Felicity K

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave. The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it. Understand what is walking out. Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long. The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour. Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet. Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable. Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers. Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

Government says they “have to cut” the £2.8m budget for this world class telescope. How much did they spend on the PR, branding, consulting, and moving to Number 10 North? Why are we cutting funding to things that make us world leaders in Astrophysics?

The obvious answer to losing our foreign shearers is to simply train our own. Britain already does. Training was never the problem, and here is what actually is. The country has fourteen million breeding ewes and about three months to shear them, because the fleece has to come off in a short warm window or the animal suffers. A mountain of work crammed into one season, then nothing for nine months. So think like someone weighing up the trade. You spend years mastering one of the hardest physical skills in farming, shearing hundreds a day with calm hands and no harm to the animal, and the reward is twelve brutal weeks in summer and three quarters of a year with no work and no money. Nobody builds a life on that. So they don't, and who could blame them. The shearers who fly in have solved the one problem Britain cannot. A top shearer works four countries a year, New Zealand, America, Britain, Australia, three months in each, chasing the season round the planet until twelve weeks becomes fifty. That is what makes it a career instead of a summer job, and no single country can recreate it, because no single country has more than one season. There used to be British gangs on this circuit. Contractors who travelled, who trained the next lot, who knew every shed in the dale. That world thinned as the wool stopped paying and the young went to jobs that ran all year, and the gap was filled by the shearers who fly in, who now teach the British newcomers coming up, because the knowledge had nowhere else to live. Cut them off and you do not force Britain to train its own. You remove the last people still doing the teaching. And this is what makes it so hard to stomach. Seventy-five people, in for twelve weeks, gone the day the job is done, costing the taxpayer nothing and leaving the flock shorn. If any arrival on earth is the useful kind, it is this one. A government serious about who comes and goes would fling the door open to exactly these people and spend its energy on the arrivals it genuinely cannot account for. It has done the precise reverse. A hard No for the seventy-five it could see, needed and time-limit, while the numbers it cannot explain carry on untouched. They looked at a skills chain held together by seasonal workers and decided the workers were the problem. They were the only reason it still existed.

🚨 NEW: The UK’s largest telescope for studying space is now set to close after the Government pulled its funding It supported various Apollo missions and tracked Soviet rockets in the Cold War

Penrhos , the trees don’t know, it might be their last season before they could be brutally chopped down, just for man to holiday in “ Nature “ the trees carry on through the seasons bearing fruit as they always have For hundreds of years at penrhos providing food ,homes and shelter for so many creatures 📸Shirley Blease

Scotland has just done something quietly brilliant for its birds 🐦 New buildings across the country will now have to include "swift bricks", hollow bricks built straight into the walls that give birds a safe place to nest. It sounds like a small thing but it isn't. Swift numbers in the UK have fallen by around 60% since the mid-1990s, and one of the biggest reasons is heartbreakingly simple: modern buildings have nowhere for them to go. Swifts have always nested in the nooks and gaps of our houses, and as those disappeared, so did they. The birds themselves make it worse by being loyal to a fault. Swifts return to the exact same nest site year after year, having flown thousands of miles from Africa to get there. When they arrive to find it sealed up, some will keep flying at the spot again and again, sometimes injuring themselves in the process. The bricks cost about £30 each. They need no maintenance, they don't affect insulation, and once they're in the wall, you'd never know they were there. Sparrows, starlings and house martins use them too, all species in trouble for the same reason. One RSPB conservationist put it starkly. In his part of Glasgow, not a single swift bred in 2025, the first time in his 30 years there. He called it "nothing short of heartbreaking." Scotland is the first country in the UK to write this into law. Campaigners are now hoping the rest follows.