It’s more of a give-and-take. The U.S. has a default state of “screw you, I’ve got mine Jack” that the Tories have wanted to emulate by eliminating parts of the existing social safety net. Meanwhile, the UK (mostly the Tories but sometimes Blairite Labour) is constantly introducing individual awful new policies in this regard that conservatives in the States borrow to cut more holes in what remains of our social safety net. Some of the latter policies, designed to make it even more difficult for vulnerable people to collect aid from a system they’ve paid into, are documented in the film “I, Daniel Blake”, which @teknocholer mentioned above.
Rubes are rubes in both countries, and if conservatives are telling them that taxes are tyranny, giving them scare stories about a non-existent “crisis” in state pensions or SSI, and that they can all be millionaires if social programmes are cut and the money is instead given to Wall Street/The City to invest (on generous two-and-twenty terms, no doubt) they’ll go for it.
As in many aspects of the political and economic scene I’m taking a “hope for the best, expect the worst” attitude and planning for the latter. In both countries we’re headed back toward the pre-war class allocations of a tiny ownership class, a rump middle class, and a precariat/unnecessariat class of between 80-90% of the population. Increased automation (benefitting only the ownership class), global warming, the continued assumption of greed as the natural order of things (and the consequent economic and political policies) and the resurgence of right-wing populism are going to make the average person’s life in much of the West more harsh than it has been over the last 60 years.
