The day started with Obi’s poo walk, then after his breakfast, we set off to visit the RCTA Tipton Floating Market. This is our second RCTA event this trip, we also came across one being held at Nantwich on Day 17 of our 2026 adventure. At todays one we had a target to find Lola the Cafe Boat and try the pizza, you can see more about that by clicking here. After returning back to…
Trade unionists have been gathering in Brighton this week for the annual TUC Congress. At the Congress, delegates have been debating and agreeing the trade union movement’s positions on key political and economic issues.
On the final day, delegates supported a motion proposed by the University and College Union (UCU) to build an alternative vision for security “based on decent work, quality public services, equality, climate action, democracy and peace”. The motion called on the TUC to build on the ‘Wages Not Weapons’ campaign, which calls for investment in public services, rather than defence spending.
This is the second year in a row a motion on this issue has been debated at TUC Congress. In 2025, delegates backed the UCU’s original Wages Not Weapons motion, which called for the TUC to ‘prioritise campaigning for public investment in Britain’s public realm’, to ‘commit to a safe, liveable planet’, and to ‘reaffirm that our movement’s priority is welfare and wages, not weapons and war’.
As with last year, this year’s motion was highly contentious, prompting a heated debate in the hall. Alongside UCU, delegates from the National Education Union (NEU) and RMT spoke in favour of the motion. Unite, GMB and Prospect delegates were among those to speak against the motion.
Unlike last year, however, the motion did not go to a ‘card vote’, and the chair deemed it to have been clearly carried within the room.
The motion called for the trade union movement to “campaign for sustained public investment in health, education, housing, social care, social security and climate resilient”.
Alongside this, the motion called for the TUC to “raise awareness of fundamental rights, including the right to conscientious objection and opposition to compulsory military service in the UK”, and “work with the ITUC, ETUC and other partners to promote conflict prevention, diplomacy, international cooperation, human rights and respect for international law”.
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
The post TUC votes to build on ‘Wages Not Weapons’ campaign and advance an alternative vision for security appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.
Late last week, word started leaking that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had reached an agreement with the Department of Defense that would see part of the NIH's budget used to fund research at the Department of Defense. So, on the Friday just prior to a US holiday weekend, the Department of Defense released a copy of the agreement and confirmed that it had been signed roughly a month earlier. The move is striking for a number of reasons, ranging from the existing budget disparities between the two parties involved to the fact that the money would be used for projects that the current NIH leadership has explicitly rejected.
The agreement itself sets up a system where the NIH would transfer money to the Department of Defense to fund staff and projects that would "support the advanced development of medical countermeasures against pandemic influenza, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats, and emerging infectious diseases." The money would come out of the budget for the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, to which Congress has allocated $6.6 billion in 2026. The agreement is set to run for a decade.
Left unspecified is just how much of the NIAID budget will be spent on Defense projects. Reporting by Nature suggests that the Department of Defense was looking for up to a third of its total budget but was being told to settle for about 10 percent. There's obviously an enormous disparity between the budgets of these two agencies, given that the 2026 Defense budget is roughly $1 trillion. That budget is under considerable strain, however, due to the open-ended nature of the conflict with Iran. The deal has also been announced at a time when the NIH has been struggling to issue sufficient grants to use the money that Congress allocated to it.
© Artem Onoprienko
As Britain surfaces from a summer of prolonged drought, record heat and wildfires, the evidence is becoming harder to ignore. Climate change is increasing the likelihood of the extreme heat and dry conditions that make wildfires more common and dangerous.
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that human activity is driving climate change, yet the right-wing media appears determined to find almost anything else to blame.
Their latest target is rewilding, the restoration of ecosystems by allowing vegetation and natural processes to return with less human intervention. Their argument is that allowing vegetation to grow has created vast ‘tinderboxes’ and that environmental policies are therefore responsible for Britain’s worsening wildfire problem.
