Why must the now mind numbingly boring US elections crop up in every other question I read on here! The first line of the question is "I'm from the UK" we don't want to hear about bloody Barack Obama and that other one, the pig in the lipstick!
To the asker - in the most basic possible terms, as you requested, left wing parties (Labour) tend to tax more, but spend more, and right wing (Conservative) the other way round. Traditionally the Tories are seen as the party representing the rich and landowners, and the Labour the working man, but there is not such a vast difference between them these days.
We don't have a Democratic party in the UK, they are the left wing US party. Strange name for a political party in the west, as we are supposed to all be democratic!
The Liberals are supposed to be somewhere between the Tories and Labour, which means they sit on the backbenches and have little say in how the UK is run.
The Labour party has only existed since the late 19th century though, before that it was the Tories and the Whigs, the latter being the ancestor of the current Liberal party. The Labour party, believe it or not looking at them now, was the party of the people, built up through working class people getting the vote, and gaining strength as the trade unions did.
US and UK politics are very different, if you want to know about both then they are two different questions.
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