From now on, I will be posting a campaign update around teatime every day to let you know where I’m up to.
Here’s the first one - hope you find it interesting. Enjoy the evening sun everyone!
🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer says he'll be travelling to Makerfield to campaign for Andy Burnham
“I want everybody to be involved in the campaign, whatever other discussions are going on”
I am proud and humbled to have been selected as Labour’s candidate for Makerfield.
These proud working-class communities represent the very best values of our country and they deserve so much better. It would be my honour to work for them every day, if elected as their MP, to achieve that.
Many people here feel Westminster isn’t working for them and they are right. I am standing to change that and get the voice of these communities heard loud and clear.
I am glad that this by-election has finally put the places that make up the Makerfield constituency into the national spotlight. They have been neglected by national politics for too long. It is a good thing that all political parties are now on the hook to tell the voters here what they are going to do for them.
More than anything, people need life to be more affordable again. As Mayor, I have brought in changes which are helping, such as the £2 fare cap, free bus travel for our 16-18 year-olds and removing the 9.30am restriction from older and disabled people’s bus passes. But there is only so much I can do from Greater Manchester. If elected, I will have a relentless focus on reducing people’s everyday costs and bills and well as securing the investment these communities need.
I have been an elected representative in Greater Manchester for 25 years. Throughout that time, I have fought for the people of the North West of England on so many fronts. I am now ready to bring the whole weight of that experience to fighting for the communities of the Makerfield constituency and would be privileged to be given that opportunity.
this is f*cking gold
the Claude setup most people will never find on their own
if I had this a year ago, I would've worked 5x faster
in the right hands, this changes everything:
I can confirm that I will be requesting the permission of the NEC to stand in the Makerfield by-election.
I grew up in this area and have lived here for 25 years. I care deeply about it and its people. I know they have been let down by national politics.
Ten years ago, I decided to leave Westminster. Why? Because, after 16 years, I came to the conclusion that our national political system does not work for areas like ours. I learnt this fighting its failure to invest in the Wigan borough, for justice for the Hillsborough families and against its treatment of Greater Manchester during the pandemic.
Over the last decade, I have been challenging this failure from the outside and building a new and better way of doing politics. We have built Greater Manchester into the fastest-growing city-region in the UK and put buses back under public control, introducing a £2 fare cap to help people with cost-of-living pressures.
However, there is only so much that can be done from Greater Manchester. Much bigger change is needed at a national level if everyday life is to be made more affordable again. This is why I now seek people’s support to return to Parliament: to bring the change we have brought to Greater Manchester to the whole of the UK and make politics work properly for people.
Millions are struggling and they need the Labour Government to succeed. It has already made changes to make life better for them in its first two years. After this week, we owe it to people to come back together as a Labour movement, giving the Prime Minister and the Government the space and stability they need as the by-election takes place.
I want to recognise the difficult decision taken by Josh Simons and the sacrifice he and his family are making. I have worked closely with him as Mayor on issues like flooding and illegal waste dumping and have seen first-hand how effective he has been. He has put the communities of Makerfield first, made a real difference for them and should take great pride in that.
Finally, I truly do not take a single vote for granted and will work hard to regain the trust of people in the Makerfield constituency, many of whom have long supported our party but lost faith in recent times. We will change Labour for the better and make it a party you can believe in again.
ENDS
This Chinese guy created 13 agents in Claude Code for Shopify stores and single-handedly serves 200 dropshippers a month, taking $800 from each.
He sits at one desk in front of a wall-mounted LG monitor split into a 3x2 grid of 6 Claude windows, another identical grid runs on a vertical display next to it, plus 1 window on the MacBook within arm's reach, totaling 13 agents simultaneously building Shopify stores, each busy with its own part.
No team, no managers, no support, just him, the monitor, and the API counter ticking in the header of every window.
He is not on a subscription but on an API rate billed by tokens, and he figures 13 parallel agents pay for themselves from the very first client, because every finished store goes for $800, and all 13 windows together consume less than $80 a day.
In the first window he set that system prompt which immediately closes the "assistant or employee" debate:
"you are my new founder-engineer"
So the model knows at what level it was hired: not to hint, not to advise, not to supplement, but to own the result, because for this Chinese guy Claude is no longer a helper in an IDE, it is a partner in his small factory, billed by tokens and never leaving for lunch.