There is a serious discussion to be had about how land should be managed to reduce fire risk, but turning that discussion into a conspiracy about rewilding is another matter entirely. It also creates a notable contradiction. Newspapers claiming to defend ‘evidence-based’ land management are promoting a narrative that ignores much of the scientific evidence about what is actually driving extreme wildfire conditions.
The Telegraph’s rewilding blame game
When a 371-acre wildfire began at the RSPB’s Minsmere reserve in Suffolk before spreading to National Trust-owned Dunwich Heath, the Telegraph sought to pin the blame on ‘rewilding.’
The paper reported claims that the area had become a ‘tinderbox’ because of the RSPB’s ‘rewilding agenda,’ quoting Countryside Alliance chief executive Tim Bonner, whose organisation has consistently opposed rewilding.
Bonner accused organisations of refusing to manage vegetation because of ‘political ideology’ and an ‘obsession with rewilding.’
Yet the organisations actually responsible for managing the land gave a very different explanation.
The RSPB said the summer’s fires were “unprecedented in scale, driven by drought and prolonged heat exacerbated by climate change.”
The National Trust likewise pointed to prolonged drought and exceptionally low rainfall across England and Wales.
The Trust’s communications director Celia Richardson summed up the absurdity: “Some of the oldest surviving heathland in the UK burns in unprecedented temperatures and Telegraph headline says “rewilding” is to blame.”
There is an obvious problem with treating vegetation management as the primary explanation for catastrophic fires. Devastating wildfires have also occurred on intensively managed land. Scotland’s first recorded ‘megafire,’ at Dava on a managed grouse moor in June 2025, is one example.
And talking of grouse land. A recent article in the Murdoch-owned Times headlined “Wildfires suggest rewilding needs a rethink,” claims that “Green enthusiasm for ignoring the old-fashioned thinning and clearing of land does create habitats – and kindling.”
But there is a wider vested interest behind this particular vision of ‘traditional’ land management. Grouse moors are managed to support driven grouse shooting, a pursuit associated with Britain’s wealthy landowners and the ultra-rich, for whom vast swathes of upland Britain are maintained as private shooting estates.
That matters because much of this land is managed through intensive heather burning. Environmental campaigners have long argued that such burning can damage peatlands, which are naturally wet ecosystems that store carbon and support a wide range of wildlife.
So, when the right-wing press present burning and intensive management as the sensible alternative to rewilding, it’s worth asking whose interests that version of ‘sensible’ land management serves.
Climate science tells us that higher temperatures dry out vegetation and make it more flammable.
Indeed, there is evidence that some forms of ecological restoration can make landscapes more resilient to extreme weather. Rewilding can increase carbon storage, restore water-retaining soils and wetlands, provide shade and diversify vegetation.
Rewetting peatlands can also reduce the continuity of flammable vegetation. RSPB senior policy officer Tom Aspinall has explained that burning can encourage heather, an oily highly flammable plant, while rewetting and diversification can introduce a wider range of vegetation and disrupt the ability of fires to spread.
A balanced debate?
In response to a front-page story in the Daily Mail claiming that ‘eco-dogma’ and Labour’s environmental policies had caused the record number of UK wildfires, Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party, accused the newspaper of “turning reality on its head” by blaming rewilding while denying readers the facts about climate change.
“This is another deeply irresponsible headline from a deeply irresponsible newspaper,” she told Left Foot Forward. “The Mail seeks to blame the climate crisis on anything other than its main cause – burning fossil fuels.”
There is, of course, a legitimate debate about whether particular landscapes are being managed in the best possible way.
University of York associate professor Andreas Heinemeyer, who has studied UK moorland ecology for 15 years, widens the discussion to include the common practice of vegetation control through burning. He argues that the supposed conflict between those who support burning and those who oppose it has become a “false culture war.”
For Heinemeyer, policy should be based on “unbiased and robust evidence” rather than “false and misleading claims about burning.”
Amen to that but there seems little prospect of the right-wing media presenting a balanced discussion any time soon.
Trump’s war on conservation
And such misinformation isn’t confined to Britain. As with so many of the culture wars peddled by the right, the inspiration comes from across the Atlantic, where the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal recently ran an editorial arguing green policies were fuelling fires in Europe.
