John Fletcher 🐝🌹🌻🦖

NEW: Bloomberg Saturday read Is Andy Burnham Labour’s saviour, or is it just… vibes? — The last week has been fascinating. Burnham has had a bumpy start. He’s boxed himself in by committing to the fiscal rules and Labour’s manifesto on tax. It significantly limits his room for manoeuvre to deliver his promise of change. — Some in Labour worry he’s already trapped by the same political and economic constraints that hampered Keir Starmer. While there’s no doubt he polls better and has more energy, they stress he isn’t a messiah who can fix all their problems. — Burnham performed 5 u-turns this week: on rejoining the EU, on the fiscal rules, backing a hardline immigration policy, reversing his trans views, and ditching a 50p top rate of tax. An MP on the left says he looks inauthentic. Another compares it to Starmer’s safety-first Ming vase strategy. — More clarifications are coming. Allies say it’ll be difficult to drop Starmer’s Brexit red lines on the single market and customs union before an election, and that it’ll be hard to fully nationalise energy and water. Ambitions are being scaled back. — A supporter says he’s being sensible and scraping the barnacles off the boat. But it shows he knows he has the same problem as Starmer losing votes both left and right, and he has a similar response: picking policies that appeal to each side. — So what’s different? Tax rises on capital sound likely, but that won’t raise much money and he’s now ruled out touching the big taxes. Some in Labour worry about the impact on growth and investment of a virtue-signalling tax policy. — One MP warns that by loudly promising “real change” but not giving himself the room to deliver it, Burnham could quickly see the public turn on him, just as they did on Starmer. The criticism doing the rounds is that he is just Starmerism with vibes and a northern accent. — There are growing concerns about the lack of serious planning Burnham has done for No10. His policy platform is erratic. His political operation is threadbare and largely consists of Ed Miliband’s team. MPs are appealing to Burnham to quickly expand his circle to avoid the sort of factional warfare that did for Starmer. — Some MPs also worry Burnham might immediately enter an economic downturn and new cost-of-living crisis just as he becomes PM, which the public will inevitably blame him for, preventing a honeymoon period. Some think he made a strategic error going so soon and should have let Starmer take the pain coming in the next six months. — Some MPs also want Burnham to stop getting into fights on Twitter, which he has been doing all week, raising eyebrows. His supporters say he’s a unity candidate who can attract voters from across the political divide. This campaign is already putting that to the test. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Too on point not to share. This is great, but too bad the Orange Felon’s enablers won’t let him see it. This Australian's reply to #Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect. "Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage. You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail. Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates. Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you. And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again. And you're calling Greenland poorly run? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no. 'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years. And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess. So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth." - Tony Locke

Finally created something that I would get personally manufactured. Would love to have this colour scheme! #CPFC | @CPFC 🦅🔴🔵