One person I believe knows this, is Keir Starmer. It's very hard to explain why things happen in UK politics without assuming he is trying to tank Labour.
To caveate this, I am a Labour member (with the goal of advising tech policy such that they don't send our tech industry off a sharp cliff). I've spoken to a few in the cabinet now about growth and industrial policy, and there's no appetite for engagement outside of their think-tanks. I go to the conferences today, and in contrast to the Tory government days where the main topic of conversation was "what do people want" and "how do we gain seats in the election", it's now all navel-gazing about how "well" their policies poll (vs how well the party does, as if they're the same thing). It's baffling how out of touch the current power brokers are regarding the danger Labour are in. There's rose-tinted glasses, and then there's obsidian-tinted horse blinders.
It's not an unreasonable assumption either. Nick Clegg did seemingly get rewarded for tanking the lib Dems. The ones lower in the party hierarchy will also have seen plenty of examples of pyrrhic loyalty being rewarded.
What modern parties effectively teach - UK Labour is just one of many examples, not even the only example in the UK - is that the supreme political virtue is loyalty to decisions taken in rooms you weren't invited to. That, they think, will eventually get them invited to those rooms.
The sad thing is that whether the rooms actually exist or not, the result is much the same.
"Don't obey in advance" is Tim Snyder's first rule against tyranny. While that is a great moral rule to follow in tyrannies, all organizations want people to obey beforehand, whether tyrannies or not. It's called showing initiative, doing what's needed without having to be told explicitly, and no organisation can function without it.
But in organizations with opaque power structures, where it's expected that decisions are taken unaccountably ("Noen har snakket sammen", loosely, "There has been discussion", used to be an ironic phrase in the Norwegian Labour Party), people may easily slip into obeying in advance a tyrant who doesn't even exist. They're trying to please the responsible people who are surely in charge somewhere nebulously above them in the hierarchy, but those people don't exist, it's bullshitters like Starmer all the way to the top.
Snyder's had his first rule, but I have a first rule too, which I keep repeating, and that is that powerful people believe in all the stupid things regular people believe in. They just act differently on the beliefs. A common person who thinks covid was an ethnically targeted bioweapon rants about it online and gets banned from Reddit. A powerful person who believes it, thinks "it's important that we too get such a weapon, and don't trust experts who say it can't be done, they probably just have scruples". A common person who thinks a Jewish cabal rules the world maybe pesters his relatives with it all day. A powerful person who believes it - well, he's more likely to do something like what Starmer has been doing the last decade. You don't try to fight Bilderberg, obviously, you try to get invited to it. Once you do, (like e.g Jens Stoltenberg was) you probably get disappointed and try to figure out who the real competent ones behind them too are, and how to join them - but you're not terribly disappointed, because on the way up you've been rewarded by all the others who thought they'd be rewarded for supporting someone like you.
Simpler take: The middle ground has been hollowed out. The old method (appeal to the centre) does not appear to be working. Starmer's throwing stunt policies at the wall to try to get some purchase.
It certainly is. And he'd maybe use more classy words for it, if he ever could be convinced to talk about his sincere beliefs. But as I said, I'm fully convinced that powerful people believe all the out there things that regular people believe. We've seen so many examples of it over the decades, and it's otherwise very hard to explain why Starmer would keep doing things which are neither a popular thing to do or the right thing to do.
The simpler take you propose doesn't work for me, because "throwing things at the wall" suggest unpredictability to me, and Starmer has been very predictable if you assume what I have been assuming for a few years now. His actions are not the actions of someone who would try anything, quite the opposite.
this isn't to say that Keir Starmer is doing an amazing job. he's not. he's far too comfortable with authoritarianism and far too establishmentarian, and I would much rather someone like Andy Burnham in charge--even if you can trust his policy positions just as much as Starmer's from when he won the leadership--just because he has some energy and charisma about him, and you feel like he might be able to counteract Farage somewhat, but, at the same time, the level of scrutiny of Labour is incredibly unfair and before you criticise them yourself, you have to try and remember that you're viewing it all through that filter
When the action is clearly going to hurt their political career, and there's no indication that it will put money in their pockets, and they don't even make much of an attempt to claim they're fighting for a principle, yet they clearly have a purpose in mind and keep doubling-down on it, you have to start looking for a motive somewhere else. "They hate their own people" comes to mind, but that's not really an answer because it still leaves you looking for the reason why they hate their own people. Not all leaders do, after all.
Or they just focused on getting into government with very little plan about what to do when there, and with a particularly inexperienced team (few former cabinet ministers in the elected Labour MPs).
If they cared about the country - they don't, they have complete contempt for the public - they would step down, dissolve the party and those in the party with a remaining qubit of morality put their efforts into atoning for their sins and crimes against freedom by working to get a Green/YP/LibDem coalition elected.
Every day they lolligag with this dead party is another vote for Reform - they know this.
The part about only listening to their own think tanks is weird. Academia leans left. American conservatives are suspicious of advice not from their think-tanks, but that’s because it’s hostile territory. The Democrats treat the university/expert/consultant class as free labor.
I don’t mean to be critical of your country especially given who is running America. But we do watch, and it has an impact here. Fear of an American Corbyn is one reason Democrats aren’t veering left.
Also I don’t know if this is related, but the fact that the US is about to install Tony Blair to head Gaza should make you rethink Labour’s capacity for thought.
One thing I have to ask about the democrats and a fear of Corbynism is shutting down primaries really and effective way to prevent one? Voters aren't stupid and the not being able to freely choose their candidate since Obama isn't going to help.
As your closest neighbor I think about how things could have been.