It’s a depressingly common thread. When wildfires become more frequent and extreme, the right-wing media repeatedly looks for an environmental policy to blame, anything, it seems, except the fossil fuel emissions driving global warming.
Donald Trump has taken a similar approach to environmental protection in the US.
His administration has rolled back protections covering huge areas of public land and weakened conservation safeguards. He has repeatedly attacked environmental regulations as the work of “radical climate activists,” including complaining that endangered-species protections have placed land off limits to development and even military training.
The same political instinct is visible on both sides of the Atlantic, to portray environmental protection as an ideological project, then use environmental problems as evidence that environmental protection has failed.
But the consequences of weakening habitat protections are not ideological. Habitat loss remains a leading driver of extinction. The Rewilding Institute has warned that rolling back habitat protections removes the foundations needed for ecosystems and wildlife to recover.
France’s far right exploits the fires while opposing green policy
The same contradiction is playing out in France which suffered a summer of record heat. By the end of July, the area burned by wildfires had already broken the annual record.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally has spent years opposing green regulations. Yet the party seized on France’s worst blazes in years to accuse President Emmanuel Macron’s government of failing in one of its most basic duties, protecting people and their homes.
As Politico noted: “As France has sweltered through record heat, the National Rally has so far paid little political price for its lack of credibility on climate and environmental policy.”
Rather than addressing the causes of climate change, the party focused on adaptation, how governments can protect people from its consequences. During a June heatwave, for example, it proposed financial assistance for installing air conditioning in homes and public buildings, presenting the measure as an immediate response to concerns about health and safety.
It is a familiar political manoeuvre: exploit the consequences of a warming climate while sidestepping the policies needed to tackle its causes.
The French example makes clear that this is not simply a British media obsession with rewilding. Across the right, climate impacts are increasingly being used to attack environmental policy, even when the policies being attacked are aimed at addressing the underlying crisis.
Follow the evidence not the culture war
The Met Office says 2026 is on course to be the hottest UK summer on record. Temperatures reached 38.1°Cat in Kew Gardens, while 2026 became the first year on record in which temperatures reached at least 35°C in May, June and July. A summer this hot has been made around 130 times more likely by human-induced climate change, according to the Met Office.
Dr Stephen Cumbers, a medical doctor and chartered scientist, summed up the implications:
“None of this means every wildfire, death or hot day can simply be labelled ‘climate change’,” he wrote. “Nor does the evidence dictate a single policy programme. But it does make continued delay increasingly difficult to justify.”
His conclusion should be the starting point for the debate.
“The message to government should be neither alarmism nor complacency.
“Take the evidence seriously. Be honest about the risks and costs. And make energy and climate decisions on evidence rather than short-term political convenience.”
There is nothing wrong with questioning how particular landscapes are managed, or examining whether controlled burning, grazing, rewetting and other interventions can reduce wildfire risk.
What is wrong is turning that legitimate scientific and ecological debate into a political conspiracy in which rewilding is blamed for a wildfire crisis occurring amid record heat and drought.
The right-wing media’s argument ultimately collapses under its own contradiction. It demands that environmentalists “follow the evidence” while repeatedly ignoring the evidence when it points towards climate change.
Britain might need better land management, but it also needs an honest conversation about what is making wildfires worse.
Blaming rewilding won’t make the climate crisis disappear. In the meantime, the debate (or lack of debate) does feel like those astronomical arguments of the early modern period. Long after scientists and seafarers had proved that the earth was round and went round the sun, there were still those who insisted on the opposite. Are climate change deniers the flat earthers of our time?
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
The post The great rewilding conspiracy: the right fight the science while Britain burns appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.
Fruit flies aren't exactly famous for their brainpower; you've probably drowned more than one in a wine glass left too long on the patio table. And yet, working with roughly 140,000 neurons—a brain smaller than a poppy seed—Drosophila can sort through a huge range of smells in a fraction of a second, and then retain the memory of that scent for a long time.
