Survival expert Ray Mears to judge BBC's Make a Difference Awards
"Learning of their achievements, sacrifices and contributions is a very special experience, one that restores my faith in our society."Ms Harding said she had seen first-hand how volunteers made a positive difference in her constituency."Whether it's helping to prevent loneliness, cleaning up litter, creating activities for young people or befriending the elderly, volunteers help to put the heart into our community," she said.Ms Ghani said the work by volunteers in her community was often overlooked."It's a fantastic way of recognising brilliant people and gives us a moment to say thank you," she said.The Make a Difference Awards is a BBC initiative to honour community champions across eight different categories.To nominate someone go to the Make a Difference Awards site, with nominations closing at 17:00 BST on 31 March.
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The Independent
9 hours ago
- The Independent
Faith keeps you going, Kemi, but it doesn't grant wishes
There's an old joke about a minister caught up in a flood. 'God will save me,' he says, confidently turning away two boats and a helicopter. When he inevitably drowns, he asks God why he didn't save him. God replies, 'I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more do you want?' I was reminded of this on hearing Kemi Badenoch speak about faith and religion. In an interview with the BBC's Amol Rajan, who is almost as omnipresent as Our Lord, she said her belief in God was gone, 'like someone blew out a candle' when she followed the case of Elisabeth Fritzl in 2008. 'I couldn't stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued,' Badenoch said. Elisabeth Fritzl was held hostage in her father's basement for 24 years, during which Josef Fritzl repeatedly raped her, fathering seven children. 'And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things, and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn't miss something. 'It's like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman's prayers?' This rang many bells for me. Stupid prayers are the gift of the safe child: I prayed nightly for a horse. And when I was 10, I started drifting away from church. With black and white clarity, I judged every person in the congregation for, as I understood, not believing what they were saying nor acting upon it. I'm probably the opposite of Badenoch in that I do believe in God but am no longer a cultural Christian. I love Christmas and holy music, but I do not consider Christianity to be a sign of Britishness more than any other religion – except perhaps paganism, being the historic traditions of the British Isles. But I do very much understand the shocks that can lead people to leave the church. I grew up with women grudgingly being allowed to become ministers, and awakened to gay people being sidelined. I read a viral letter from a musician to the radio personality Laura Schlessinger about her singling out homosexuality as a Biblical sin (sample line: 'I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?'). Religion's pick-and-choose nature highlighted the contradictions I had seen as a child, and I didn't bother with church again until my late 20s. I found my way back to faith after a series of deaths, and in places that acknowledged the contradictions that exist in the Bible and, well, humanity. Arguing with God over what is fair is immortalised in poetry (John Donne) and song, including Kate Bush, whose magical 'Running Up That Hill (Deal with God)' marked its fortieth anniversary this week. Many people move away from religion. Moving away from faith is a different matter. In psychotherapist Edith Eger's 2017 book The Choice, she described how 'drawing on my inner world' helped her to survive Auschwitz, Mauthausen and the death march. 'I found hope and faith in life within me, even when I was surrounded by starvation and torture and death,' she said. Her sister Magda lost her faith, yet somehow, Eger did not: 'I want to keep alive the part of me that feels wonder, that wonders, until the very end.' When I look at the news, I want to wonder. And so, I turn away from Elisabeth Fritzl's father – rightly left in prison to rot – and towards the wonder of her courage. She has started a new chapter with her children, under new names, with a media ban and security protection. The true strength is hers. This is what I understand that I didn't know when I was 10: God and religion are not the same. People may trumpet their 'Christianity', but that doesn't mean they are good people or even that they live by what is written in the Bible. The Christian right, in the US particularly, leans heavily on abortion. Yet Exodus 21 v 22 to 25, from where 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' comes from, indicates that a pregnant woman's life is worth more than her unborn child. Politicians might reflect on this. Badenoch might go on to find a new understanding with faith, if not with religion. God is the indefinable spirit that helps humanity through the hardest times. Whether as a 'Good Orderly Direction' or the 'Great Outdoors', or an old man with a beard, God gives us the strength to be of use and to recognise the miracles around us. Sometimes they're a rainbow. Sometimes they're a boat. As the American children's TV hero Mr Rogers said, 'Look for the helpers.' And as Bruce Springsteen said: 'Still at the end of every hard-earned day / People find some reason to believe.'
