Innholdsfortegnelse for 03-08-20 i The Big Issue

VENDORS: Not all vendors have been returning at once. Health issues mean some are shielding and areas of the country may be subject to localised lockdown restrictions. We will continue to support vendors who need help until they can start selling again. PPE: Safety is key, we do not want to risk any vendor or customer’s health. So we have provided ‘Welcome Back Packs’ for each vendor that include masks, gloves, sanitiser and wipes. Vendors will also be given waterproof bags to safely store magazines. PITCHES: Some pitches may have moved, depending on local safety measures and circumstances. A large number of vendors will now be offering contactless payment, but they will all continue to accept cash – there is no indication that handling cash or magazines will transmit the…

It’s been a big year for celebrities stepping in to help children stave o›f hunger – Big Issue cover star Marcus Rashford led the way on school meal vouchers, and now Dame Emma Thompson is celebrating victory too. The actor has been an ambassador for the Right2Food campaign for the last two years, which saw her support 20 Young Food Ambassadors in delivering a Right2Food charter that ensures no child goes hungry in the UK. And while the battle towards that goal continues, Dame Emma was able to celebrate recommendations from the charter going straight into the first major review of the UK’s food policy in nearly 75 years. Restaurateur Henry Dimbleby revealed the first part of his National Food Strategy last week, making urgent calls to prevent the poorest…

The first thought I have about advising my younger self is that nothing I could say would make the slightest bit of difference because I never listened to a word that anyone ever told me. I was convinced that nobody came from the same twisted, dark, cracked mould as I did, so advice from anybody else was coming from normal people from the normal world. What could they possibly understand about me and the noise in my head? I was terminally unique. I’ve always had an addictive personality and by the age of 16 I’d already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades-long love affair with drugs. Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person…

• Permitted development rights make it possible to carry out relatively minor building development without having to apply for planning permission – such as adding two storeys to existing residential buildings, converting retail and commercial premises into housing or demolishing unused buildings to create homes • More than 1 million homes have been lost from England’s social housing stock since 1981 • Only 6,827 were built last year – while 23,740 were sold or demolished • Nearly 13,000 more families with children were living in temporary accommodation last year compared to 2010 • There are more than 1.15 million households on the waiting list for a social home…

Discrimination against people who receive housing benefit is rife in private renting. Shelter sees every day how it turns people’s lives upside down and pushes many into homelessness. So-called No DSS discrimination is when landlords or letting agents refuse someone’s tenancy application simply because they receive benefits, even when they can afford the rent. Sometimes, a letting agent or landlord will explicitly advertise “no DSS” or “no benefits”. Other times, a person will enquire about a property only to be refused or ignored. In 2019, we found that almost a third of private renters receiving housing benefit (32 per cent) had been barred from renting a home they wanted by a No DSS policy in the last five years. There are currently 4.6 million households in privately rented homes in…

Dublin-born writer Emma Donoghue is best known as the author of Room , the international smash hit she adapted into an Oscar-winning film. The novel, about a mother and her young son encountering the outside world after years of being imprisoned in a single room, has, for obvious reasons, taken on a new life since lockdown. One wonders then what readers will make of the chilling prescience of her new novel, The Pull of the Stars. Set almost entirely in a claustrophobic quarantine ward in 1918 Dublin, its depiction of a small group of maternity nurses and mothers-to-be coping with the complex terrors of a global flu pandemic has uncanny contemporary parallels. The novel is narrated by Julia Power, a pragmatic but compassionate midwife who, along with enthusiastic young volunteer…

Offering a glimpse as to just how erratic the current UK cinema release schedule is, this particular piece was completed and written uncharacteristically ahead of deadline. Three quick announcements from major movie studios, and it was hopelessly out of date and needed to be started again. We’re in an odd grey period for the UK cinema industry, where picture houses around the country are opening up, but major film distributors are reluctant to send new releases to them. Instead, when doors started flinging back open in July, we were mainly being fed a diet of very welcome classic films, whilst we waited for new releases to return. Only they haven’t. Disney has delayed the release of its blockbuster retelling of the Mulan story until later in the year. The eagerly-awaited…