In this, they do much better than current "electronic noses." Even the most advanced ones on the market tend to be expensive, painfully narrow in what they can detect, and quick to forget an odor the moment they learn a new one.
So why not just copy the fly? That's the question a growing number of researchers have been asking—including Kevin Max and Yang Shen at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, whose new algorithm, Spi-Fly, is described in a paper recently published in the journal Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering.
© Joao Paulo Burini
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure that would continue funding the US government through early December. While the measure still requires the signature of President Trump, it's widely expected that he will act to avoid a government shutdown immediately before the midterm elections.
This is a normal part of how the US government has operated in recent years, as it's often difficult to build the political support needed to pass a full year's budget in advance. In fact, dissent within the House's Republican caucus prevented them from agreeing on their own measure to keep the government open; instead, the House simply adopted a version of the spending bill that had previously passed the Senate.
From the perspective of scientists and their supporters, that adoption turned out to be a very good thing, because the Senate's budget bill, passed in early August, contains a provision that blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing new rules that would give political appointees full control over what science is funded and allow them to cancel any grant at any time. The proposed rule has been widely decried as catastrophic for science, and it faced widespread opposition from scientific and health-focused organizations.
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
The Trump administration is halting vital federal research on the foodborne parasite Cyclospora, despite the record-breaking, nationwide outbreak of the diarrheal pathogen, according to Politico.
Of the three research programs that represent nearly all of the Cyclospora work at the US Department of Agriculture, two have been defunded, and the third is about to lose every scientist working on it. The Trump administration is shuttering the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center near Washington, DC, and moving its work to a location in Iowa. That includes relocating the remaining Cyclospora research.
Although the research is still funded, insiders told Politico that not one of the scientists working on the project plans to relocate from Maryland to Iowa. Instead, they are either retiring, being reassigned to a different project, or leaving the USDA's research services.
© CDC | Melanie Moser
The relatively recent rise of AI-assisted coding tools and the whole concept of "vibe coding" have effectively upended entire software development workflows. While these tools have been available to novice coders willing to put in the work to set them up, those with little to no coding experience could still be a little put off by the CLIs, IDEs, and terminal-based tinkering needed to create a complex AI-coded project these days.
Meta's latest AI-based project launch wants to make that kind of vibe coding as instantly accessible as posting on social media. Pocket—which launched in the US last Friday, August 21, after Meta acquired the staff behind the now-defunct vibe-coding app Gizmo in March—is a mobile app that lets users create fully functional interactive "gizmos" just by typing prompts into a text box, without even the option to look at a line of code. Those gizmos can then be shared with the world in a TikTok-style endless scroll complete with likes, comments, reposts, and all the other hallmarks of social media addiction.
After playing around with Pocket for the better part of a week, I found myself getting hooked on the simple process of quickly standing up functional, relatively feature-rich game prototypes simply by chatting with an LLM. But the result of all that time and AI effort is a couple of interactive toys that are effectively trapped in Meta's new walled garden, without any real way to turn them into something separate.
© Pocket / Kyle Orland
Ubuntu’s Desktop Icons NG (DING) extension has a little-known way to bring order to a chaotic desktop: stacks. Stacks groups multiple files of the same type in a collapsible icon, e.g. images in one stack, PDFs in another and so on. Folders don’t get grouped, and if there is only one of a type of file on the desktop, it is not stacked. Expanding a stack by clicking on it reveals all files in the stack (other file icons bump out of the way). Multiple stacks can be expanded or collapsed at the same time, and stacks can be left […]
You're reading A hidden Ubuntu feature that stacks desktop icons, macOS-style, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Ubuntu’s Desktop Icons NG (DING) extension has a little-known way to bring order to a chaotic desktop: stacks. Stacks groups multiple files of the same type in a collapsible icon, e.g. images in one stack, PDFs in another and so on. Folders don’t get grouped, and if there is only one of a type of file on the desktop, it is not stacked. Expanding a stack by clicking on it reveals all files in the stack (other file icons bump out of the way). Multiple stacks can be expanded or collapsed at the same time, and stacks can be left […]
You're reading A hidden Ubuntu feature that stacks desktop icons, macOS-style, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Can you tell when someone nearby is wearing Meta AI glasses?