Spectator
13 hours ago
- Spectator
Does Northumberland really want to see the return of lynx?
Farming is hard, and sheep farming especially so. Sheep are endearing but awkward creatures, generally looking for the most inconvenient way to die. The weather is usually miserable. Lambing is an annual torment. The government is always dreaming up new ways to make things harder. In a real sense, I'm writing this because sheep farming is so hard. That's what persuaded me to leave the bleak, beautiful hills of Northumberland and make my living from writing and talking in bland, warm rooms in London. But my heart is still there, in the hills. My family too, and their sheep. So I continue to take an interest in the life of rural Northumberland, including in various attempts by well-meaning campaigners to reimagine the place as a stage for their environmental dreams. One such dream is the reintroduction of the lynx. For several years now, various groups have been pushing for the release into the Northumbrian countryside of the Eurasian lynx. These are magnificent beasts whose advocates say could play a vital role in local ecosystems. Not everyone is entirely persuaded, however. If you spend your waking life trying to keep sheep alive, the idea of 70-odd pounds of teeth and claws prowling your fields at night might just raise a few questions. But such doubts would spoil the story that lynx advocates appear keen to tell. Even though previous attempts to bring the lynx to Northumberland have been roundly rejected by local people, the lynx people are undeterred and continue to make their pitch. The latest drive comes from the Missing Lynx Project, a coalition of wildlife groups. It's got some headlines this week with a report that it says shows strong public support for releasing lynx into Northumberland's Kielder Forest and the surrounding areas of Cumbria and southern Scotland. Here's how they put it in their press release: A year-long social consultation has found that 72 per cent of people in the project area of Northumberland, bordering areas of Cumbria and southern Scotland, support potential lynx reintroduction. That line has already bounced around the media: '72 per cent of people in the region support their reintroduction', the BBC reports faithfully. Except that's not what the actual report says. This report details a commendably serious and reflective attempt to examine public opinion relating to lynx introduction. But that attempt is based on a large exercise in sampling bias. The 72 per cent figure comes from a self-selecting group drawn from people who visited a pro-lynx exhibition, attended talks, or voluntarily filled in a questionnaire organised by the same group campaigning for the reintroduction. These aren't ordinary members of the public drawn at random and representative of the wider population – they're the already-engaged, the already-interested, the already-convinced. Here's what the paper actually says about the survey data: As the questionnaire collected data from the 'active voice,' people who are interested in the topic or that have engaged with the project, the respondents that answered the questionnaire may not reflect the results at a regional or national population level. Compare and contrast that with the press release and headlines about 72 per cent of people in and around Northumberland backing the return of the lynx to Northumberland. The detail of that self-selecting sample is even more interesting. Of the 1,075 people in the area who completed the pro-lynx survey, no less than 42.9 per cent are employed in the 'environment and conservation' sectors. So, far from showing that the general public in Northumberland supports a controversial conservation project, the latest bit of lynx-lobbying actually shows that a lot of people who work in conservation and who engaged with a pro-lynx conservation project are in favour of a lynx-based conservation project. At the same time as spinning its consultation report, the pro-lynx camp is also highlighting a new paper in the Journal of Environmental Management which uses data analysis to show that Kielder Forest in Northumberland would be a lovely place to introduce a few dozen large carnivores. Again, it's a serious bit of work by academics and wildlife experts who earnestly believe that giving Britain some 'top carnivores' would have real ecological benefits. I'm sure they mean well. But the overall impression given by those two documents this week is of a coalition with an idée fixe – a pre-determined desire to let lynx loose somewhere, anywhere, in the UK. Quite where doesn't seem to matter to the lynx lobby, just so long as it's good for the big cats. The data paper is an overt attempt to identify places that would suit lynx. It devotes far less space to anyone else's needs. There are neat statistical estimates for how many lynx might be killed by cars, but no such modelling of potential livestock losses. All local farmers get – tucked away in an annex – is an airy concession that it is 'possible' the lynx would eat their sheep if deer populations turn out to be lower than expected: Although the