Innholdsfortegnelse for 10-04-2017 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.…

Back in 1971 my parents purchased their own house and paid £11,000. In that year the Prime Minister’s salary was £14,000. In September last year, as executor trustee of my late mother’s estate, I sold that same house. As the Prime Minister’s salary is now 10 times what it was in 1971, in theory I should have sold my parents’ house for £110,000. I sold it for half a million. In 1974 I purchased my first house (a worker’s cottage) for £10,000. In three years the value had risen to £40,000. The reason for this massive jump is that building societies started to give 100 per cent mortgages. The requirement to save a substantial deposit kept prices down, removing it caused demand to exceed supply. The following decade, under the…

“Looking back, it took a while for things to fall into place. A bit of an ugly duckling thing” I started going to Sylvia Young’s theatre school at the age of nine, so I knew I enjoyed acting. But I wasn’t part of the acting world – the school happened to move into premises across from my house at a time when I was really enjoying being in the primary school play. If they hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have gone to that school. I wouldn’t have known such a thing existed. There were no actors in my family – my dad’s a black cab driver. There were six of us in the house in the estate in Marylebone being brought up by one person and we didn’t have a lot…

Back in 2012, the idea that The Doctor could be – shock, horror – a woman was worthy of an April Fool from showrunner Steven Moffat. Yet with each regeneration, pressure increases to hand the keys of the TARDIS over to a Time Lady. Peter Capaldi has voiced his support, as has David Tennant – and Tilda Swinton has been heavily trailed as a possibility. Missy is a delight, so who could argue? Well, me. Concentrating on The Doctor’s gender not only obscures the many brilliant women who have been a driving force in the Whoniverse, it’s also stopping the real conversations about gender that the veteran show needs to have. From the moment in 1963 when the British public was catapulted into time and space with Delia Derbyshire’s…

This year’s Brighton Fringe, which The Big Issue is delighted to be a media partner with, features an absorbing programme of guided walks and open days, offering the chance to uncover many hidden gems in a city that’s enchanted visitors since Victorian times. The Fringe includes after-hours tours of the world’s oldest operating aquarium (pictured here in the 1880s) and the Grade II listed Brighton Railway Station. Peek inside Middle Street Synagogue, opened in 1875, Brighton Buddhist Centre, Grade I listed St Michael & All Angels (which is known as ‘the Cathedral of the Backstreets’) and the Church of the Sacred Heart in Hove. A Pavilion Gardens Cafe History tour and Piers & Queers: 200 Years of LGBTQ History of Brighton bring us up to date. See the Fringe programme…

Discover the very relevant and topical story at the core of critically acclaimed and Bafta-nominated film The Pass, which stars Russell Tovey (Being Human, The History Boys) and Arinzé Kene (Our Girl) – and introduces a huge talent in debut director Ben A Williams. The Pass, out now on DVD and digital download, is the story of three very different nights over 10 years in the life of a Premier League footballer. Jason (Russell Tovey) is at the beginning of his career, and on the night before his first big international match he and long-time friend and team-mate Ade (Arinzé Kene) share a hotel room, trying to beat the inevitable pre-match tensions with locker-room banter and teenage high-jinks. Out of nowhere Jason kisses Ade. The emotional repercussions of this pass,…

I sell the magazine in Bournemouth. It’s a good time of year to be out selling, now that we have some nicer weather. There’s plenty of good stuff in the magazine this week – more news on The Big Issue’s library campaign (page 27). Libraries are important resources. There’s a library in Bournemouth where I would get eight books out at a time and rip right through them. It helped me through a time I suffered from depression. There’s also stuff on Doctor Who this week (page 20) – I always liked the way science fiction allows you to ponder some of the big questions. More of my story on page 46.…

Type 2 diabetes is not a disease. It is a ‘walking deficiency’ syndrome – so claims Sir Muir Gray, a leading medical researcher. Gray decided to rattle cages last week by insisting it was a result of modern environments. Essentially, we’re gorging on bad food and lying on the sofa moaning about the plot of Broadchurch. Gray’s a big fan of switching off the TV. On the face of it, this looks like an academic trotting out a neat soundbite to help sell his book. But there is much to what he says. It costs an estimated £10bn a year to treat type 2 diabetes in Britain. And it’s not going to decrease. Globally the numbers of people with diabetes have nearly quadrupled since 1980. Figures suggest this is made…

A government health minister has said Big Issue founder Lord John Bird was “quite right” to champion a new, preventative approach to health care in the NHS. Bird recently wrote in The Big Issue that “prevention is the best of all cures ever invented”. During a House of Lords debate last week he said: “What we’ve got to do is push up the prevention [spending] amount. Is the minister prepared to come and talk to MPs and Lords who want to push up the prevention methodology?” Acknowledging he was “quite right”, Lord O’Shaughnessy, Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health, responded: “We need to move from an NHS that is dealing with illness to one that is promoting health care, and preventive health care is a huge part…

