UK parties

[andrewducker]

I was asked for an overview of the major political parties in the UK. This is a vague stab. Would those more politically aware people than I please point out the stupid mistakes I've made.

Conservatives are the right-wing part of the rich and those who think that the poor deserve to be so poor because they're all lazy scum. Which puts them slightly to the left of the Democrats, on the American scale, as they (nowadays) don't actually believe that homosexuals should all be put in camps.

Labour _used_ to be the party of the unions, ranging from those who believe in fairness on the wishy-washy side to full-blown communist types on the hard-line side. They've moved a long way right since then, at least fiscally. Nowadays they believe that the market (properly regulated, of course) is the answer to most things. I'm largely with them on that, but they do seem to have turned it into dogma rather than being pragmatic about it. This has lost them a lot of support.

Liberal Democrats are the people who believe that people should be allowed to make their own decisions, that cannabis and prostitution should be legalised, that strong government isn't the answer. They were also the only major party to say that taxes needed to go _up_ at the last election, because they recognised that the NHS was in urgent need of more cash. Think of them as socially liberal and economically supportive (if not fully redistributive).

My sympathies lie with the liberals

Comments

[andrewducker]

No, the Democrats are the ones who think the poor are all lazy scum. The Republicans are the ones who think the poor are subhuman scum.

Neither party would stand any chance of being elected in the UK.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

My impression is that the Democrats are somewhat to the right of the Conservative party, though in the past they have done leftward things. They *might* stand a chance of getting elected here - after all, it's the Tory party's lack of leadership, lack of policy, and general fuckwittedness, that is keeping them so much out of power now.

The Republican party are a load of screaming right wing nutters who do not stand a chance in hell of being elected anywhere but America.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Clinton administration was right of the Tories, on most domestic policy at least, and may well have been left of New labour on several planks. (I am not dealing with foreign policy and defence here.) The US, for example, has had a far more liberal policy on abortion than the UK throughout many adminsitrations. The medical insurance system, if you are in work, (which is a big if, of course) also provides far better care than the NHS does (or perhaps did - let's be optimistic ) for many people. It is wrong to judge US politics wholly on what we see most of here, which is their foreign policy.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

But as I understood it, the medical insurance system in the US is completely private - the only exceptions are Medicare, Medicaid, and health benefits you get if you're a US army vet. With the result that 40% of people in the US have no health insurance at all, because they've never been in the military (or, of course, they were dishonorably discharged), they're not yet retirement age, and they're in jobs that don't pay medical insurance and don't pay enough to get private non-job medical insurance: and since they have jobs they don't get Medicare. The NHS has its problems, but at least it covers everyone living in the UK, which makes it fundamentally better than the American system. Not to mention cheaper...

[heron61.livejournal.com]

This is sadly exceedingly accurate.