🅜🅐🅡🅚

With no inspiration, a total lack of knowledge and a head full of syrup sponge and Rolos, I spew out syllables in the vague hope of producing something useful.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Burnham's China Connection. The Letter. The Investors. The Pattern.

In early 2020, as the world was beginning to understand the scale of what was emerging from China, Andy Burnham wrote a letter. It was produced on official Greater Manchester Combined Authority headed paper. It was signed by him as Mayor. It exists in both English and Chinese versions. It was addressed to Mayor Zhang of Tianjin and classified as Internal Personal and Confidential.

The letter praises the speed at which the Chinese National Government mobilised to contain the virus and states that their timely response policies and the speed of containing the virus spread left a deep impression. The Chinese version is if anything more effusive. This was written at the precise moment the Chinese government was suppressing information about Covid, silencing the doctors who raised the alarm, and withholding data from the World Health Organisation. Burnham was commending their response while the cover-up was underway.

The letter is not an isolated courtesy. It references an ongoing relationship between Greater Manchester and Tianjin described as a continued relationship between our two regions. That relationship matters because it provides the institutional framework within which a pattern of Chinese financial engagement with Manchester has developed on Burnham's watch.

Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority lent £578 million in public money to developer Daren Whitaker of Renaker. The resulting luxury towers were actively marketed to Chinese buy to let investors through Hong Kong estate agents. A marketing event was held in Hong Kong just weeks before the GMCA approved a £69 million loan for one of the developments. Hundreds of flats have been sold to Asian investors according to Telegraph analysis of Companies House filings. Out of 11,000 homes built with that public money, 503 are classed as affordable. Less than five percent.

Meanwhile Manchester City Council, which Burnham's GMCA works alongside, selected Far East Consortium, a Hong Kong company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, as the lead developer for the Northern Gateway, the largest regeneration project in the city's history covering 350 acres and planned to deliver up to 15,000 homes. The construction of the first phase used China Zhejiang Construction Group Hong Kong, a subsidiary of the largest state owned construction enterprise in Zhejiang Province. A Chinese state owned contractor was building luxury towers in Manchester while a Hong Kong developer incorporated in the Cayman Islands was handed a £1 billion regeneration contract.

The pattern that emerges from assembling these documented facts is consistent and directional. A formal relationship with a Chinese city. A bilingual confidential letter praising the Chinese government's Covid response. Public money flowing to a developer whose luxury towers were marketed to Chinese investors. A Hong Kong developer chosen as partner for the city's largest regeneration project. A Chinese state owned contractor building the first phase.

Each element has an explanation available to it. Twinning relationships are routine. The Renaker loans were largely repaid. The FEC selection followed a competitive tender. The letter was a diplomatic courtesy.

But Burnham is not asking to remain Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is asking to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. At that level the pattern of relationships, decisions and correspondence matters in a way it did not when he was managing a regional brief.

The letter exists. The relationship with Tianjin is documented. The Chinese investors are in the Companies House filings. The question of what a Burnham government's relationship with Beijing would look like is visible in Manchester. It has been for years.

"A Chinese state owned contractor was building luxury towers in Manchester while a Hong Kong developer incorporated in the Cayman Islands was handed a £1 billion regeneration contract."

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

"Britain is funding, at scale, some of the most repressive and misogynistic regimes on earth. Britain is simultaneously admitting, without adequate screening, large numbers of young men formed in those same societies."

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

Manchester firefighters have been warned about supporting Reform UK by senior fire service bosses.

Senior leaders at Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) advised staff on how to deal with colleagues who wished to stand for Reform UK and effectively encouraged employees to report those they believed were supportive of the party.

The Free Speech Union’s General Secretary, Lord Young, said the email sent by GMFRS management “will create a chilling effect on the free speech of GMFRS employees who support Reform”.

He has written to Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who is responsible for the governance of the region’s fire and rescue service, calling for an explanation.

Public sector employees should not have to fear repercussions for their lawful political beliefs or associations.

Read more below 👇

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@RidyardMike 👍 snap

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@shane_pruitt78 @FBCKissimmee @NAMB_SBC @NAMBEvangelism @kevezell @FloridaBaptists @PaulWorcester @laceyeloisa Amen 🙏

[Big Brother Watch @BigBrotherWatch]

🚨 BREAKING: Keir Starmer threatens mandatory ID checks to use mobile phones

"Protecting children online is vital, but these are outrageous plans that will fail to address the underlying causes of online harm. This will only result in population-wide ID checks for all of us to use our phones, tablets and laptops.

"Put simply, the Labour Government is threatening ID checks for the internet. No one in a democracy should need to show their passport just to get online.

"These plans would replace efforts for meaningful tech and parental responsibility with performative, authoritarian government control that children can easily circumvent by accessing adult-registered devices. However, for the UK's 50 million adults using the internet, this backdoor digital ID requirement would invoke the death of anonymity and internet privacy.

"The Government's plan very likely means that unless you submit to intrusive identity checks when setting up your phone or computer, there will be a chokehold on your software and internet access leaving you with a child-locked device. Planned restrictions on messaging, streaming and browsing raise the potential of spyware in our pockets that will be exploited for other purposes before long.