As millions of people buy into the smart glasses fad each year, the odds are increasing that you could be secretly recorded while simply going about your day.
Meta is not the only smart glasses maker, but its AI glasses are by far the most popular. And as the devices become more common, some public places, including schools, courts, restaurants, and entertainment venues, have begun to ban them. Even tech lovers have rejected Meta glasses in certain settings. The hackers behind DEF CON 2026 reportedly banned smart glasses with no exceptions, reminding attendees with prescription pairs to “be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them.”
© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
As normal the day starts with the girls taking Obi for his poo walk, while I get the boat ready and prepare breakfast, today is part-bakes and bacon, with fresh coffee for the adults. The next thing we had to do was take some pictures of Rosie doing some extreme reading for a school project (that is reading in unusual/extreme places).
Few political words have become as instantly recognisable, or as politically loaded, as Brexit. It became shorthand for Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, dominated headlines for years and ultimately entered the political vocabulary of the world.
But where did the word actually come from?
According to Peter Wilding, chairman of British Influence, he coined it in 2012. And, somewhat ironically, the man who helped give Brexit its name was not campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union at all. Quite the opposite.
Wilding was chairman of British Influence, an independent, cross-party, pro-single-market foreign-affairs think tank founded in 2012 to make the case for Britain’s continued engagement with Europe at a time when calls for withdrawal from the EU were growing louder.
In a recent interview with Sky News, Wilding described himself as “neither a ‘phile’ nor a ‘phobe’, just a realist campaigning for British Influence in Europe.”
His original intention, he says, was to argue that Britain needed to regain influence in Europe rather than retreat from it.
After leaving his role as Europe director at BSkyB, Wilding says he devoted himself to campaigning for Britain to “take back control” of Europe through his think tank, British Influence. In 2012, he published an article in which he warned:
“Unless a clear view is pushed that Britain must lead in Europe at the very least to achieve the completion of the single market then the portmanteau for Greek euro exit might be followed by another sad word, Brexit.”
The word was, at that point, little more than a linguistic invention, a combination of Britain and exit, following the already familiar Grexit.
Unlike Brexit, however, Grexit never actually happened. The term emerged during the Greek debt crisis, between 2010 and 2015, when there was intense debate over whether Greece might be forced to leave the eurozone. Greece ultimately reached agreements with its international creditors, accepted strict austerity measures and remained in both the eurozone and the European Union.
But the word Brexit didn’t just catch on but came to signify the turmoil that followed the 2016 referendum.
Wilding has recalled that shortly after the EU referendum, the Oxford English Dictionary contacted him to tell him that Brexit was his word and had subsequently been named its 2016 Word of the Year.
Having coined the word, Wilding now argues that the political project that came to bear its name was profoundly mishandled.
“But having invented the word, I can now reveal the hopeless mistakes by arrogant people made on the way which have led us to this place. My own personal J’accuse is heartfelt. Because Brexit was a chronicle of a death foretold. The fault, not of the lions who are the British people, but of the donkeys who led them,” he told Sky.
Wilding also argues that there remains a route back from the political consequences of Brexit.
“But the darkest hour is always before dawn. If the Brexit revolution can be stopped before it devours the country itself – before Scotland and Northern Ireland tire of this English public schoolboy caper – then maybe leaders will emerge so that Britain can lead again in Europe and the world to defend our threatened principles of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.”
Yet the internet, as ever, didn’t miss an opportunity to take the mickey.
“The expression ‘Grexit’ came first, so this was hardly rocket science,” one commenter mocked.
“That’s okay, I invented Brexshit,” someone added.
And another wrote:
“Makes it easier to give a name to what we do next though — Brejoin.”
Whether Brejoin ever becomes anything more serious, remains to be seen.