And the other 12 agents he spread across the layers of the store, so each one sits in its own context and does not interfere with the neighbor:
"build a catalog of 80 products and rewrite the descriptions"
"lay out the homepage for the niche of the client"
"set up the cart, payment, and shipping by country"
"generate 30 email chains for warming up"
"design 50 banners and a logo for the brand"
"set up analytics and A/B tests on the homepage"
In a regular agency each task like this would take one designer or developer a full 2 days, because they would first collect the brief, then wait for revisions, then get on a call, whereas this Chinese guy has all 13 agents working in parallel in their windows, and while one writes descriptions, the second is already laying out the homepage, and the third is designing banners.
In the end on the wall it looks like a factory: 13 identical Claude robots writing into one project, and the Chinese guy himself in the chair in front of them decides only 2 questions, which client to hand the finished store to and who to take next, and beyond that he does nothing.
And economically it is still cheaper than keeping a team of 5: one operator like this closes 6 to 7 finished stores per day at $800 each, while a traditional design agency charges $3,500 for the same store and builds it over a full 2 weeks, whereas this guy spends less than $80 a day across all 13 windows.
Wires hanging out, the monitor bolted to a stand, no office and no employees, just 1 desk, 13 robots, and a queue of dropshippers who send new orders every morning.
In my opinion, this is the most efficient solo Shopify factory I have seen this year, and it is already running right now, while traditional agencies are still debating whether AI will take jobs from designers.
🚨BREAKING : Call centers are officially dead.
ElevenLabs Agents quietly wiped out the $40B customer support industry.
→ Sounds human in 70+ languages
→ Books, updates, closes tickets mid-call
→ Plugs into GPT, Claude, Gemini, any LLM
→ $0.08/min, startups get $4K free
Revolut, Cisco, Deliveroo already switched.
You're next 🧵
Met a 44 year old at a quiet rooftop bar in Barcelona who runs a brand doing $27M/year.
Pays himself €22k a month and cycles almost everything else back into stock, creative testing, and a reserve he started building five years ago.
I asked him if he ever thinks about upgrading his life… penthouse, supercar, all that.
He said his first mentor gave him a rule when he was 20.
Spend 20% max until you’ve built 7x your “never worry again” number.
After that, you can stretch to 40% without slowing the machine.
He’s at roughly 4.5x right now.
Thinks he’ll hit his number in about 3–4 years.
No debt.
About 16 months of cash sitting untouched.
And a creative budget that lets him test faster than most competitors can even produce ads.
That reserve means no supplier issue, no ad account ban, no market dip can really hurt him.
That’s what real control looks like.
The creator of Claude Code just broke coding in 30 minutes.
No long tutorials.
No fluff.
Just pure “vibe-coding.”
People spend HOURS learning this… and still miss it.
Save this.
This changes how you build forever.
The Head of Claude Code at Anthropic said he hasn’t written code by hand in months.
In 2 days he shipped 49 full features. All written 100% by AI.
He just dropped a 30 min talk on exactly how he does it.
Worth more than any $500 vibe coding course. Bookmark it:
🚨 BREAKING: Claude can now build your retirement plan like a Vanguard $500/hour wealth consultant (for free).
Here are 5 insane Claude prompts that replace your retirement advisor, tax consultant, and investment strategist.
(Save for later.)
The Anduril supply chain is worth paying attention to.
$OPTX - Syntec Optics just announced participation in what they describe as "the largest effort of its kind to equip every U.S. soldier with superhuman perception and decision-making capabilities."
That exact phrase appears in Anduril's EagleEye announcement.
Anduril took the $22 Billion IVAS contract from Microsoft. Now building AR helmets fusing night vision, AI, and battlefield data for every soldier.
$OPTX makes the polymer optics. Lighter than glass. Lower cost. High performance. They claim to be the largest independent manufacturer in the U.S. with full vertical integration.
The numbers:
$148M market cap
~$28M annualized revenue
5.3x P/S
15.3% EBITDA margin H1 2025
82% insider ownership
~$20M free float
NDAA now mandates domestic sourcing for defense optics. China currently dominates polymer optics production globally.
This is not a pre-revenue bet. It is a micro-cap component supplier with real earnings and potential exposure to a generational defense program.
The UK gives you a £20,000 ISA allowance every year.
Millions don’t use it.
Let’s look at what that actually means....
£500 a month invested Inside a Stocks & Shares ISA in Vanguard S&P 500 $VUSA
At 10% over 25 years → £660,000
Completely tax-free.
No capital gains tax.
No dividend tax.
Most people focus on what to invest in…
However, they ignore where they invest.
That mistake costs more than they realise.