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Bats, newts and poor people are by no means the only subhuman creatures that His Majesty's Government is supremely uninterested in accommodating. A project to re-establish the country's beaver population was grudgingly approved in March, and forty expressions of interest have been lodged since then; of which slightly fewer than one have resulted in the necessary licences being issued. Admittedly, given the demonstrated extent of Team Starmer's interest in cleaning up the nation's waterways, this may be just as well for the beavers; but a certain moderate and sensible calculation may also be involved. Beavers are notoriously ecosystem-friendly and could potentially be seen by the all-important Farage Falange demographic as pandering to quasi-European Net Zero aspirations. Perhaps even worse, the animals are notorious not only for undertaking ambitious infrastructure projects, but also for regularly completing and even maintaining them; which is self-evidently the wrong way for any creature to behave that wishes to prosper in England.