and a "safe pair of hands" in this era when those hands have held onto next to nothing. He's been trying to imitate a form of politics that belonged to the likes of Clinton, Blair and Keating, to an ilk of which the Janus-faced managerialism at least had the integrity of managing a real decline. The historical conditions of this form of politics expired long ago. Only these delirious clowns who went up to read PPE or postgraduate law and can't stop huffing their own farts have still been trying to practise it.
History will never care if Starmer's secretly a decent fellow who secretly achieved some good things. Rightly so, because Starmer's a learned idiot and as UK Labour leader he's always been one. Starmer's a catastrophic misreader of the state of affairs as well as gormless enough to think the path of least resistance was the path of reason, especially when half the path he undertook was rat-fucking almost every single public figure with better politics than him in his own party, only to leave weasels like Streeting as his dance partners. Fucking shame job.
