Ahh yes, your ready to listen, you say in a calm tone. Then you go off on one again. I'm not going to bother. If you really wanted to know then I suggest sifting through
www.marxist.org or
www.worldsocialism.com
I wasn't refuting your point. I was stating that the people in power currently are relaxing their powers slowly so that they can monopolise the system when its finally at western levels of freedom. And I certainly wouldn't refute China's great improvement in many, many areas. But this is to be expected when a regime goes from authoritarean to open. I have never supported authoritareanism, I support democracy, which you are clearly terrified of.
GB didn't become authoritarian because of socialism. Its always been authoritarian because, I don't know if you know, we have a monarchy. Monarchs have total power over the military and foreign relations no matter what the people want. Now the power of the monarch is given to the PM, who is not even directly elected. Theres not even open primaries. The parties elect their leader, and the party leader is the one who becomes PM. So Tony Blair is an elected king, without restraints in his foreign relations. We don't even have a written constitution, so if Tony thinks having elections every five years is a bad thing, he can draft a new bill scrapping elections. Now you might think that such a bill would never be approved by parliament. Well over here our party systems are so damned tight and patronage so powerful that the amount of times a party has actually voted against its government in the last century can probably be counted on your fingers and toes.
And entirely against what you have suggested, it has been historically the Conservative Party that have brought in civil rights curtailing measures mostly, not Labour. You heard of Thatcher? Well she might be famous to you as being a good friend of Reagan, but here she is famous for putting three million people into unemployment while similtaneously cutting welfare, absolutely destroying the unions and supporting dictators (she actually denied that saddam had gassed the kurds for a long time even while there were reporters showing the bodies). Oh the freedom and liberty of it all. In this country it has always been the left wing that has pressed for more rights for individuals, not the right, which has clung on the vestiges of aristocracy.
Oh no, Labour introduced an NHS? Private health has never stopped, so there is still choice. Massive death taxes? Oh boo hoo, rich kids have to look after themselves rather than have daddies money? Big deal, and its a well known secret that the rich give their wealth to their kids bit by bit as they get closer to death just to avoid the death tax.
I don't think you know the meaning of the word socialism is you think GB is highly socialistic.