Innholdsfortegnelse for 17-10-2016 i The Big Issue

WE BELIEVE in a hand up, not a handout... Which is why our sellers BUY every copy of the magazine for £1.25 and sell it for £2.50. WE BELIEVE in 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. WE BELIEVE poverty is indiscriminate… Which is why we provide ANYONE whose life is blighted by poverty with the opportunity to earn a LEGITIMATE income. WE BELIEVE in the right to citizenship… Which is why The Big Issue Foundation, our charitable arm, helps sellers tackle social and financial exclusion. WE BELIEVE in prevention… Which is why Big Issue Invest offers backing and investments to social enterprises, charities and businesses which deliver social value to communities.…

In autumn 1991, Bob Dylan didn’t have a Nobel Prize. In fact, his late period renaissance that kicked off with Time Out Of Mind had yet to come. Mikhail Gorbachev was still in charge in Russia, making the world feel that not only had the Cold War thawed, but a period of global peace was here to stay. Donald Trump was a garish self-publicist with weird hair. Syria was a (relatively) stable state and friend of the West. The euro was barely a glint in a technocrat’s eye. A run at a bank was a thing that happened in the Depression. The internet didn’t really exist. Amazon was simply a river. In the intervening 25 years, as the world has shifted angrily with what feelslikeunstoppable pace, The Big Issue has…

HIRST, BOWIE AND JARVIS September 1997 A Damien Hirst guest edit features David Bowie interviewed by Jarvis Cocker and a competition to win one of Hirst’s paintings. PRINCE WILLIAM December 2015 Prince William gives an exclusive interview to The Big Issue carried out by 24-year-old Sophie Kichou who was made homeless aged 18. CHANGE PLEASE November 2015 Big Issue-backed project Change Please starts selling coffee from carts in London, training homeless people to become baristas. “I BELIEVE IT’S TIME WE CHANGED OUR APPROACH. THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS THE BIG ISSUE TACKLES SO COURAGEOUSLY WILL BE AT THE VERY HEART OF MY GOVERNMENT. I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF PREVENTION” THERESA MAY Prime Minister I’m delighted to congratulate the magazine for its 25 years of helping some of society’s most vulnerable individuals.…

SUPERMARKET SWEEP June 1999 For a Big Issue campaign Mark Thomas, Colin Firth and Tony Booth go shopping with the same weekly vouchers as an asylum seeker. Good ideascanoftenwitheron the vine without proper financial backing. Big Issue Invest (BII) is the social investment arm of The Big Issue and is always looking to talk to social entrepreneurs who are creating social impact across the UK. Since 2005, Big Issue Invest (a social enterprise itself) has established a formidable reputation as one of the country’s leading social investors. Social investment has been hailed as a pioneering way to fund social businesses, charities and other ventures tackling poverty and creating opportunity for people across the country. Big Issue Invest harnesses the power of financial investment to help grow the organisations addressing some…

BIG BUSK May, 2001 Virtuoso violinist Nigel Kennedy busks to support The Big Issue. Frank Black, Travis, Ellie Goulding and Passenger follow suit in coming years. I, Daniel Blake is the latest film from Ken Loach, a Newcastle-set drama that’s as fierce an attack on austerity Britain as we’ve seen from any British filmmaker. The eponymous character (played with enormous warmth and sensitivity by Dave Johns) is a former carpenter in his late 50s. He recently suffered a heart attack and has been ordered off work by his doctors. But then his disability benefits stop – seemingly on a bureaucratic whim – and the film charts his anguished battle with red tape to appeal the decision. It’s enraging viewing. The obstacles Daniel encounters are small enough to start with, though…

This week is a good one for opera in the capital. Both of London’s main opera houses host opening nights, with two very different shows hitting the stage. Just off Trafalgar Square, a six-week run of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers begins in the Coliseum on October 19. In nearby Covent Garden, a new production of Shostakovich’s first opera The Nose starts in the Royal Opera House on October 20. The former is an Orientalist love story premièred in Paris in 1863, the latter a Russian satire about a Major’s missing nose given its first performance in 1930. This is the first time the Royal Opera House has staged The Nose – a romping, irreverent opera steeped in Shostakovich’s brand of teasing wit tinged with cynicism. In Nikolai Gogol’s short story,…

Taking liberties Having read your letters on community libraries [October 10-16], I’m afraid I must disagree. Library closures have for decades been a popular answer to budget cuts since Thatcher. Whilst communities taking over these vital resources has been great for easing the conscience of councils, in the long term it is not great for communities. In a time when we have fewer and fewer community job opportunities, turning government-funded resources into charities is killing off careers. Librarians are just as important to the communities as libraries and they need money to pay their rent just like our nurses and teachers. I live near one of the community libraries in Lewisham that Barbara Greenall mentions. Whilst it is a lovely endeavour, I would rather those hard-working staff were given vocational…

UP IN DOWNING STREET May 1997 John Bird and representatives of homeless charities present Prime Minister Tony Blair with a 10-point plan to tackle homelessness. In 1991 the cover of the first edition of The Big Issue posed a stark and provocative question: “But why don’t the homeless just go home?” Nick Hardwick, then director of the charity for homeless young people Centrepoint, answered in an article identifying factors such as broken family relationships, a desperate shortage of cheap rented accommodation and meagre social security payments. In the last 25 years great progress has been made in helping people up from the streets, raising public awareness of the problem of homelessness and challenging common misconceptions about the forces driving it. But with rough sleeping and statutory homelessness still on the…

