Maybe I just wasn’t there – I seem to have missed the day when it was decided that all Conservatives in Britain want to see the Republican Party win in the USA, whilst Labour supporters are aligned behind the Democrats. Perhaps I was having a nap.

As far as I was aware, both the major parties in the States believe in free market economics. Capitalism is the baked into the crust of the American Dream. Freedom of speech and religion are written into the American Constitution. Based on these three facts alone, it’s clear that both the Republicans and the Democrats are aligned closer to the traditional Conservative voter than to Labour’s bread and butter support base.

What’s more, aside from Margaret Thatcher’s close relationship with Ronald Reagan, there’s no real pattern of old allegiance between the Conservative and Republican Parties and between Labour and the Democrats. The solidly Republican President George W. Bush’s closest friend and political ally on the world stage was not a Conservative, it was Tony Blair.

When Americans speak of the politics of the left, they don’t mean the left as we know it – the Left of centralism, union power and nationalised industry – they mean universal, government-funded healthcare provision and a properly funded state education system. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Britain already has both of those and more besides; and that Britain’s Conservatives are not ideologically opposed to either. In fact, there’s general a lot more political and ideological water between Obama and Brown than between Obama and Cameron.

What’s more, British Conservatives aren’t anything like as far right as much of the Republican support base – there’s no home in Cameron’s Conservatives for those who wish to give significant power to the Church, nor to oppress others based on their sexual orientation. British Conservatives do not generally advocate the banning of abortion or the legalisation of firearms.

Both the American parties are promising tax cuts in the coming months, and while the only British party to say they’ll cut taxes is the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives are hugely more likely to try and bring down the overall tax burden in the long run.

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I would like to propose a more interesting way to think about British politics and its relationship with America, and I think it’s one which is far more enlightening than the lazy mapping of the two major parties in each individual country onto each other.

I would argue that Conservatives are aligned to America, while Labour ideologically sits with Europe. The correlation would be that when America is internationally strong, the Conservatives are more likely to be in favour, but when anti-American sentiment peaks, Labour is the order of the day.

Thus, Europe has been the strongest power in our lives for the past few years and America has been universally derided for it’s incumbent president; but as the 2008 presidential election has caught the imagination of the world, sentiment has shifted over towards the Americans and away from Brussels. Simultaneously we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of the Conservative Party. In many ways, it doesn’t really matter who wins the election (though I think it’s fair to say that most of us are rooting for Obama nowadays), because the overall winner is American politics, which the world is gaining a new level of respect for.

Naturally, it’s a gross generalisation, but I think it sheds light on the reason that Europe was at the heart of the Tory divides throughout the 90’s, and why David Cameron and Barack Obama get on so well, and why Tony Blair could have such a strong relationship with George Bush, and why, indeed, Britain’s place on the modern international map always seems to be that of a mediator between Brussels and Washington.

Great Britain is a island between America and Europe. In many more ways than one.