current evidence from Europe suggests lynx do not frequently target livestock, it is possible that smaller livestock, such as sheep, might be predated in areas close to suitable lynx habitats or if wild prey species are of lower abundance. From the perspective of people who farm sheep for a living, that's not something to ignore. Hence, every time before that when the lynx lobbyists have tried to push big cats into Kielder, local opposition has blocked them. In 2015, the (Wales-based) Lynx UK Trust proposed an initial trial release of 18 lynx into Kielder. Farmers objected, warning of threats to livestock and questioning how the animals would be monitored and contained in such a vast and remote forest. The plan was abandoned, for a while. Then in 2018, the trust applied to Natural England for a licence to release six lynx. Defra rejected the application outright, saying it failed to meet international reintroduction guidelines and carried 'a significant risk' to livestock. Yet here we are again in 2025, with pro-lynx claims that – to put it mildly – appear to gloss over the possibility that local people, and farmers in particular, might not be keen on the lynx agenda. I'm not, as such, writing this to oppose that agenda. That would be somewhat hypocritical: I don't live there any longer, so it's not my place to say what should happen there. Instead, my point is that the people who live and farm in Northumberland should be the ones who decide whether large wild carnivores are set free in their woods and fields. The countryside is not a theme park. It's not there to fulfil the fantasies of rewilders looking for Instagrammable biodiversity or policy wins for their mailing lists. It's a working landscape, where people make a hard living from hard land. Those people deserve better than spin and lynx-lobbying.
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
Wiltshire teenager calls for more 'amazing' families to foster
A teenager who grew up in care has called for more "amazing" families to consider fostering. Cora, 19, from Wiltshire, moved in with her first foster family at age seven, and has lived in the care system ever since – from fostering, to residential care and now supported living. With dreams of training to be a paramedic, she told the BBC how being fostered had been a "massive thing" when it came to overcoming the difficulties she had faced in childhood. "All a young person or a child needs is for one person to say: 'I understand you, I am here for you, I will look after you'," she said. Despite living with her first foster parents for only a matter of weeks, Cora said she was still in touch with them and had fond memories of being taught to ride a bike or going on a family holiday as a young child. "A young person in care – if you give them something little they give you something big back just because they feel appreciated," she said. "Take your time with a young person, take your time with a child in care because trust me, you will feel just as amazing as they do," she added. Having spent her teenage years in residential care rather than a foster home, Cora now advocates for more foster parents to consider taking on older children who are often dismissed as "troubled". Others agree that older children are just as worthwhile fostering. "We like dispelling the myth," said foster parent Graham, 40. "It's just teenagers just being teenagers." He and his partner Sherly, 42, have spent most of the past decade fostering children and raising them alongside their 12-year-old son. They currently have two children in their long-term care – siblings who are now 13 and 15. "It can be quite challenging, but just being consistent, present and available for them... and being patient and calm is the real key to looking after teenagers," Sherly said. Both Sherly and Graham described fostering as "very rewarding" – enjoying activities with foster children from getting nails done together to playing video games. They said seeing children grow in confidence academically was pleasing too. For any families curious about fostering but not sure where to start, the couple suggested offering respite placements for as little as one week and progressing up to short term placements before thinking about taking on a child or young person long-term. There are currently more than 460 children and young people in care across Wiltshire, and the council is urgently looking for more foster Jon Hubbard, who oversees children's services at Wiltshire Council, said the authority was "fortunate to have so many big-hearted people who have opened their homes and helped children and young people turn their lives around"."Teenagers need love and support just as much as younger children, and fostering them can be incredibly rewarding," he added. Wiltshire Council is holding several sessions in August, two of which will be held in a park, where members of the public can meet the authority's fostering of these sessions will take place at King George V Park, Melksham, from 10:00 BST to 14:00 on Thursday 21 second will run from 13:00 to 17:00 on Sunday 31 August in John Coles Park in Chippenham.
