Dartmoor's hill ponies have grazed those commons for longer than there has been a country called England. Fewer than a thousand are left, down from six thousand a generation ago. The United Nations listed them as endangered in 2023. So, naturally, the body charged with protecting nature has decided to get rid of nine in ten of the survivors. There is a process, obviously. Natural England's new grazing contracts now count the ponies in the same bucket as the cattle and sheep. A commoner with a fixed quota has a choice: keep a semi-wild pony worth nothing at market, or use the slot for a lamb he can sell. Guess which one survives the spreadsheet. The rest are gathered in the autumn drifts, and with nowhere to put thousands of unhandled moorland ponies, the next stop is the abattoir. Natural England would like it noted that it has not ordered a cull. It has merely built a machine whose only output is a cull, switched it on, and handed the bolt gun to a farmer so the fingerprints land elsewhere. Very tidy. And now the funny part. The pony is the best tool on the entire moor for eating Molinia, the coarse purple grass strangling Dartmoor into a brown monoculture. Cattle and sheep won't touch it. The ponies hoover it down and clear the ground for the orchids, the wildflowers and the insects behind them. Remove the ponies and the moor chokes into precisely the lifeless scrubland the contract was meant to prevent. So the conservation strategy, in full: protect the habitat by deleting the animal that maintains the habitat. A masterclass. Better still, Natural England's own Fursdon review looked at this exact question and told them, in plain English, not to lump ponies in with cattle and not to cut pony numbers. They read it, praised it, said they fully supported it, then did the precise opposite. Four thousand years these animals have run Dartmoor with no committee and no contract. They could be gone within one, and the people who did it will write it up as a win for nature.

If it was so important for you, how come you didn't vote in favour of it in March? Only John McDonnell out of your 400 MPs voted in favour. You are a hypocrite, just like all the rest.

Home Secretary @ShabanaMahmood's statement on today’s Court of Appeal judgment on the proscription of Palestine Action.

The Court of Appeal has just described Elbit as “a company pursuing a lawful business”

I am simply not prepared to be a bystander when the safety and happiness of our children are at stake. We will ban social media access for under 16s, and give children their childhoods back. Read more about it here: keirstarmer.substack.com/p/g…

Today’s ruling to uphold the UK government's proscription of Palestine Action is a travesty of justice. One by one, the very foundations of our democracy are being destroyed — all to oil the wheels of British complicity in genocide. Our government has participated in the mass murder of Palestinians. That is the real crime, and we must bring about justice.