Innholdsfortegnelse for 10-02-20 i The Big Issue

01 Fight fake news with Stacey Dooley  C’mon, c’mon – she’s not only the greatest dancer, but also an acclaimed investigative journalist and Big Issue Changemaker, as a series of in-conversation events with the 2018 Strictly champion should serve to remind everyone. Dooley will discuss her career highlights and ambitions, her drive to open up documentary journalism to new, younger audiences, and how good reporting is more important than ever in the fake news era. Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury, February 13, then touring fane.co.uk/our-shows 02 Put your best foot forward with the Big London Night Walk One of the first and now most iconic night walks, The Big Issue Foundation’s fundraising Big London Night Walk lets nocturnal strollers experience the city as never before. Setting off from Shoreditch Town…

Last week radio stations across Britain revealed how many of us tune in to them. Two big climbers were BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM. Radio 3 had its highest figures since 2016 – more than two million a week. Classic FM did even better. They had more than 5.4 million listeners You can make any number of reasoned arguments why this might be. Alan Davey, the boss of Radio 3, talked of “having a place where you can take time out from the world, listen to something in depth and get a new perspective”. And while executives announcing good news can get a bit platitudinous, there is some truth to what he says. In the deep, dark trenches of the Brexit debates last year, an alternative was present. Why…

Scotland has the highest mortality rate for homeless people in the UK, the results of its first official count have revealed. The National Records of Scotland’s experimental statistics released last week found that 195 people died on the streets or in temporary accommodation in 2018 – a rise of 19 per cent on the 164 people who died in 2017. The offcial stats follow the Offce for National Statistics’ frst offcial England and Wales fgures, frst released in December 2018. Scotland has the highest rate, with 35.9 deaths per million of the population compared to 16.8 in England and 14.5 in Wales. Of those who died, around three quarters were male and just over half were drug-related, while the average age was just 43 years for women and 44 for…

Ask people what the heart of their community is and few are likely to say a gym. But for residents of Leith, Edinburgh, Projekt 42 is known for putting their wellbeing first – whether you’re their youngest or oldest member, aged four and 91 respectively. Sara Hawkins saw firsthand what a winning combination of physical exercise and mental health support could do in tough times and was driven to make that accessible to others, regardless of income. Hawkins was working as an auditor when she was assaulted in 2012, leaving her with debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder and forcing her to quit her job. Struggling to leave her home as a result of severe anxiety, she couldn’t work for two years. At one point friends giǽted her a gym membership –…

Literacy charity Give A Book are championing an initiative that feeds kids’ bodies and minds. Since 2013, Breakfast Book Clubs have been set up in more than 30 schools in disadvantaged areas where a higher than average number of pupils receive free school meals. “The schools or other organisations provide the food and we provide the books,” explains Give A Book’s Adeela Khan. “It encourages children who, as well as coming into school hungry, often don’t have books at home or parents who are able to read to them.” The Breakfast Book Clubs are dealing with a problem caused by multiple factors. School budgets are stretched tighter than ever. It is not a mandatory requirement for schools to have libraries, so many do without. At the same time, these local…

A century ago there was just one female MP in Parliament, when Nancy Astor became the first woman to take her seat in December 1919. Speaking about her experience, she said: “Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.” Her election and 26 years in Parliament encouraged many brilliant women to enter politics. Over the last 100 years there have been 552 women elected to the House of Commons. Among them was Margaret Bondfield, who made history as the first female cabinet minister when she became minister of labour in the 1929–31 Labour administration. Brought up in poverty in Somerset, she was the 10th of 11 children and became a shop assistant at 14, moving to Brighton where she was a tailor’s apprentice. She became the…

First, a confession. I have a movie-loving friend who whenever they see a bare bottom on-screen – be it male or female – feels compelled to exclaim “cheeky!” aloud as if they were in a particularly fruity episode of Hi-de-Hi! You might think I could safely chaperone this friend to a matinee of Emma (just the latest Jane Austen screen adaptation and one that, judging by Anya Taylor-Joy’s fetching bonnet on the posters, seems pretty faithful to the source material) without fear of disturbing other patrons. But you’d be wrong. There’d be an involuntary “cheeky!” within the first 15 minutes, and then another not long after. That is not to say this version of Emma – adapted by Booker-winning Kiwi author Eleanor Catton and directed by veteran US rock photographer…

