William Musson

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.

Wool is the only textile fibre that: - Regulates body temperature in both directions: warm when cold, cooling when warm, through a moisture-wicking mechanism that no synthetic can replicate - Is naturally flame-retardant without chemical treatment, which is why it is still the mandatory textile for aircraft seating and racing drivers' undergarments - Absorbs up to 30% of its weight in moisture without feeling wet, then releases it gradually - Is biodegradable in soil within months, leaving nitrogen as it goes: it is, technically, a slow-release fertiliser - Grows back. Every year. Without harming the animal. The sheep, in fact, requires shearing. If you don't shear a sheep, it suffers. The shearing is not exploitation. The shearing is a welfare intervention. What replaced wool in your outdoor gear, your base layers, your running kit, your ski socks? Polyester. Which is a plastic. Which sheds microplastic fibres into waterways with every wash. Which does not biodegrade. Which cannot be made without petroleum. Which, when it reaches the end of its life, sits in a landfill or an ocean for five hundred years. The sheep on the Brecon Beacons is producing a renewable, biodegradable, multifunctional technical fibre from grass and rain. No factory. No fossil fuel. No microplastics. The sheep has been doing this for ten thousand years. We replaced it with plastic and told ourselves it was progress. Then told the sheep it was the problem.