[alexbilbie]

I'm confused by your statement - a right-leaning Government is attempting to collect more taxes from multinationals who have huge sales in a country and pay little tax and yet you're claiming that they also consider tax collection some form of evil socialism?

[anon1385]

The Conservatives are right leaning from a European perspective and compared to most of the UK governments since the war.

From an American perspective they are more akin to the Democrats: they support gay marriage, support legal abortion, don't support reintroducing the death penalty, support public health care (to some extent), generally support public education, do at least claim to accept that environmental issues are a concern (although we do have an environment secretary who denies climate changes science…). They support giving benefits to at least certain groups in society (pensioners, land owners) and accept the need to provide some level of support for the disabled, unemployed, single parents and so on. They made commitments to maintaining the level of foreign aid. For all their talk of pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights they have not actually done so. So they have a lot of policies that your typical Republican would be fairly disgusted by.

I wouldn't vote for them myself of course…

[timje1]

This is because the US Democratic party could be considered center-right by European standards, with the Republicans heading into extreme-right.

If a party in the UK hinted at dismantling public health care (the NHS) out loud, they'd be lynched (either in the polls or the streets, whichever was more convenient).

[mercurial]

This is clearly an attempt to explain dmk's post, but not the article which was submitted.