PITCH: Waterstones, Swansea Monday-Saturday, 8.30am-3pm Lockdown was a struggle for me. It was lonely. The only time I went out was when I had to get food but even that was hard sometimes. I’d lost my income and didn’t have the money to pay for it. Also, some days I don’t like big crowds and I don’t like enclosed spaces so I had times when I was unable to move and didn’t want to get out of bed. I just shut the curtains and thought, I’m not going nowhere. But then the next day I’d be fine, I’d go out to the garden and sit there all day. Just before lockdown I managed to get a one-bedroom flat in Swansea after being in a hostel for a year. It’s better,…

Boris Johnson’s latest epiphany is not a surprise. After getting very ill and then realising that being overweight caused him serious complications, he’s now on an obesity-busting health drive. We’ve all done it. Something happens leading us to change our own habits – whether its diet-related or giving up smoking or discovering that exercise isn’t all bad – and then we become born-again zealots banging on constantly to friends, family or anybody who just happens into view about how much better we feel and that EVERYBODY should do it. You sleep SOOOO much better, we insist, as our loved ones drift off. Being leader of a nation means you have a bigger audience to bang on at. And then you can do something about it. Johnson’s plans are not bad.…

The Big Issue’s Italian sister street paper Scarp de’ tenis has kicked o›f a campaign to ask football team Juventus to dedicate their ninth straight league title to one of their vendors. Claudio Calò died two months ago after spending 20 years selling the street paper. He also had a lifelong passion for Juve and had been to watch his team at their home stadium in Turin four times with Scarp director Stefano Lampertico. The street paper even bought him a television and pay TV subscription so he could follow the games because, as Lampertico recalled, “on matchday his main concern was the results”. Scarp launched its bid on July 23, reaching out to Juventus legend Gianluigi Buffon, club president Andrea Agnelli and others on social media before the Bianconeri…

I have become the most one-sided, limited, obsessed thinker, reminding me of the days when I was an aspirant painter. Then London, the place I came back to after youthful incarceration, was a series of galleries, museums, art shops and art bookshops. Nothing else mattered. Not pubs, nor discos, dancehalls or coffee bars. Only places where I could see art, going north, south, east or west in pursuit of paintings and sculptures, drawings and watercolours to drink in. If you stopped me in the streets, a thin, underfed, rough-looking boy, you might think I might have escaped from an earlier Dickens time. Obsessive, repetitive, and probably boring to most. How I managed to get through my day job as a bin emptying, path sweeping, fence mending, tree and bush trimming,…

Post-Covid-19, prepper expert Bradley Garrett says it's time the UK's underground shelters were brought back into public use For the better part of a decade I lived in Clapham, South London. For the first few years I was there, I heard stories of a system of Second World War bunkers underneath the area. One night, curiosity got the best of me and I went looking for them. As it turns out, cracking the heavy doors to take the 180 stairs down to the deep level shelter at Clapham South wasn’t hard. The stairs bottomed out into a riveted-steel semi-circle protecting a concrete path that stretched for more than a mile through the earth, directly under my house. The fluorescent lights still worked as if they were installed yesterday. Eventually, along…

I sit here pondering on the life I had. For 11 years I served as a police officer in Britain, firstly in Manchester and then in London. After my experiences of racism and homophobia in the force, and falling ill with depression because of them, I was forced out of my job as a detective. My life fell apart. Not only did I lose my career, home and marriage, which crumbled under the weight of everything else, but I had to survive on benefits and live in a shared dorm hostel for more than two years. A former Clerkenwell courthouse, Clink78 is a 600-bed hostel in central London. It uses former prison cells as bedrooms and is next to a police station. The irony was not lost on me. After…

For the foreseeable future, it’s looking likely that cinema chains will continue to lean on older movies to fill up their screens. This has been something of a boon, not least because many multiplexes are offering discount tickets to see The Greatest Showman, The Empire Strikes Back, Dirty Dancing and Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring. The flipside is that independents struggling for screen space are still finding themselves crowded out by studio fare: it just happens to be older studio fare.…

