There's a truism of conventional wisdom, broadly accepted on both sides of the Atlantic, that British and American politics since World War II have run in rough parallel. Sometimes one of the two Anglophone democracies gets ahead and sometimes the other falls behind, but roughly similar phenomena — adjusted for cultural differences and quite different political systems — tend to occur at roughly the same time.
Both nations experimented with large-scale social-democratic reform in the 1960s, under left-center political leaders — Lyndon Johnson in the U.S., Harold Wilson in the U.K. — who were ultimately undermined by that decade's social discord. In the other direction, Maggie Thatcher became prime minister the year before her friend Ronald Reagan was elected president; between them they remade the political economy of the Western world, with calamitous consequences we're still feeling today. Bill Clinton's "New Democrats" emerged a couple of years before Tony Blair's "New Labour," inaugurating a triumphalist era of neoliberal reform politics that ended up pissing off the entire world — except for the investment banks and their political flunkeys, of course, who remain distressingly powerful and entirely cocooned from reality.
