it is hard to know where to even start with this one.
maybe have a look here--though in a sense this could be anywhere--regarding the kind of socialist tony blair is. i suppose from some american militia group perspective, one so far to the right that clinton would look like one too, it is possible to refer to blair as a socialist in a meaningful way, but it says more about the problem of basic definitions that plague right discourse than it does about blair:
http://www.vusst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/neoliberalism.htm 3401 E 12th St
the other problems are evident:
1. american conservatives have been persuaded that taxation can coherently be understood as an end in itself, something visited upon the wealthy to pay for their reprobate brothers and sisters. that view is, of course, insane. it does speak to a petit bourgeois understanding of the world, however, one in which anything and everything can be understood from the "common sense" perspective of the experience of an isolated individual. this makes sense from an ideology that hates the idea of the social (remember margaret thatcher on this) because it is linked to a notion of the public (which the right hates even more).
2. there is no way to move from the viewpoint outlined by ustwo--which he did not invent--on taxation to anything approaching an understanding of democratic socialism, where it came from, what it was and to an extent is still about--because there is no way to think about taxation in terms of its social function.
instead you get: taxes=bad while at the same time capitalism=good.
there is nothing more to the right's economic ideology than that.
3. from the above it follows that, apart from cheerleading, the right ideologically has no coherent position on capitalism either--not as social system, not as generator of social problems that have required responses from the state. sometimes it seems that the right has a purely abstract understanding of capitalism--ideologues from teh right would have to have such an understanding in order to believe seriously in fictions like the free market.
4. so given that the right has no coherent view of capitalism, and no coherent view of its social effects (beyond deciding that more cash=more moral, so less cash=less moral), and no coherent view of taxation (beyond thinking it bad because they do not as individuals like being taxed), it follows that you cannot expect american conervative ideologues to have anything coherent to say about socialism, either as a whole, as a historical phenomenon, or about the present state of affairs, in which you have a persistent conflict between the logic, say, of the welfare state writ large--based on the redistibution of wealth--and neoliberal ideology.
so when you see ustwo above biting the london times article about blair's pension proposals, which seem based on actuarial data and which seems to follow from a neoliberal hostility to the system he purports to reform---and then (ustwo) claims that this action is indicative of something about "socialism"---it is hard to know whether you should simply laugh and move on or try to say something in response.
as it stands, right now, i get to do both.