But Brexit, a word coined in 2012 as a warning about where Britain might be heading, eventually became the defining label for one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history.
Wilding may have invented the word.
He certainly didn’t invent everything that happened afterwards.
The post From ‘Brexit’ to ‘Brexshit’: the internet has its say on the word that changed Britain appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.
The Daily Mail has been rebuked after it ran a front page story yesterday claiming that ‘eco-dogma’ and ‘rewilding’, not climate change, has caused the record number of UK wildfires this summer.
New figures released on Wednesday by the National Fire Chiefs Council reveal that England and Wales have suffered 1,017 wildfires so far this year, already matching last year’s record-breaking total.
The Mail article quotes a spokesperson for landowners and a rewilding critic, who say ‘Labour’s rewilding drive’ and the restrictions on controlled vegetation burning, have turned “swathes of countryside into tinderboxes”, causing the wildfires.
Rewilding is where vegetation is left to grow naturally with minimal human intervention, helping ecosystems to recover and supporting greater biodiversity.
Another figure quoted in the article was Andrew Gilruth from the Moorland Association, who said: “Rewilding sounds like a good idea, unless you end up facing a wall of flames.”
He also claimed that there is “far, far too much vegetation covering our landscapes” and until rewilding is reversed “the wildfires will get worse and worse”.
The article does mention that temperatures have reached 38 degrees this week, but it doesn’t mention climate change or the role that rising temperatures play in wildfires spreading.
Climate science shows that higher temperatures driven by climate change dry out plants and make them more flammable. Scientists also maintain that most fires are started by humans.
There is also evidence that rewilding captures carbon dioxide and helps create a variety of vegetation and healthy water-retaining soils, reducing the likelihood of wildfires.
Reacting to the Daily Mail’s claims about rewilding causing wildfires, Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party, told Left Foot Forward: “This is another deeply irresponsible headline from a deeply irresponsible newspaper.
“As usual The Daily Mail is turning reality on its head and denying its readers the facts about climate change. The Mail seeks to blame the climate crisis on anything other than its main cause – burning fossil fuels.
“Alongside cutting down our fossil fuel use, rewilding is one of key things we can do to slow global warming. It draws down planet-warming carbon dioxide, provides shade and cools the land, helps prevent flooding, and starts to restore the huge variety of wildlife and plant life that we have been losing.”
Friends of the Earth’s senior nature campaigner, Sienna Somers, also called out the Mail’s claims, stating: “The reason vast swathes of Britain are burning is climate change, not rewilding – and it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
“Without tougher action to protect communities and curb the emissions that are driving the climate crisis, things will only get worse.”
Somers added: “Decades of degrading our land have helped create this situation. Rivers have been straightened and wetlands drained, creating tinder-dry conditions for wildfires to rip across our landscape.
“Rewilding and restoring nature at scale should be treated as national infrastructure. We need to invest in transforming our degraded peatlands, rivers, wetlands and woodlands so they can hold and store water, provide shade, reduce the risk of fire and drought, and help protect communities from flooding.
“Restoring nature and rewilding are part of the solution – not the problem.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
The post Daily Mail rebuked over ‘irresponsible’ claim that rewilding has caused record number of UK wildfires appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.
The Telegraph has been criticised after attempting to link the devastating Suffolk wildfires to ‘rewilding’ rather than the extreme weather conditions that experts say have dramatically increased fire risk.
Rewilding, alongside organisations such as the National Trust and the RSPB, has long been a favourite target of the right. Few episodes illustrate that better than the controversy surrounding Sir David Attenborough’s series on wildlife in 2023, when the BBC chose not to broadcast an episode examining the destruction of nature on its main channels amid concerns about a political backlash.
Senior BBC sources told the Guardian that the decision was taken partly to avoid criticism from Conservative politicians and the right-wing press. At the time, the Telegraph had attacked the BBC for creating the series and for taking funding from “two charities previously criticised for their political lobbying” – the WWF and RSPB.
It was hardly surprising therefore to see the newspaper publish the headline this week entitled: “Rewilding blamed for Suffolk wildfire.”
