Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/1/2021 i The Big Issue

Before Covid-19, 22 per cent of the UK population were living in poverty, with 2.4 million people destitute. As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc with people’s livelihoods, Universal Credit has become a lifeline for more people than ever before. Claims have risen 90 per cent since the start of the pandemic, and almost 4.6 million households (41 per cent with children) now depend on it to stay afloat. However, the real value of social security benefits was already eroding prior to the crisis. So, even with an uplift to some benefits, many people using social security still do not have enough to buy essentials and have to borrow money to pay their rent or put food on the table. By December, nearly nine million people had borrowed money because…

MAY 2019 BBC's Newsnight finds thousands of teenagers in care are being "dumped" in unregulated homes and "abandoned to organised crime gangs" JULY 2019 Former children’s minister Nadhim Zahawi says full regulation of some 16-plus accommodation would be a "knee-jerk reaction" to criticism SEPTEMBER 2019 Another BBC investigation finds children as young as 11 being illegally placed in unregulated care homes DECEMBER 2019 Peter Nieto, area coroner for Derby and Derbyshire, reports to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson expressing concern over unregulated placements following the death of 17-year-old Jacob Bates FEBRUARY 2020 Williamson launches consultation to ensure care provision meets the needs of young people, promising “immediate and decisive action” SEPTEMBER 2020 Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield calls for the government to change the law to stop councils placing under-18s…

My novel, All Girls, is a book about teenagers written for an adult audience. From the outset, this has been a source of some confusion, and I often find myself having to justify my book’s existence. I have grown used to explaining that my novel is an effort to take girlhood very seriously. I tell interviewers about the depth and capacity of teenage girls. I say that they are rarely given credit for their full personhood. In fact, I said exactly this in an interview recently, and the journalist speaking to me paused and pointed out that earlier in our conversation I’d asserted that my characters were just kids. The implication was that I’d contradicted myself. Except: By personhood I did not mean adulthood. I meant very literally what I…

The Big Issue is delighted to announce more than £1m has been given to struggling vendors in lockdown – all thanks to our readers’ support. We hit the staggering target last week and, as the magazine went to print, The Big Issue had supported some 2,110 vendors with £1,062,000 since the beginning of the pandemic. The Covid-19 crisis has been a tough time for everyone, not least Big Issue vendors who lost their incomes overnight. When the UK first locked down last March, we kicked off a determined campaign to distribute cash and supermarket vouchers as well as helping vendors cover rent, fuel and electricity bills, and mobile phone payments. This vital financial support was only made possible by Big Issue readers, who took out subscriptions in their thousands as…

VENDORS Across the country vendors are prevented from working on their pitches by the national lockdown. Our staff is working closely with each vendor to make sure there is extra support to make up for lost earnings. We also understand that apart from reduced income, the lack of social interaction will cause a lot of distress. If you would like to pass a message on to your local vendor please email editorial@bigissue.com and we’ll do our best to make sure they know they still have your support. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND SHOPS Since the first national lockdown in March, we have supported our vendors with more than £1m of financial assistance to make up for lost sales. As the only certainty is more uncertainty, we urgently need your help to make sure…

The most pressing matter must be the life of the planet. There will be 10 billion of us by the next generation. It was 2.5 billion when I was born. Yet we seem to get drawn into other arguments that fail to bear down on the fact that our ability to function as human beings will terminate some time soon, if we don’t act now. How soon is soon is open to speculation, depending on which expert you speak to. The environment seems to be the big issue. But the problem is, how do you crack open this particular nut? By which I mean how do you crack the nut that, although lots of people talk about the environment, most people are more tied up with other things. Like getting…

“I have been doing a series of what I think of as emotional and psychological descriptions, as a kind of self-exploration and self-portraiture,” explains long-time regular Street Art contributor Andrew. “But this can be quite challenging, and so a change to more abstract work, where one is primarily concerned with colour and shape, becomes a nice change, and a rest from introspection. I am drawn to the work of people like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, and I like to use their work as a starting point for my own. “Lockdown has given me lots of time to work, and I find the opportunity to produce art a useful one. I have also reduced the amount of alcohol that I drink, which improves the quality of my work, and my…

