Innholdsfortegnelse for 19-9-2016 i The Big Issue

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It is not sexy news. Last week central government cancelled a tendered project by a third party because they failed to meet contractual agreements. But it is significant. The company is called Concentrix. They had been hired, for £75m, by HMRC to investigate tax credit applicants and to weed out fraud. Instead they punished the innocent and those most in need. Almost 6,000 people who had claims stopped appealed. To date over 67 per cent of those appeals that have been processed have won. There are 2,000 more awaiting the result of the appeal. Such was the mess-up that government peer Lord Young issued an apology in the Lords. And so Concentrix, an American company, were dumped. To try and clean up the mess, more than 150 HMRC staff have…

In a little-noticed trend, local councils are increasingly using parkland for building projects. The problem is worst in big cities, where population growth and budget cuts affect the way councils go about funding new housing and schools. But instead of being creative, lazy council officers are reaching for the same tired old solutions. In Hackney’s Haggerston Park this involves finding a bit of much-loved public space, cutting a deal with a property developer and elbowing aside the local community. Hackney Council, where a new mayor has just been elected, has let down its community yet again in regards to Haggerston Park, part of a conservation area containing a nature reserve, in the third most densely populated borough in England. The park is legally open space and council documents call for…

“He is truly tortured at having abandoned the folk back home, left on the other side of the Atlantic under the bombs” For a period of about 20 months the Communist Party of Great Britain advocated pacifism and non-intervention in the Second World War. This supposedly crazy situation was because of Stalin’s Nazi-Soviet Pact that cleared the way for Germany and the Soviet Union to invade Poland. Was it a clever move by Stalin to buy time so that a vast secret army could be built up? Whatever was the reasoning, the advocacy by British communists of pacifism threw, among others, so-called British intellectuals into some strange political postures. One among them was music composer Benjamin Britten. He hightailed to New York in the early days of the war, where…

“I see religion as a cousin to art. Both involve a suspension of disbelief” At 16 I went off to boarding school. It was a mixed blessing. It was nice to get a bit of distance from my parents, though we got along very well. On the other hand, it wasn’t necessarily a fun experience. Boarding school is an intense place. You have intense friendships but you also have intense friction, whether with teachers or fellow students. When I look at my young self, I was bright but not very wise. Sometimes I find intelligence is a treacherous trait. Often when you’re bright it’s an excuse to be arrogant and thus not self-reflective. You have this sense you’re right, which is not always the case. I think it slightly…

As we sat down to speak to Daniel Radcliffe for this feature, we noticed he was trending on Twitter. The Guardian was running a story under the headline, “Daniel Radcliffe endorses Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader”. Which seemed oddly familiar. Radcliffes quotes were taken from an interview with The Big Issue in September 2015 but presented as if he had backed Corbyn following JK Rowling’s recent attack on the Labour leader (she noted emphatically on Twitter that “Corbyn. Is. Not. Dumbledore.”) In our interview a year ago – at the height of Corbynmania in the first leadership contest – Radcliffe said he was excited about the enthusiasm Corbyn was generating but was careful to contextualise his words: “When I was about 16 I gave an interview where I talked about…

All that jazz How refreshing to read Jim Richardson’s letter re Chet Baker! [September 5-11] I don’t find many fellow jazz-lovers these days and it’s exciting to hear some excellent remarks about Chet from someone who played bass on stage with him in 1983. I have a few of his CDs and much admire his singing and playing. Barbara Benoit, email The personal touch Just wanted to send a big heartfelt thanks to Mark who prepares The Big Issue for mailing out to subscribers. As it no longer was possible for me to get out to purchase weekly issues from local vendors, I began subscribing mid-January this year. It was an unexpected surprise and a huge delight finding Mark’s handwritten signature on the reverse of the envelope containing the BI!…

NEW STREET CAT BOB TRAILER: IT’S PAWSOME! Brace yourself Bobites: the countdown to the big screen debut of A Street Cat Named Bob took a cat-leap forward last week, with the release of a new trailer. Promising the film will be a bit of a tear-jerker, it shows more of the background to James Bowen’s story, with Luke Treadaway in a heartfelt performance as James. It also shows how James and Bob (played by real-life bestselling literary superstar Bob) find their lives transforming. Watch as they hop on and off buses (Bob is a very polite commuter), build an avid fan-base for their busking routines while selling The Big Issue, and perfect that paw-some high five. If you can’t wait for the film on November 4, watch the trailer now…

“People sofa surf, squat, stay with friends. Then they move on. Until there is nowhere else to move on to” During the second week of September this year, as Britain bathed itself in one of the hottest days, we gathered in the House of Lords for a short one-hour debate on the crisis of homelessness. And it is a crisis which is not diminishing. The Lords have discussed this issue many times before, pushing successive governments to do more, build more, and as John (Lord) Bird, the founder of The Big Issue said, to tackle the root causes of homelessness. And there are many. For me this is a deeply personal issue. As I said in the debate it affects every single one of us, and indeed at any one…