"The Government mandating that all phones in Britain require ID and surveillance software is a crossing of the Rubicon that would make the UK one of the most authoritarian internet regimes in the world. This extreme technological censorship requires rigorous public and parliamentary scrutiny that is currently totally missing" - Silkie Carlo | @silkiecarlo

[No Context Brits @NoContextBrits]

GP receptionists when you ask for an appointment after 8am.

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@TerraOrBust He lives in a techno fantasy land

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@SeanM1997 👍

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@SPD_travels Even better

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

🚨 Astonishingly, the heads of the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service’s (GMFRS) ‘race and faith’ network have sent an email to firefighters, targeting staff members standing as candidates for Reform UK.

The email stated these individuals were "spoken to" and that management is seeking "legal guidance" to protect their "inclusive culture."

Sending an anti-Reform UK political broadcast on public systems during a regulated election period is a shocking breach of electoral neutrality and is unlawful.

Firefighters have every legal right to stand for election.

Hounding staff for lawful political views is unacceptable and is proof of the exact perception that anyone questioning an aggressive DEI agenda will be chased out of their job.

I have written to Chief Fire Officer Dave Russel demanding answers.

Petch and Ahmed - the network heads responsible - appear to have committed gross misconduct and should be dismissed.

GMFRS must apologize to Reform UK and the affected staff.

We have given GMFRS until Wednesday to answer 8 specific demands, including providing transcripts of what was said to our candidates and explaining why these network heads are permitted to weaponize IT systems.

I am also calling on HMICFRS (@HMICFRS) and the Electoral Commission (@ElectoralCommUK) to urgently investigate this unlawful breach.

Full letter below. 👇

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@Mioewing @ArchRose90 Very true

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

This was brilliant. Trevor Phillips played a clip of what Keir Starmer said about George Floyd and displayed how Labour MPs expressed their “anger”.

David Lammy said it was fine because they were in opposition.

But not fine for Nigel Farage to use the term “rage” like they did.

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@SPD_travels Great news 👍

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

Excellent leader in the Mail on Sunday about the persecution of employees of the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service standing as Reform UK candidates in the local elections. https://t.co/UKtFvRj3F0

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Since this was published Saturday morning it’s been revealed that the Royal Navy’s entire available fleet of hunter-killer submarines is stuck in port unable to sail — all five Astute class subs currently laid up awaiting maintenance and other repair work. Leaves the UK’s sub-sea internet and power cables dangerously vulnerable to sabotage by the Kremlin

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@AnneAshworth @SpaceX As an #SMT shareholder I invested years ago 😉

[🅜🅐🅡🅚 @markydeedrop]

@guy_herbert @Frencheconomics Fail faster

[The Iceman @the_iceman64]

90% of the soldiers on the first boats to hit the beach didn't live to see the end of the day. Look at those faces. Some of them never made it to 18.

Never forget that they paid the ultimate price for our freedom. We live our lives the way we do because of them.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

82 years ago this morning, a man of 31 from Middlesbrough waded onto Gold Beach in Normandy and, before the light went, did the thing that would make him the only man awarded a Victoria Cross for the actions of D-Day itself.

His name was Stanley Hollis. Before the war he had driven lorries and worked as a sandblaster. On 6 June 1944, a company sergeant-major in the Green Howards, he spotted a German pillbox his company had walked straight past. He went at it himself, up the open slope into the machine-gun fire, cleared it with a Sten and grenades, and took a second position and its occupants prisoner. Later that day, near a village called Crépon, two of his men lay pinned in the open under a German field gun and as good as dead. He went back out for them, into the fire, and brought them in. He had taken them in there, was his reasoning, so it fell to him to get them out.

That is more or less the whole of it. No speech, no pageant, no press release. A lorry driver from Teesside decided that other men's lives were his to answer for, and walked into the guns, twice, to make it good.

My dad was born in '61. We often sit and marvel at the fact that he is the full-way, and me half-way, through our fighting ages as men, and neither of us have ever been called up to war. We are the lucky few. But it is worth being honest, on this morning of all mornings, about what has thinned out between the country my dad and I have known, and Sgt. Major Hollis'.

Hollis did not wait to be told. He did not film the pillbox and tag the relevant authority. He saw what needed doing, judged it his to do, and did it. That mortal reflex - take responsibility, act, and expect no official to come and save you - was once an ordinary thing here, bred into ordinary men. Two generations of being managed and waited upon have quietly bred much of it not out but into deep dormancy.

The men of that generation did not cross the Channel in 1944 for a Britain that waits for permission to act, nor for one that watches its own dying boys handcuffed on the pavement. They did it for something they felt in their bones and would never have trusted to an institutional memorandum: a free people, fit to govern and defend itself, worth the dying for.

We owe them more than a poppy and a minute's silence. We owe them the vision of that country.

Stanley Hollis came home, kept a pub, and died in 1972. There are barely any of them left now, very old and very quiet. The decent thing would be to become a country of which they might be proud.