The article is focused on the 371-acre blaze that began on the RSPB’s Minsmere reserve before spreading to the National Trust-owned Dunwich Heath. It claims residents and experts believe the area had become a “tinderbox” because of the RSPB’s “rewilding agenda.”
One of the principal opponents cited is an anonymous local resident who criticised the RSPB’s land management and alleged its “green projects” had put nearby communities at risk. The piece also quotes Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, an organisation that has consistently opposed rewilding, who said the RSPB should “follow the evidence.”
“Refusing to manage upland vegetation because of political ideology or an obsession with rewilding is completely irresponsible,” Bonner added.
“As the Countryside Alliance has pointed out repeatedly, organisations that manage land should listen to science and evidence, and put landscapes, nature and livelihoods first. The RSPB are playing with fire.”
Only towards the end of the article were readers presented with responses from the organisations responsible for managing the land.
The RSPB said this summer’s fires had been “unprecedented in scale, driven by drought and prolonged heat exacerbated by climate change”.
A spokesman said: “While we work hard to reduce risk, it is important to recognise that wildfires are indiscriminate; they can ignite and spread quickly across a range of landscapes – from heathlands, grasslands and peatlands, to farmland, woodlands and areas close to homes and communities – particularly in hot, dry and windy conditions.
“We carry out ongoing habitat management across our reserves to reduce fire risk, including cutting firebreaks, rewetting peatlands, restoring bogs and wetlands, and improving water retention across vulnerable areas.
“We also run public awareness campaigns urging people not to use disposable barbecues, light campfires, or leave litter that could spark a blaze.”
The National Trust confirmed that assessment, pointing instead to prolonged drought and exceptionally low rainfall across England and Wales.
A spokesperson said:
“Our Suffolk colleagues are part of the local community and care deeply for Dunwich Heath and have long worked to reduce fire risk – maintaining fire breaks and regularly cutting heather.
“When the fire broke out, our team, neighbours, local agencies and the wider community rallied immediately, working alongside emergency services to cut additional breaks and help contain the blaze.
“Evidence shows healthier, wetter landscapes are more resilient to fire, which is why we prioritise nature restoration over routine burning.
“The wider issue is clear: climate change is accelerating, and we urgently need national leadership to help protect people, places and nature as we face a long recovery together.”
While the Telegraph’s headline suggested rewilding itself was responsible for the blaze, both conservation organisations pointed to the growing scientific consensus that hotter, drier conditions driven by climate change are creating unprecedented wildfire risks across many different landscapes.
The article prompted a backlash online. Celia Richardson, the National Trust’s director of communications, wrote on X:
“Some of the oldest surviving heathland in the UK burns in unprecedented temperatures and Telegraph headline says “rewilding” is to blame.”
Many readers accused the newspaper of using an environmental disaster to advance an ideological argument. One commenter wrote: “Who would want to advertise or buy this out-of-date, once-quality newspaper?”
Another said: “The truly jaw-dropping fact is that the Telegraph is still regarded as a serious newspaper.”
Others noted that catastrophic wildfires have also occurred on intensively managed land, including Scotland’s first recorded “megafire” at Dava, a managed grouse moor, last year. Critics argued that presenting rewilding as the primary cause of wildfire ignores both the wider evidence and the increasingly central role that climate change is playing in driving extreme fire conditions.
The post Telegraph criticised for blaming Suffolk wildfires on ‘rewilding’ appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.
I’ve been scrolling through Nexus Mods near enough every weekday morning for three or four years now. On a good day, I might spot a couple of new mods potentially worth writing news about and a couple, usually Skyrim player homes, I might fancy checking out in my free time.
Historically, browsing for mods was largely just a matter of gauging which looked complex or unique enough to be worth investigating further, and making sure nothing about them appeared offensive or otherwise dodgy. Usually, new quests, new mechanics, or substantial overhauls which can turn a game on its head got the nod. Then, a few years ago, AI-generated voices started popping up in the former. Skyrim, being the most actively modded game, was ground zero.
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