01 Flames in the Field by Rita Kramer The tragic story of Andrée Borrel, Diana Rowden, Vera Leigh and Sonia Olschanezky of the Special Operations Executive who were executed at Natzweiler concentration camp in July 1944. The reader learns about their lives and follows them through their last few hours. Grisly but fascinating. 02 A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead The true story of 230 French women resisters who, in January 1943, were deported in convoy 31000 from Paris to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was the only train to take women of the resistance to a death camp. A story of friendship, determination and survival. 03 The Italian Wife by Kate Furnivall This story of intrigue, power struggles and murder is set in pre-war Italy against a backdrop of rising fascism…

Being trapped in the house for a year can do strange things to a person. I’m not quite getting to the point of writing a tally of the days on the kitchen wall in my own blood – but I’ve got that pencilled in for March. You’ve got to have something to look forward to, don’t you? At the moment, we’re all suspended until further notice, stranded at the depot, gathering dust. Going outside for a takeaway coffee feels like an invite to Beyoncé’s 40th. The other day I even felt a strange rush when I was in the Co-op, because AT LEAST I WASN’T AT HOME. When I’m at home, though, I get frequent itchy urges to change it. Raze it to the ground! Throw everything out! But then…

Two years ago I went as mad as a March hare. Massive overwork, perfectionism and years of buried pressure became a chaotic stew of manic worry and self-loathing. Split, in my soul, between the person I wanted to be and the person I felt myself to be, and jacked up on my trigger, cannabis – do any of us still doubt how dangerous this drug is? – I boiled over into a complete breakdown. I believed the radio was talking to me. Ironically, I used to work on some of the programmes I heard, and know the presenters, who specialise in sounding as though they are talking to you. And I dug holes in my ceiling, trying to turn a block of flats in a university of universal peace, as…

I’m not sure why I was lying awake at 0545. Outside, the light was starting to break, but it wasn’t particularly bright. I was listening to the infrequent hum of cars as they passed by the house. And then I heard it. The buzz of a message landing in my phone. It’s funny how devastating a binary code of zeros and ones can be once they become text. I knew who it was. I knew what it was going to say. I reached for my phone stared at the message icon. For a moment, I was playing Schrodinger’s cat with the news I knew was coming, and I knew I couldn’t stop. My uncle had passed. We knew it was imminent and I had said my goodbyes the day before.…

A year ago last week, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson responded to a letter from the coroner who investigated the death of 17-year-old Jacob Bates. Jacob had autism and had taken his own life aǽter years of struggling with his mental health. Having lived in “a succession of secure placements under the provisions of the Mental Health Act 1983 and the Children Act 1989” from the age of 14, Jacob was latterly put by children’s social care into an unregulated home, before deciding he wanted to live with his dad. Although he found no causal link between Jacob’s death and his time in an unregulated setting, the coroner wrote to Williamson to prevent future deaths of 16 to 18-year-olds living in this kind of accommodation. Two former employees had told the…

I feel that writing fiction is really one big confidence trick. You’re asking the reader to come into a new world and engage deeply with the rules of your universe, and that’s all about confidence. If you create the world with confidence, the reader feels that in the pages. This week we have two terrific examples of fictional worlds that are out there in terms of what a reader might expect, but written with such confidence as to be irresistible. The first is the wonderful Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander. I’ve long been a fan of the Jewish-American author, one of the few who can really make me belly laugh. His previous books were all brilliant, scathing parodies, often of the author’s ultra-orthodox upbringing, and if anything Mother for…

Few of us could say we created much of note as teenagers. Art, songs, stories – overly earnest stepping stones on the way to figuring out who we are, at best. Certainly nothing we’d be keen to not just revisit but recreate and release to the masses, frontal lobes fully formed. That’s not an issue for Taylor Swift, who apparently has time to spare after surprise- releasing two of the most critically acclaimed albums of the past year, Folklore and Evermore The world’s biggest pop star, now 31, has pledged to re-record her first six albums right back to her 2006 self-titled debut, released when Swift was 16. It’s the result of an ownership dispute, a tangle of multimillion-dollar recording contracts and copyright claims. Swift released that run of albums,…

NEED HELP? Why not get together with other Big Issue readers on Twitter – @BigIssue Get the answers in next week's mag! Good luck 1. Which singer and actor’s real name is Stefani Germanotta? 2. In which English city is the Headingley cricket ground? 3. In which year did The Sopranos debut on US TV? 4. What was the name of the actor who originally voiced Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck? 5. What type of beans are used to make most commercially available baked beans? 6. What part of the human body is the mandible? 7. What does the DC stand for in Washington DC? 8. Percy Spencer is generally credited with inventing which time-saving kitchen appliance? 9. What is the largest landlocked state in the USA? 10. Which UK…

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