Is the UK now giving off strong Third World vibes?

i just checked, your claim is bogus.

no doubt you will keep repeating it but it's still bogus.

ireland has a higher over all literacy rate then the uk.

They're quoting from over two decades ago.

Anyway, they said "we" a few times as if they were in Ireland, yet they had no knowledge of how education has progressed in Ireland since the 1970s. Very low level trolling, or just low comprehension skills.

To quote Eric Hoffer;

"In times of change, the learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

it's not my world, it's the actual factual world.

all of the rest of europe still has it's state railways and will continue to do so, only britain was stupid enough to engage in privatization rather then just doing the minimum of allowing open access operators.

Incorrect. I gave you a link for the UK literacy link earlier.

If you google literacy in Ireland, it says "The OECD Adult Skills Survey shows that 17.9% or about 1 in 6, Irish adults are at or below level 1 on a five level literacy scale. At this level a person may be unable to understand basic written information. 25% or 1 in 4 Irish adults score at or below level 1 for numeracy."

https://www.nala.ie/literacy-and-numeracy-in-ireland/#:~:text=Literacy%20and%20numeracy%20statistics,below%20level%201%20for%20numeracy.

Now you can make up all sorts of excuses about leaving school early here etc but that does not wash.

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

your claim is bogus and has been for years.

Not 20 years old. The survey I quoted was from 2013.

Here is one from 2020:

"According to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, about 18% of Irish people aged 16 to 65 are at or below level one on the five-level literacy scale."

https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-adults-literacy-5156484-Jul2020/

So not that different. Not great, is it, after all the money we spend on education?

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

so your claim is bogus.

It actually says PIAAC survey 2012, so is only 11 years old. If you can find a more recent survey on literacy in Ireland, feel free to post it.

Now is 2023 minus 2012 your 20 years? Where do you get 20 years from?

You remind me of that SF TD from Donegal, the lad who dropped out from Letterkenny I.T., and who wishes to become the next Minister for Finance in a new government....heard him making mistakes like that more than once.

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.

I didn't ignore problems in the UK. It was impossible to.

The rise in the homeless, the increasingly dysfunctional people who used drugs, presumably as a means of escape. The boarding up of shops wasn't unusual in the boom & bust UK, but when I left it was long term cumulative and from what I see on the internet is now worse than the deepest "bust" period.

I went to Liverpool to photograph some of the dereliction in Maggies ere, I could get far worse photos in the city that I was born in and spent my life there.

I think it summed the place up one Sunday about five years back. We were drinking in my town center pub and watching a group sorting through the donations left outside a charity shop.

That was in the days before Brexit sank in.

The only places boarded up in Tralee are Argos and Iceland,

I have been coming here all my life incidentally and the place is showing no sign whatsoever of any form of decline.

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.