🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer will introduce nightly social media curfews for 16 and 17-year-olds as part of the Government's social media ban [@thetimes]

🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer will introduce nightly social media curfews for 16 and 17-year-olds as part of the Government's social media ban [@thetimes]

Ireland is being made to shrink its dairy herd, with healthy in-calf cows going to slaughter early, to satisfy a nitrogen figure set in Brussels. Start with how cruel the timing is. Barely a decade ago, when the EU scrapped its milk quotas in 2015, Ireland told its farmers to do the opposite. Expand. Grow the herd. Build the new parlour. The government's own strategy pushed dairy hard for export growth, and thousands of families borrowed heavily and did exactly as they were asked. Now the same establishment that cheered them bigger is ordering them smaller. The instrument is a rule that sounds technical and harmless. The EU caps the nitrogen that livestock manure may spread on the land. Ireland's grass-fed dairy farms, among the most efficient and lowest-carbon on earth, held a hard-won allowance to graze a little heavier. After a water-quality review, that allowance was cut, from 250 kilos of nitrogen a hectare down to 220, across great swathes of the country from 2024, and it has stayed under threat ever since, its conditions tightening at every review. To drop under the new line, a farmer has three doors. Find more land, ship his slurry away, or get rid of cows. Land is scarce and the squeeze itself sent rents soaring, so for many the only door left is the herd. The Irish Farmers Association reckoned an extra sixty nine thousand acres would be needed nationally just to stand still. One senator, a farmer himself, warned that up to forty one thousand cows, a great many of them pregnant, could be sent to slaughter to comply, and called it an animal welfare catastrophe in the making. Sit with that. Healthy, productive, in-calf cows, on some of the greenest grass in Europe, culled early because a stocking number on a form moved by thirty kilos. The very cows the nation was begging the farmer to buy ten years ago. This is what modern environmental policy looks like at the sharp end. A good cow loaded onto a lorry she never needed to be on, on a wet Tuesday in County Cork, to shift a figure in a spreadsheet.

EXCLUSIVE from @oliver_wright Keir Starmer was blindsided by John Healey's resignation as defence secretary because he was far more worried about Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves   Miliband was on “resignation watch” after he refused repeatedly to meet Starmer to discuss planned cuts to his net zero agenda. The fear was that the energy secretary would use the announcement to quit and publicly throw his weight behind Burnham   Extraordinarily No 10 was also worried about Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, who had been strongly arguing for a much smaller defence uplift of “single figure billions”   Reeves was said to be so angry about the move to take money from other departments’ spending plans to top up defence that she had refused to take part in the process of drawing up the cuts   While her allies said Reeves had worked “constructively” on trying to find the money, tellingly it was No 10, rather than the Treasury, that negotiated cuts to infrastructure budgets.   “It went well beyond what Rachel wanted,” said one No 10 source. “John [Healey] knew how difficult it was and how hard the prime minister worked to get it up to £13.5 billion.” Our weekend read on how John Healey’s resignation blew a hole in Keir Starmer’s survival strategy: Healey’s resignation is deeply damaging for two reasons. First, until now, Healey has been as loyal as they come, resolutely defending the prime minister time and again on the broadcast rounds But far worse was the timing. Starmer’s whole survival strategy was predicated on playing up his national security credentials. The plan had been to launch Dip before next week’s G7 summit at Evian in France and use the event to present Starmer as the man who could take the “big decisions to make the country safe” It was deliberately designed to contrast Starmer with the inexperienced mayor of Greater Manchester, giving Burnham and Labour MPs at least a few second thoughts about an immediate challenge Instead the prime minister heads to Evian with that entire strategy in tatters and a date with President Trump that could be excruciating “The survival plan has been totally demolished by Healey,” a senior Labour figure said. “Starmer’s strongest card was as the man who can take the big decisions to keep the country safe and Healey has accused him of putting the country at risk. It is hard to see how we go from here.” thetimes.com/article/fc89861…