I have spent too much of 2020 listening to The Last Word , Radio 4’s weekly obituary show. With middle age, the fear of asking how people are increases daily. Our childhood icons are regularly in the obituary columns. Each one seems like a surprise. You don’t notice the passing of time, just that it has gone and it’s Friday already. “They can’t have been 85,” we say, astounded, forgetting that we are in our 50s so the adults of our childhood must be getting on a bit now. All bets were off after David Bowie died. Any lyricist who manages to put “pusillanimous” in a song gains my immediate respect. Neil Innes [who died of a heart attack in December, aged 75] found a place for it in Another…

A hand up, not a handout... Our sellers BUY the magazine for £1.25 and sell it for £2.50. Trade, not aid… Which is why we ask you to ALWAYS take your copy of the magazine. Our sellers are working and need your custom. Poverty is indiscriminate… That is why we provide ANYONE whose life is blighted by poverty with the opportunity to earn a LEGITIMATE income. The right to citizenship… The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers tackle social and financial exclusion. Prevention… Big Issue Invest offers backing and investments to social enterprises, charities and businesses which deliver social value to communities.…

Making his mark  Thank you for shining a light on Mark Richards [My Pitch, January 27-February 2]. I am a recent subscriber to The Big Issue, and I see his name on my envelope each week and was beginning to wonder what he looked like and what his story was (one of the disadvantages of subscribing and not buying a copy of The Big Issue from a vendor in the street). I appreciate the human touch with my subscription and it’s lovely to virtually ‘meet’ Mark who sends me my copy! I pass on my very grateful thanks to Mark and wish him all the luck for the future. Angela Beaver, email Great to read about Mark and see a photo – he signs the back of the envelope that…

Lord Bird has championed the cause of libraries in Parliament, probing ministers on their funding plans at House of Lords Questions last week. The Big Issue’s founder and crossbench peer asked the Lords’ representative for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Baroness Diana Barran, to outline the government’s plan for libraries after years of savage cuts. He also quizzed her on the “cross-governmental problem” that sees DCMS promoting libraries while it falls to the local government minister to spend the money. Baroness Barran said: “The government are committed to supporting a sustainable, long-term future for libraries in England. We want libraries to be resilient and equipped to meet local challenges – to thrive, not just to survive.” The Big Issue has long been defending libraries and teamed up with…

The number of members who use Projekt 42’s mental health services is modest – around 10 per cent on average. But since launching the gym, Hawkins has noticed interesting seasonal fluctuations. “Just before Christmas there was a huge influx in applications from our members who felt depressed or stressed and needed access to short-term counselling,” she says. “About 30 per cent of our membership were accessing it then. “A lot of people explain depression away as winter blues, or the lack of daylight, and they really hang on until they can’t any more.”…

Emilio Estevez makes no apologies for making a serious film. When we meet at the Hospital Club in London ahead of the release of The Public, Estevez acknowledges that his latest feature film as a writer-director – following The Way and Bobby, which were both critically lauded – is a tough sell. The film was a labour of love for Estevez, who found fame acting in 1980s hits like The Breakfast Club – itself set in a library, St Elmo’s Fire and Young Guns. It was, he says, hard to get funding to make a film about what happens when a group of homeless people in Cincinnati, who use the city’s central library during the day, occupy the library overnight during a cold snap with emergency shelters at capacity. “You…

After lunch every Saturday afternoon, my father would take my brothers and me on our weekly pilgrimage to a beautiful early Edwardian redbrick building that housed East Ham library. We boys spent several hours sprawled on the floor, voraciously absorbing books on topics spanning from the Aztec Empire to Victorian engineering to the fiction of Roald Dahl. We would return home with a shopping trolley full of borrowed books, just in time for the BBC’s final football scores (and sometimes a disappointing West Ham result!) When people meet me now, they often associate me with my exploits as captain of Emmanuel Cambridge’s team on University Challenge. However it was my years of being engrossed in books at East Ham library that had (unexpectedly) prepared me to square up to quizmaster…

In the UK an estimated 8.4 million people struggle to get enough to eat. Food poverty is growing at a horrifying rate. Already in 2020 charities, campaigners and food activists across the country are reporting desperate circumstances as they struggle to meet demand from people who are going hungry with increasing regularity. Last year, after three years of pressure from food poverty campaigners, the DWP finally agreed to begin measuring the extent and, crucially, the causes of hunger. For people living in the extremes of poverty – rough sleepers, people in hostels, those moving on from homelessness – the reality of finding sustenance is stark. One of our sister street papers, Curbside Chronicle , asked its vendors in Oklahoma City to share images of their daily grub. Nathan Poppe reports.…