A VISIT FROM THE PRINCE OF WALES December 1997 Charles visits Big Issue London office and bumps into an old school chum from Gordonstoun, now selling the mag. HOW WE LIVE HOW WE EAT HOW WE WORK HOW WE SPEND OUR TIME People using a mobile device to access the internet: Most watched TV programme: Best-selling album: (physical sales, downloads and streaming equivalents) Highest-grossing film: 1991 Terminator 2: Judgement Day 2016 Captain America: Civil War Sources: Crisis, Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Office National Statistics (ONS), Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), British Household Survey.…

STAN BURRIDGE Healthcare Champion for Homeless People Stan is an expert on homelessness through his own experience: he slept on the streets of London and sold The Big Issue outside the old BBC headquarters in west London during the late 1990s. “Selling The Big Issue, I learnt I had an ability to get people talking, not only talking but listening as well,” he says. “I got to hear about other people’s lives, marriages, divorces – it led me to where I am today.” Now in his early 50s, Stan is a project leader at Pathway, a charity that works within the NHS to get homeless people and other marginalised groups better healthcare. “I get a real sense of pride when one of the people we help gets a job or…

COVER OF THE YEAR July 2015 Big Issue scoops prestigious PPA British magazine Cover of the Year gong, featuring Sgt Rick Clement, who lost his legs in Afghanistan, photographed by Bryan Adams. When The Bake Off is in turmoil and Mary and Mel and Sue are more or less on the lam (in baking terms), you need a good bunch to test the best of cakes. And who better to taste a Big Issue birthday cake than some of our vendors? Brilliantly iced to look like our very first cover from 1991, the cake was made by the homeless trainees at Rise Bakery in east London. Graham Grenfell, 51, and Paul Logan, 57, who both sell the magazine around Liverpool Street station, came along to thank the budding cooks. “It’s…

Here are a few words about my brother, Hamish Lorimer. He was born in Dechmont West Lothian on June 24, 1955. Our family moved to Sleaford, Lincolnshire in 1962. We were brought up at Rauceby Hospital, where our father worked. Hamish was a bright child and after leaving school he gained a degree in computing. Later he completed an Msc, in the same area using ‘Bird Song’ as his theme. He could recognise every species of British bird. As a person he was very quiet and thoughtful. He had a dry sense of humour and was well-liked. Unfortunately, he struggled from his late teens with drug abuse. This culminated in deteriorating health in the last few years of his life. Despite that he worked his pitch outside Marks & Spencer…

“I believe the greatest of all challenges is to create a science of new government. We must work to dismantle poverty” Twenty-five years ago we struggled, and for many years after, with the enormity of our task. Starting on the double yellow lines of the West End of London, kindly ignored by friendly coppers and traffic wardens, we began. To say that we knew precisely what we were doing was our first big whopper. That knowing what you are doing only comes from doing. And quickly we learned that we loved and loathed our work because it was so madly engaging and intense. “John Bird, you scumbag, you’re exploiting us” was said at one of the memorable confrontations with a group of distraught vendors rough-sleeping in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “You’re…

“The Daily Mail would be happy to know they facilitated my sexual fetish” I was already a transvestite by the time I was 16. I took my stepmother’s clothes, changed in the toilets behind the Chelmsford Museum and walked up and down the high street in make-up, a mini dress and a wig. I was just acting on an instinctual desire, this need to play a role. It was very sexually exciting, a big turn on. Adrenaline is a great aphrodisiac. I got the wig from an advert in the back of the Daily Mail. It was about £1.50, a shapeless, brunette, very wiggy sort of thing. I’m sure the Daily Mail would be happy to know they facilitated my sexual fetish. At 16 I was…

As James Bowen acknowledges on page 26, the cover of The Big Issue is crucial for vendors to catch the eye of passers-by and make that all-important sale. That is why our exhibition Up from the Streets: 25 Years of a Publishing Revolution at Proud Camden is important. For the first time it collates our distinctive, striking and unusual covers alongside photography from eminent snappers, including David Bailey (whose Insiders cover is shown top right) and Bryan Adams, whose portrait of Sergeant Rick Clement (third row, right) won British Magazine Cover of the Year. The exhibition shows how covers that celebrate vendors, knock on the doors of politicians, land exclusive interviews with world leaders and bring a fresh perspective to celebs – from Street Cat Bob to Robert Downey Jr,…

1. THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN Hergé This is part one of the Red Rackham’s treasure stories. Old but it’s still one of my all-time favourite books. It’s part thriller, part detective and it looks soooo good. 2. BLACK HEARTS IN BATTERSEA Joan Aiken An almost historical thriller, richly peppered with wild characters and high risk. It goes with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase but I read it on its own when I was eight. Loved it then, love it still. 3. STORMBREAKER Adapted by Antony Johnston from the novel by Anthony Horowitz This is the first in the Alex Rider series and it’s the graphic novel version. It took my dyslexic daughter into reading – she loved the beautiful illustrations by Kanako Damerum and Yuzuru…

GOING SUPERSONIC April 1994 Oasis name check The Big Issue in their debut single as both band and magazine go Supersonic. FACTS ABOUT ME... WHERE I LIKE TO GO The British Museum – there is so much to see and explore there. A wonderful place in a wonderful city. MY UNUSUAL HOBBY Coin collecting – I’ve collected since I was a boy. My favourite coins were the British ones. I had nothing valuable but they were special to me. I’m still alive, after all my troubles – that’s what I like to tell people. I’ve been through the mill but I’m still standing. That’s the important thing. I’ve been selling the magazine here at Victoria station since January this year, and it has been good for me. I had been…