
Quite a lot of principle in common, I'd suspect, but fair bit of difference in application on the ground, at least in part because our situations and history are linked but different.
A lot of disturbing parallels though, our left wing parties are also fairly emasculated. We are getting the same daft rhetoric about how we should not scare off wealth creators by taxing them, or heaven forbid making their companies actually pay tax on the profits they make trading in this country. That's a European wide problem though the EU should IMO make tax havens illegal. The reality is they need us to make their money let's stop pretending we are at their mercy. At least the even sillier rhetoric about how financial services is a stand alone industry that doesn't need an industrial base to sell it's services to has kind of died down. We still have the right wing trying to privatise the NHS, despite widespread opposition and all the evidence to show it's not a good idea. We now pay more in subsidy to the railways than we ever did when they were nationalised but now it makes private shareholders and overpaid management wealthy, all the money we pay for gas and electricity goes abroad to foreign companies when we used to own it ourselves yet still people argue privatisation was a good thing. Some things are too important to be left to the markets. adam smith was saying that two hundred years ago yet now the institute that bears his name is a right wing think tank whose articles i no longer read in case I trash my computer. Fascism lost the war in the 1940's but seems to have won the peace while no one was looking. At least our religious nutters don't have much political sway, except we now have more faith schools and apparently single parent families and the disabled are ruining the country. Never mind the real culprits find somebody powerless to lay the blame on and keep telling everybody who is to blame and don't let them change the subject. It used to be if you lost your livelihood and possessions because of the actions of the ruling classes you rose up and slaughtered them now we just vote them back in.