Ian Rankin once said that if you want to know what a particular society is really like, you should read their crime fiction. There is truth in that – crime fiction seems particularly good at getting under the skin of a society and exposing the trouble bubbling underneath. And so it is with this week’s two books. First up is Your House Will Pay, the fourth novel by American author and journalist Steph Cha. The book is set in Los Angeles and switches between the present day and the early Nineties, highlighting the racial tension that has pervaded the city both then and now. The story is told through two central characters – Grace Park, a young Korean- American woman working in her parents’ pharmacy, and Shawn Matthews, an African-American…

This Valentine’s week there is some stark counter-programming in the form of Eminent Monsters: A Manual For Modern Torture. It traces the influence of Dr Ewen Cameron, an ambitious Scottish-born psychologist who spent the early 1950s in Canada refining methods of physical and mental coercion that would eventually shape the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques after 9/11. It is a sobering but necessary film, a globetrotting portrait of a shadowy legacy rightfully dragged into the light. Eminent Monsters screens in London, Glasgow and other cities on February 16 @EminentMonsters…

Posthumously released music has become an industry of such practised bankability it sometimes seems to lose sight of honest remembrance. Sales of Basic Plumbing’s only album Keeping Up Appearances won’t turn a profit anything like recent sets by, for example, Leonard Cohen or David Bowie – and anyway, what proceeds it does generate will be donated to mental health charity CALM and the Los Angeles LGBT Centre. Yet as a fond and resonant farewell to a fine and talented soul, its intentions could scarcely be truer nor better realised. Patrick Doyle was a restlessly prolific multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who, in his all-too-short 32 years, played with more bands than there is space to list – most prominently Veronica Falls, with whom he released two albums of haunted jangling via Bella…

Poor Vivaldi. Spring from The Four Seasons was axed from the benefts hotline because it gave callers anxiety. But what should replace it? Philip Glass’s Halberstadt organ project Huggy Badger, Facebook (Don’t Fear) the Reaper – Blue Oyster Cult Andrew Salisbury, Faceboook The theme from M*A*S*H Andrew Davison, Facebook Killing in the Name – Rage Against The Machine Claire Bissett, Facebook Ode to Joy Adrienne Elly, Facebook Napalm Death Grant George, Facebook Someone answering the phone in under 10 minutes Darran Scott , Facebook @zonedoutfromyou Ride of the Valkyries @realdavedoubleu Someone answering…

Some years back I read about a book by a leading social critic of government who took some time off to get a job as a chambermaid. Earlier I had read most of a book by an American woman who had done the same in the US. But I think it was a French woman who started this craze among serious social journalists to clean toilets, make beds and vacuum up; and out of all this produce a book. A sense of solidarity came out of the pieces I read. But also the wretchedness of being so incidental to people’s understanding of life, yet so essential. Cleaning and making the world run tidily was one of the most important service industries as you passed through the day. An unclean world…

01. 816 libraries closed their doors between 2010 and 2018, leaving 3,618 surviving in the UK 02. Library funding in the UK has been cut by £213m since 2010 03. There are 233.1 million UK library visits every year 04. For every £1 invested in libraries, £5-£7 makes its way back into UK communities 05. Libraries provide 26 million hours of internet access a year in the UK Stats from The Big Issue’s Public Libraries: The Case for Support report and gov.uk…

“I am so happy I found acrylic pouring/fluid art a few years ago,” reflects frequent Street Art contributor Robyn, who is in her late 50s, lives in Brighton and copes with physical and mental health challenges including rheumatoid arthritis and bipolar disorder. “It has helped me in so many ways and it just keeps getting better and better. This visual arts creative outlet has made me so happy. I hope to keep doing this for years to come.” The theme of Robyn’s latest set of paintings is climate change and solidarity with Australia. The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com At least half of the profit goes to the artist.…

01 A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly  Mattie, 15, is a poor, gifted girl who longs to go to college. Based on the true story of a murder, this thoroughly researched book reveals the gap between aspiration and harsh reality. Suitable for ages 11 to 90. 02 Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella  Audrey, 14, doesn’t leave the house. Her family are hoping her therapist can sort it out. Sounds grim? No – this is a laugh-out-loud book which I’ve already read twice. Will raise your spirits. 03 This is Not a Love Story by Keren David  Set mainly in Amsterdam, Kitty has fallen in love with two boys. The author has lived in the city and this is a well-drawn, absorbing story. Will make you want to want to jump…