The UK's Investigatory Powers Bill—the new Snoopers' Charter—is now hurtling towards the finish line with Labour doing what Labour does best: backing the surveillance state.

Nonetheless, anguished Liberal Democrats were quick on Monday to complain about Labour's inability to mount any sort of opposition to the Tory push for greater snooping powers in the UK as scrutiny of the proposed law reaches its final days in the House of Lords, before it returns to the lower chamber where MPs are likely to bless its enactment, following years of lobbying from Theresa May.

But the Conservative Party—which has a slim majority of 16—doesn't own the rhetoric on the Snoopers' Charter. In fact, it swiped much of the script from Labour when it was in government. And while Labour's Jeremy Corbyn-led frontbench is a very different beast from the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown "draconian, database state" years, it has fought only for small amendments to the IPB.

On Monday, Labour refused to back Lib Dem peers who sought amendments to remove two of the most controversial powers in the bill: the opaquely-named Request Filter and Internet connection records. Instead, it voted with the Tories to wave them thorough. It comes just weeks after shadow home secretary Diane Abbott tweeted that "many concerns remain" with IPB.

A number of tweaks, meanwhile, have been made to the draft law—some of which Labour has described as a big win for the party, even though they are fairly small beer. Last week, Labour gloated about May's first parliamentary defeat as prime minister when a superfluity of cross-party peers threw their support behind legal costs for victims of phone hacking with an amendment to the IPB that would pull in parts of the Leveson report. (As an aside, there's even been an under-the-radar win for ISPs, after the government recently amended the bill to make it clear that telcos can't be forced to collect and retain third party data.)

During the report stage of the planned law in the House of Commons back in June, Labour said that it supported the bill "in principle" after it struck a number of deals with the Tories, which it described as "significant demands" being met by then home secretary May. They included a review of bulk powers within the planned legislation, which has now come and gone; "a historic commitment," according to then shadow home secretary Andy Burnham, "that trade union activities cannot be considered sufficient reason for investigatory powers to be used"; and a "privacy clause" that he said had been "placed at the heart of the bill."

The result was for Labour to sit on its hands when it came to voting for heftier amendments on issues such as "thematic" warrants, the protection of whistleblowers from criminal proceedings, and the establishment of an Investigatory Powers commission. While its MPs—including the aforementioned Abbott—had largely abstained from siding with any opposition to the Tory bill, the party's peers (with few exceptions) have gone one step further by voting with the government.

And it sticks in the throat of Lib Dems who defeated May's draft Communications Data Bill—the uglier big brother to the IPB—during its coalition years with the Conservatives. But it's wrong to suggest that Labour ever had the appetite to oppose greater surveillance powers for British spooks, cops, and other agencies.

Some might argue that this is more down to Corbyn's ineffectual leadership, rather than his pick-and-choose stance on civil liberty issues. Perhaps both portrayals are unfair until you look at his recent Digital Democracy Manifesto, which seeks to bring in online ID for Brits with the Labour Party apparently planning—if it returns to government—to urge "people to share anonymised information for medical, government, and academic research." It also promises to "protect the human right of individual privacy with strict laws against the unauthorised hacking of Digital Citizen Passports by either public bodies or private individuals."

Some of which sounds spookily similar to the database state years of NuLabour, when ID cards and the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP)—the even uglier bigger brother to the IPB—were the order of the day. As a backbencher back in January 2011, Corbyn signed an early day motion that questioned various issues with IMP. It said at the time that the proposed legislation, initially shelved by the Tories before morphing into the draft Communications Capabilities Development Programme—May's first stab at a Snoopers' Charter—raised "serious privacy, data storage, and access concerns."

Skip to June this year, and Burnham said: "We are now significantly closer to developing the balanced, modern, world-leading framework, which the home secretary spoke about, for the use of investigatory powers that this country needs in the digital age."

But critics, who accuse Labour of failing to act on what some say are yet-to-be-addressed civil liberty issues, are missing the point: the party—despite the radical change of faces—repeatedly returns to the same well-worn script on surveillance.

Wednesday is the last leg of the report stage of the bill in the House of Lords, when bulk hacking powers will be eyeballed by peers, with Labour expected to once again look the other way. The IPB will then have its third reading in the upper chamber on October 25, where peers will have one last chance to consider amendments to the proposed legislation. Finally, both houses will be required to pore over and agree to the exact wording of the meaty bill, before it can receive royal assent from the Queen and become law.

In the meantime, let's not forget that spooks have been breaking European Convention on Human Rights rules while they secretly spied on us Brits for years, as surveillance legislation in its various guises was brought before parliament. Does anyone really believe that Labour was ever strongly opposed to a Snoopers' Charter? Don't be daft.