“We are encouraged to crave our treats but Britain needs to examine its conscience through its spending” A few years ago I was in a cathedral with 400 sixth formers. We were debating ethics and green living. Many seemed very concerned. “How many of you buy cheap clothes that you throw away?” I asked. I saw plenty of unsettled expressions. At that time textiles volume had grown massively as a proportion of UK landfill – it’s still 350,000 tonnes a year – linked directly to cheap manufacturing in the Far East, sold at dirt-cheap prices by high street chains turning big profits on large turnover. If you can buy a cool new outfit so cheap, who cares if it falls apart? Wear it a couple of times and throw it…

“However much the Catholic authorities wanted him burnt alive, Luther had the people on his side” Martin Luther had no expectation of fame – or notoriety – when in October 1517 he issued his 95 Theses (or debating points). They were an effort to prompt late medieval Catholicism into reform of practices Luther regarded as corrupt, corrupting and ungodly. Some say he nailed them to the door of a church. It is a shame to spoil a good story but it is much more likely that he sent them to his archbishop, who in turn forwarded them to the Pope. This clever, serious-minded 33-year-old’s protest was in Wittenberg, a small town in Germany with an obscure newly founded university where the friar worked. It was all light years from the…

Celebrating vendors I would like to thank the lady working outside London Euston, who was extremely friendly, smiley and polite. After buying a copy of The Big Issue she helped me carry my suitcase up the steps to get into the station. She absolutely made my day and the kindness of a stranger is such a blessing. Katie Whitehouse – a university student who was travelling home and overpacked Taxing times It is always good to read the most important issues in The Big Issue such as the front page headline: ‘Wipe out’ [March 27–April 2]. I’ve been involved year on year with the fiasco of helping people fill in council tax and housing benefit forms, and now we have the pain of PIPs (Personal Improvement Plans) to tackle. In…

“The world faces many challenges right now and you can either get sucked up in the negativity that breeds or you can put yourself forward and empower, resource and provide some solutions – which is exactly what I intend to do” Superstar actor and all-round good guy Michael Sheen lays out his agenda as he joins Social Enterprise UK as a patron. After the new wave of horrors rained down on Syria last week, the urgency of people fleeing for safety reverberated across the globe. For those who have already left, life in refugee camps is ingrained, especially kids who have known little else. But amid the sprawling regimented steel hut shelters, there are smiles. This is Azraq camp, in the Jordanian desert, home to 32,000 displaced people including…

SILHOUETTE BY STEPHEN MUNDY Stephen served two years of a four-year prison sentence at HMP Lewes, Sussex. “While I was in prison I was given the choice of working in the workshop or going into education,” he says, “I chose education. I was very mentally ill, and practising art was a real benefit to my mental health. I applied to college on release but didn’t have anywhere to live. Luckily, since release, I have been in temporary, supported housing, and I am doing well at college.” THE RIFT BY STEVE McINTOSH Steve submits his artwork via London homeless charity the 240 Project. He taught himself to draw at a young age from reading DC comics. “My drawing feels more technical than artistic; puzzles, crosswords and historical facts influence my thoughts…

Can you describe a visit you remember making to a library, either in childhood or more recently? Do you remember how old you were, why you went there, or what the building was like? Can you remember any of the books you encountered there? These are among the questions we’ve been asking people, for our project, Memories of Fiction: An Oral History of Readers’ Life Stories. The project aims to find out how reading shapes our lives. We set out with the observation that authors are always being interviewed – for TV, for radio, for magazines, for the British Library’s oral history project, ‘Authors’ Lives’... but what about all the readers out there? Surely they’d have interesting things to say too. Reading is an immensely important and little documented cultural…

1. THE MOOMIN BOOKS Tove Jansson Jansson’s irreverent, poetic wisdom takes flight in the existential dilemmas and exploits of the round, lovable Moomin family. 2. THE WOLVES OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE Joan Aiken This is also part of a series and is set in a fantastic, reimagined 19th-century England, where feisty children take on serious baddies, amidst snow, wolves, castles and lashings of cockney cheek. 3. THE WILDWOOD CHRONICLES Colin Meloy For something contemporary but still with a timeless appeal, two children enter the forbidden and usually impenetrable realms of the “Impassable Wilderness” where they encounter talking animals, bandits and evil queens. 4. THE FAMILY FROM ONE END STREET Eve Garnett Because it’s a stand-alone novel and many of these are sadly lost amidst the onslaught of popular series. This is…

Boosted from the indie margins to a mass audience in the space of one performance of Seasons (Waiting on You) on The Late Show with David Letterman in March 2014, chiefly by the air-punching, chest-beating bellowing antics of frontman Samuel T Herring, Future Islands could easily have been dismissed as a novelty act by now. However, their previous album Singles turned out to be a record of incredible warmth, emotion and refreshing quality. The Baltimore synth-pop band – self-starters since 2006, whose bassist William Cashion booked their first 500 gigs himself – spent two years on the road in support of Singles. On most nights between the springs of 2014 and 2016, you could find their dynamo of a frontman – a fascinating blend of deadly earnestness and obvious ridiculousness…