Is the UK now giving off strong Third World vibes?

that's a mistake that is often made, all be it thanks to the far right press.

what corbyn was offering wasn't marxism, but what is offered in the rest of europe, social democracy.

because politics in britain is so scued right now, anything that is not the hard/far/alt right wing of politics is saw as hard left or communist or marxism etc.

Labour did well when I were a lad.

I never voted Labour in my life, but there was stability and although there was poverty, there was one person sleeping rough in my city in the sixties/ seventies. He was a well known alcoholic who used to bed down outside brick kilns for the warmth.

Now every town in the place is full of people holed up in shop doorways. The towns making up Stoke on Trent are well portrayed on the internet and look only marginally worse than when I left after Brexit.

The gutter press have wrecked Labours chances. Any party is up against a propaganda machine that even Pravda could learn from.

The Labour party were not perfect, I didn't support them because of their loud mouthed followers who were basically thugs shouting anyone down in the odd subject oriented meeting I went to. In addition to that, their paymasters, the unions wrecked Britain, they abused their power and even shifted Heath from office.

I was there, I lived through it, I think we were a better country when we valued truth, courage, looked after those in need and despised liars and greed.

That country is gone. Which is why you have ended up with me I'm afraid :-)

TBF there's been nothing but opposition to this which I never understood. George Osbourne may have been overplaying the 'northern powerhouse' thing but woudn't you want to upgrade and modernize a major rail route anyway.

It will be a balancing act, like the new 15% Corporation tax rate that came in from worldwide pressure, not just the EU. Ireland couldn't ignore the political pressure from the US in particular on it, so had to go along with it.

So like we've always done we'll go along with the prevailing mood, but keep looking for the loopholes.

10 years ago people thought Ireland would be heavily affected by rule changes, the Apple case a great example, look at how that turned out. You've the ridiculous situation of a government strongly objecting to extra tax revenue, and defending a company that was acting extremely greedily to avoid taxes.

Corporation tax receipts have gone off the scale, leprauchan economics and all that. The government avoided the last crisis by letting companies bring Intellectual property rights to Ireland, they can't believe themselves how much Corporation tax they are taking in.

Italy has been ruled by the communists? I must have been slept through that day.

That's a bit of a leap there mate. I didn't realise we were discussing the Ukraine situation.

Oh, wait - maybe you think that UK & 3rd world = UKraine?

While that might all be true, the CP never ran Italy.

I seem to remember someone writing that it was about as radical as the British Labour party, which did hold the reins on several occasions.

As against that, one government minister in Italy (maybe even a prime minister?) at one stage was reputed to say "The Italian government is not unstable. I've been in government ever since the second world war".

When I moved back to the UK during Covid what shocked me was how normalised food bank collections seemed at supermarkets. Unheard of when I first emigrated back 2012.

it is shocking alright.

Corbyn was not fit to be PM. He couldn't even say he would be prepared to use his country's nuclear arsenal in retaliation for a nuke attack on his country.

You might want to read up on Italian political history. The Italian Communist Party - despite being in opposition - had around 33% of the votes in Italy throughout the 1970s. My point was that the entire political landscape there, fascism followed by the emergence of a large Communist party among multiple other parties, was deeply fractured and unstable up until the 21st century i.e. not a good example of how political systems or coalitions operate.

to be fair he was very much fit to be pm, as much as he wasn't perfect (no politician is or will be)

but in comparison to junk like borris johnson, sunak and truss, there is no doubt he was a much much better bet.

it could be argued that to state either way whether a country would or wouldn't use it's nuclear weapons could be giving information to potential enemies, so corbyn not saying either way as to whether he would or wouldn't use nuclear weapons would be protecting the country as the enemy would not know what he would do.

anyway, nuclear weapons are a 1950s solution to a 2023 problem, weapons from a by gone era for warfare of a by gone era where there needed to be an end to millions being sent off to battle.

cyber and similar is the warfare of the modern age, it's cheap and effective and that is what countries should be focusing on rather then 70 year old technology that is cumbersome, horrifically expensive and requires all of the waiting around for the processes to take place before a single missile can even be fired, by which time the country is destroyed anyway.