The Alliance continues to grow. This week we’re delighted to welcome Stonewall Housing, part of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans people campaign organisation. They’ve helped thousands of people find homes, including teaming up with Big Issue Changemakers The Outside Project to open London’s first LGBTQ+ homeless shelter. We also welcome Zacchaeus 2000. They have been chronicling the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic through their #LifeAfterLockdown project. Their campaigning has focused on revamping Universal Credit as well as calling for a suspension of the No Recourse to Public Funds rules that mean people cannot access state support due to their immigration status. Now they have joined forces with RORA to prevent homelessness and protect jobs. “Stonewall Housing are delighted to support the Ride Out Recession Alliance initiative and are very…

Britain is at a housing tipping point. Our need for social housing, built well and built quickly, has never been more urgent. There is less housing stock available, there is a need to find homes for the previously homeless to meet the laudable ambition currently sounded by the authorities, and there is a growing need for affordable new homes for many others. Quality and a good place to live are key. However, last month Westminster housing secretary Robert Jenrick announced a change in legislation making it easier for developers to convert buildings like offices into residential units, a practice largely shown to produce shoddy homes that promote overcrowding. The government says this will help us build back from the Covid-19 crisis. It leaves the situation on the horns of a…

Planning is a largely devolved matter – the latest PDR changes, allowing commercial buildings to be demolished or redeveloped as homes without the need for planning permission, only apply in England. Similar projects must go through the planning permission process in Scotland and Wales. However the Scottish Government held a consultation on the issue last year, resulting in proposals that would allow the conversion of agricultural buildings into homes to support rural communities.…

The mask is the law of the country You won’t be allowed in the door Traffic lights have to be obeyed, red light stop Even when the other road is clear you have to wait For the amber to green to go forward The mask law is coming into force this Saturday When mobile phones first came out Some people said, I’m not phoning you on a mobile You must be joking they cost a fortune In the shops, the mask gets you the goods A car won’t go without petrol it needs gas The mask gets us past the barrier stile It’s a good decoy, the mask is a mask stuck on No matter what you want the mask gets you in The work on this page is created…

01 The Goldfish Boy by Lisa Thompson  A gripping mystery which doubles as a wonderfully authentic portrayal of living with OCD. It has a great cast of characters and an inspiring message. 02 Millions by Frank Cottrell-Boyce What would you do if millions of pounds landed in your back garden and you only had a short time to spend it? Packed with wisdom and humour, this is one of the books that showed me how it was done when I was starting out. 03 The Boy at the Back of the Class by Onjali Rauf This book tackles the refugee crisis in a kid-friendly way and is full of warmth and kindness. 04 Joe All Alone by Joanna Nadin Left to fend for himself while his mum and her boyfriend…

Scepticism is often confused for cynicism, a lip-curl sneer rather than a furrowed brow of investigation. Sometimes, sceptics groups can be guilty of an air of superiority, a dismissive elevation above the herd who are consuming magic water or who sit unsteadily on a flat Earth. The best scepticism comes from curiosity and human concern, a desire to alert people that they may well be being misled, often for financial gain. The frequently furious author Harlan Ellison said, “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” An opinion is not worth much if little effort has gone in to arriving at it. An opinion becomes dangerous if you decide to use it to persuade other people to…

1. Which rock legend was born in Zanzibar in 1945? 2. In which London borough is Madame Tussauds? 3. Jack Nicholson’s only Best Supporting Actor win was for his role in which film? 4. What is the capital of St Lucia? 5. Who collaborated with Karl Marx to create The Communist Manifesto ? 6. Earl ‘Bud’ Powell was famous for playing which instrument? 7. Alektorophobia is a fear of what? 8. In which year was veggie-friendly company Quorn founded? 9. A Scottish mountain must be at least how many feet high to be called a Munro? 10. In the Adrian Mole diaries, what is the surname of his girlfriend Pandora? 11. How many rooms does Buckingham Palace have – A) 575, B) 675, C) 775 or D) 875? 12. What…

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