Conservative vs Labour
As an American, I am trying to understand the differences between the Conservative and Labour parties. Here in the States, I am a conservative Democrat (almost right in the middle of the parties). However, if I lived in England, it seems I would align (as far as my understanding goes) more closely with the Conservative party. Probably on the moderate side of the Conservatives. It seems to me that these two parties are not simply equivalents of the Democrat and Republican parties here in the States.
Trying to understand. Thoughts on this?
Trying to understand. Thoughts on this?
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Both mainstream parties in the UK (well, traditionally mainstream; it's all in flux) are somewhat leftwing on some issues from a US viewpoint - NHS, gun control, reproductive rights. They pretty much agree on a regulated Capitalist economy; the differences are largely on the nature and degree of this regulation and the degree to which free marketism must give way to direct government provision.
Roughly how I'd see it. We don't (outside the fringe) have right Libertarians or Christian Nationalists wanting to entirely end redistributive taxation on the one hand or enforce fundamentalist morality on the other.
It's not so much that they agree, but that these are largely inherited positions for which there is considerable public support to the point that they function as political third rails. Actual support for these policies within the party are either very minimal (Tory Wets are virtually extinct) or minimal (the soft-left and SCG are small organisations within the current PLP. If the NHS didn't exist, there wouldn't be much support for establishing such a thing within the current political class.
Depends on what you mean by a 'fringe', these were variously the positions of the ERG (which was around third to a half of the Tory Parliamentary Party and provided at least 3 of the last 4 leaders), and is very much the position of Reform.
I think I have that right.
Since the vote to leave the European Union the Conservative Party's move rightwards has been not so much a drift as a stampede.
On the other hand there is very little on the hard left. The dictum that the Labour party "owes more to Methodism than to Marxism" rings true to me. Whereas in continental Europe (e.g. in Italy) there have often been genuine Communist parties with power at a local level, in Britain they have always been fringe. There was a late 1970s sit-com called "Citizen Smith" starring Robert Lindsay as "Wolfie" Smith, a far-left activist seeking a Communist revolution in the UK. I suggest that this series could never have ben made in either continental Europe or in the US. In Europe he would not have been so powerless and ridiculous. In the US his allegiances would have been considered too shocking and evil to be funny.
This I feel is an unhelpful counter-factual. The NHS does exist and while many are happy to criticise it and say how much it needs reform, I suspect that as soon as anyone proposes actual change involving actual private payments for healthcare, there will be vehement public protest, perhaps from many of the same people who were previously clamouring for cuts (see: "Attempted Removal Of Winter Fuel Payment").
I once saw a British(or somewhere Commonwealth) gag book consisting of news-photos of politicians with supposedly funny word balloons imposed on them. One had Thatcher saying "In Britain, we have the Labour Party, which you Americans would call the socialist party, and the Conservative Party, which you Americans would also call the socialist party."
I don't think Thatcher was the best figure for the writers to telegraph that particular bit of national smugness, since she pretty clearly thought of Ronald Reagan as her ideological soul-mate, and even trashed Jimmy Carter in her autobiography for being too "interventionist".
Granted, she was pro-choice, and pro-lgbqt, insofar as that cause confined itself to abolishing the criminal statutes.
I think @chrisstiles might mean something like this...
Alberta has a reputation right now for being the most conservative province in Canada, but it also has a state-owned bank(*), a holdover from the era of agrarian progressivism(**), and which remains popular with the general public.
But if someone were to say that currently-NDP British Columbia is more left-wing than Alberta, and I were to reply "Hold on a sec! Alberta has a state-owned bank, but that's not gonna happen in BC!", it wouldn't really be a legit argument, because we all know that the main reason the bank survives is because people find it convenient, and are not analyzing it ideologically, AND if another nationalization on that scale were proposed in Alberta today, the governing Conservatives, along with a good chunk of their voters, would reject it as socialist.
(*) Technically, not a bank, but the closest the government could get to owning one without violating the federal monopoly on banks and their regulation. They take deposits, lend money etc.
(**) The bank was actually set up by the kooky-populists in Social Credit in 1938, but I think they lifted the idea from the previous United Farmers government, after the SCOC told the Socreds they couldn't do anything else to regulate banking.
I think that gives people a good feel
However, I note that most points lie approximately along a line from top right to bottom left, suggesting that the data is not two-dimensional despite the Political Compass's suggestion.
Where do you get this idea from, @chrisstiles ?
Yes and no. FPTP tended to force the left into the Labour Party, hence the existence (and eventual proscription) of Militant Tendency, and the "Red Clydeside" movement (and an attempt to affiliate Labour to Comintern). Plenty of communists around, just not that many in the Communist Party (though they still got some MPs elected).
I entirely disagree - - the foundation of the NHS wasn’t simply based on pragmatism or what was thought to be a good idea at the time but sprung out of a particular conception of society that was ultimately the product of serious and considered ideological beliefs.
The difference between Bevan and Streeting is thus significant especially in the context where 'many are happy to criticise it and say how much it needs reform' - because the real threat is that it's run down gradually, in much the same way as much of the rest of the state. And in the less likely case that it face immediate threat of abolition, there would be fewer politicians willing to defend it on its own terms.
Yeah, somewhat closer to the latter than the former (and in your example, the Conservatives preferred policy would be to privatize the bank, whereupon it would end up in the hands of a local oligarch in all probability, leading to all kinds of knock on issues with land ownership, preferential credit and so on).
I think we can basically synthesize the "latter" and "former" with...
Crazy old Bible Bill gave us this goddam bank when the Depression was still going on, but if we try to unload it now, our most stalwart rural MLAs start getting angry phone calls from old ladies panicked about having all their money somehow disappearing, and who the hell do we sell it to anyway, without creating multi-dimensional knife-fights in the financial sector?
Applied, mutatis mutandis, to various surviving reforms and innovations from the early to mid C20. FDR's social-security(financially troubled as it may be) might be a good Usonian example.
'England' is that part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain which is bordered by Scotland to the north and Wales to the west. There is another part of the United Kingdom on an adjacent island across the Irish Sea.
'England' isn't the name for the UK as a whole. Just sayin' ...
And yes, back in the day some English people used the term that way and I occasionally see some English Shipmates doing the same now and then. I won't name and shame.
Howbeit, the old joke about both the US Republicans and Democrats being the equivalent of the UK's Conservative Party is just that - old.
Americans I've spoken to have laughed and got the joke but say it's about 30 years out of date.
There is an American left, of course, some of it radically so, but I don't think we can describe all US Democrats as being 'on the left.'
As so often with transatlantic dialogue British and Americans can find themselves at cross-purposes at times. Regular US visitors to the UK or Americans living here tell me they can't always tell when we are joking - and I'm sure the same thing happens in reverse.
Likewise with terminology.
The term 'socialist' here doesn't always carry the connotations it has for many Americans. There can be differences in the way we use the term 'liberal' too.
There are broad similarities of course but subtle distinctions on both sides of the Atlantic that each of us need to take into account.
On the political compass, yes most parties lie along that axis. There are some exceptions, of course, the most obvious being Libertarians (and, I have come across Libertarians here in Scotland though by no means a dominant political movement) being to the bottom right and Communists to the top right. Where the "point on the compass" fails is it doesn't really deal with parties - it can work with individuals, but parties should be regions on the map with fuzzy edges which would often overlap, and especially for larger parties (which Democrat and Republican in the US, and Labour and Conservative over here, certainly count as) those parties would probably cover close to a a quarter of the space - and if you look at large parties dominated by a single issue (eg: SNP or PC centred on independence) that space can be even larger.