Is the UK now giving off strong Third World vibes?

your link was to a stat that was over 20 years old.

your claim is bogus and has been for years.

that's the same 20 year old stat you posted.

so your claim is bogus.

While I was in north England I could often see how libraries were turned into food banks.

And the libraries that still were open seemed to have a lot of their time taken up with people struggling with the profit driven company that the government offloaded welfare entitlements to. Profit was determined by how many entitlements they could block, so of course they immediately started making claimants life hell.

I don't have a link but the vast majority of denied claims are later overturned in court. Such a waste of public time and money to undo the damage of privitisation.

Have you a non charity link to your last claim?

I can understand a degree of scepticism. We are after all, told we're doing very well for ourselves by the media.

I'm also sceptical of anecdotal stories but if you look at the fact that someone, unprompted, posted that they were unaware of charitable food distribution organizations in their own town when in fact there were several. Does this not back up the notion that we tend, in this country, to overlook our own problems while being critical of those in other countries.

Perhaps if we look at literacy. Ireland is about 8 places below England in our literacy rate. Given that literacy is very important in getting out of poverty, might this explain the greater use of food banks in Ireland vs the UK?

https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/publications/countryspecificmaterial/

The UK is also doing the wrong thing in abandoning HS2 as it would be a key infrastructure project. And then the big problem in the UK is Brexit and the current labour relations unrest, strikes in the NHS or the train service. The EU would be the biggest trading partner the UK has or had. So you can guess what's going to happen if you run a business and offend your biggest client? And the Tories want to be the political party which represents business? It's more that the Tories are the party representing self inflicted isolationism.

The problem I see in Ireland is that nothing or few things ever get done or built, when it comes to infrastructure. The docks or so called silicon docks as they like to be marketed and seen, are basically not much, compared what places in England, like Liverpool are like.

High rise buildings with contemporary and nice design often get rejected in Dublin just for being too high, or even if approved are not built. And then there is the lack of residential housing and excessively high rents, - all reasons, why Dublin was sadly not the prime alternative business location to Brexit UK or Brexit London. And Dublin as well as Ireland would have been the top destination, English speaking and a general welcoming business climate and good relations with the US.

Just look how much high rise architecture has been built recently in Liverpool or in Manchester? No crisis there, one would think, Brexit? Labour shortage? High interest rates? all no excuses, so it seems. If these cities were Dublin there would be many reasons to reject those buildings right from the beginning.

If Britain has better literacy skills then why did they swallow all the brexit promises?

Perhaps there's a deficit in rational thinking.

And that's a decade old research.

Demographics will have seen a gap open up since then. I commonly meet older people over seventy who struggle with anything beyond a tabloid, whereas that's the norm in England.

No offence to Stoke, but by UK standards it is s a pretty poor city economically.

You are right that there is greater poverty there than we would see anywhere in Ireland.

I really don't think the media paints a rosey picture of how hard things are here. We are well informed of how people are struggling to put food on the table, pay bills, rent/mortgages, put kids through third level education, put up with a dysfunctional health system, crime, drugs etc.

But we aren't pretending we live in the world's fifth richest and thriving economy (as if that means anything, was 4th a few years back, had an Empire 60 years ago), and Brexit made us stronger, Cruella Braverman coming out with stuff that just 10 years ago, would have been treated as downright hate speech.

I mean this is a government that thought painting cartoons in an asylum kids was too left wing and touchy feely, and anything bright and colourful to make a kid smile was dangerous, and should be removed. They are the type of psychopathic ministers that are in that government. Show a bit of common decency and respect for kids in an asylum centre, and actually act like the world's 5th largest economy.

Do people think Boris, Liz Truss, Cruella, Patel and the rest, actually believe any of the shyte that comes out of their mouths?

If I thought they actually believed it, I'd have a little respect for them. Most of them were remainers who are coming out with the most vile shyte to appeal to UKIPers.

F*cking absolute charlatans. Little Donald Trumpers.

As for that dangerous clown Boris, I'd forgotten some of the Covid stuff. Didn't go to any Cobra meetings about Covid for 2 months then, the day after he attends his first one, goes into a hospital and shakes hands with infected patients and then tells the world everything is fine, I shook people's hands, everybody else do it.

We can't tell people to stay at home, the British love their freedom too much. Cummings following their own Covid models, because we know more than every other country in the world. That delay in lockdown cost thousands of lives.

Same moron editing blogs after he was caught driving to test his eyes in Durham. Trying to say he warned about Covid way back. A dangerous know it all bastard.

Using charts in the briefings at the start of Covid to show how great Britain is doing, then ditching them when they started catching up with Spain and Italy.

Every f*cking statement has to include world leading. Tell you what, never mind world leading, just have a basic level of competence and listen to advisors who know what they are talking about.

Drafting up plans to send refugees to South Georgia and paint over cartoons on walls of child refugee centres. Just solve the immigration problem that you've failed to do for the last 13 years and stop wasting time on shyte that everybody knows will never, ever get implemented because it's crazy, batshit stuff.

That's just off the top of my head stuff. Our shower mostly listened to the experts. They f*cked up on nursing homes and trying to keep the country open for Christmas that time, but they got most things right because they listened to experts. That inaction cost hundreds of lives though. Just multiply that by 10 to get the level of incompetence in Boris's government.

Too much time spent on slogans and clapping for the NHS, and wasting time doing Brexit preparations that could have been spent elsewhere.

I forgot, everybody is sick of experts. That Gove clown is largely responsible for that school buildings mess, private sector knows best. Another mess was the Covid tracking and tracing system.

That's only a few things under Boris. Then Liz Truss. I don't what words you use to describe that imbecile.

Boris never got anything half right in his life, if he did it was by pure accident.

When he did up 2 letters on Brexit, 1 supporting Remain, the other Brexit, he got that half right purely by accident.

He famously said he'd stand in front of the bulldozers for the new runway at Heathrow, then f*cked off abroad when the vote came up in the Commons. What I didn't know is he did up 2 letters again at the planning stage. 1 he gave to the groups supporting the runway, the other to groups opposing it. When it got to the planning hearing everybody was looking at each other going wtf? So he got that half right.

When he decided to stand down from the leadership contest in 16, he got that half right too, should have left it that and he'd have got it completely right.