Kai Wiedenhöfer took portraits of 40 Syrian war wounded in towns, villages and refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon between spring 2014 and 2015. The portraits make up Forty Out of One Million, an exhibition putting faces to a tiny fraction of the casualties in that terrible conflict. As a fragile ceasefire begins in Syria, Wiedenhöfer details what happened to these children. 1 Amar Salamat, aged eight On July 24, 2012, a rocket hit a shelter in the small town of Al-Hirak in southern Syria. Six children and one woman were killed. Among the injured was Amar. He spent a week in a field hospital before being carried on a stretcher across the border into Jordan. His arm and half of his foot were amputated because of an infection that…

The generation divide is an important motor for creating culture – and it is happening more and more online. Unlike in Logan’s Run, where those over 30 are deemed a burden and rubbed out, the older you get the more options are served up to you. While teens and tweens fill their days with PewDiePie, Stampy and Zoella on YouTube, their parents and grandparents are finding succour in the podcasting apps on their smartphone. Here is a portal into a world of defiantly long-form content that creates a new type of intimacy that radio, with its stop-start dynamic, can only dream of. Serial – the 2014 documentary fronted by Sarah Koenig that tried to find the real killer of Hae Min Lee (an 18-year-old student from Baltimore) – was podcasting’s…

1. RIVERKEEP Martin Stewart Set in a Scottish-flavoured fantasy world, this is both moving and frightening. Fourteen-year old Wull’s father watches over the wild waters of the Danek. When his dad is possessed by a dark spirit, Wull sets off on a perilous journey down river to find the cure. 2. HILL OF THE RED FOX Allan Campbell McLean This has haunted me since school days. The threat of the cold war looms large, and young Alasdair’s adventure on a beautifully described Isle of Skye is packed with tension and atmosphere. A classic. 3. HARRY POTTER SERIES JK Rowling Hogwarts is in Scotland you know! Harry’s journey has enthralled, frightened and enchanted readers for almost 20 years, and I’ll wager we’ll never tire of it. There are scary moments along…

While most TV dramas tend to finish by their fifth or sixth season at best, Supernatural just keeps on going. Its 12th season kicks off soon, with no obvious sign of an ending – or is there? Leads Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki have teased Entertainment Weekly that they want to get to 300 episodes – which would take the show into a 14th season. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was the highest paid actor in Hollywood last year – not surprising, given that he has 20-plus films on his to-do list and gets through two or three a year. In fact, he’s about to start shooting his third film of this year – the, er, much-wanted reboot of Jumanji. Speculation surrounding James Bond continues. A report that Daniel Craig…

Hatfield House in Hertfordshire is one of the few humongous stately homes left in this country that’s still in the hands of the family for whom it was built. An extraordinary Jacobean manor constructed in 1611 for Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, it remains the home of Lord and Lady Salisbury (the seventh Marquess and Marchioness). It’s also home to the somewhat younger Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, which this week will celebrate its fifth birthday. In fact, it’ll do so in quite some style, artistic director Guy Johnston having assembled a dream team of musicians for the occasion. From September 22 to 25, music performed by the likes of Alison Balsom, Angela Hewitt, Rachel Podger and James Gilchrist – not to mention Johnston himself – will resound in several…

I buy The Big Issue every week, one reason is to do the Sudoku. I am one of the top Sudoku players in the world (world ranking #97) and I like to do yours because they are always hard. My point is: do you realise that they are harder than in any newspaper and that very few readers will be able to solve them? Some, including September 5-11 this year, could probably only be solved by half a dozen people in the country. Personally I love them but I doubt that your intention is to be so elitist? The crossword, that I also do, is much more mainstream. Mike Colloby, email…

I can’t choose between my two musical loves. Elvis Presley and Queen have been constants in my life. My earliest memories are listening to Elvis LPs. The live albums are where you capture his essence. One of the first songs I heard was Way Down on 45 with the orange RCA label. I remember dancing to Teddy Bear in my front room pretending to be him. I was hooked. His story moves me. If I had to pick a favourite song I’d go for Don’t Cry Daddy. Elvis has been a massive part of my life. My wife and I got married in the Elvis chapel in Las Vegas. We were doing series four of Torchwood, Sarah and I were engaged already, her mum was with us, so we thought,…

OUTSIDE IN: 10 TH  ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION A project supporting artists who face barriers to the art world due to health, disability, social circumstance or isolation is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a free exhibition. Outside In was founded in 2006 by the executive director of Pallant House Gallery, Marc Steene. He describes it as “a gentle revolution, expressing my intention to radically change the art world through revealing and embracing a wider group of artists and makers”. The exhibition, which runs until October 30 at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, features pieces by some of Outside In’s award-winners from across the last decade. Here are a few of the highlights. DAVID JONES PAN Following a period of drug abuse and homelessness, it was in a prison art group that David’s…

EXHIBITION THE ART OF FREEDOM The Koestler Trust’s annual art awards and exhibition give a unique, thought-provoking insight into the minds of the prisoners, secure patients and detainees it works with at 300 institutions across the UK. For this year’s exhibition, titled We Are All Human, poet Benjamin Zephaniah selected 250 artworks, ranging from painting, ceramics and writing to a matchstick-modelled clock. Zephaniah told The Big Issue how arts diverted him from re-offending after serving time in prison as a teenager. Read more at bigissue.com…