Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/11/2022 i The Big Issue

£0 Shell paid no UK tax on its oil and gas production last year 4 YEARS The oil giant has not paid a single pound of tax on its profits in the last four years Shell made £14.7bn in profits in 2021 The largest oil and gas companies made a combined £132.8bn in profit in the first nine months of 2021 £92m in Treasury tax refunds were paid to Shell for decommissioning old oil platforms in 2021 Meanwhile, households are paying more for energy after the energy price cap rose by £693 a year And fuel prices surged by the largest monthly price spikes on record, rising 11p a litre to £1.63 for unleaded and 22p a litre to £1.77 for diesel (RAC)…

Our exclusive interview with controversial comedian turned political commentator Russell Brand got both disciples and detractors talking. The Sun ran some of the quotes too in a piece headlined: ‘How Russell Brand ditched his mockney geezer schtick and reinvented himself as a clickbait conspiracy theorist’, drawing comparisons between Brand and reptile-spotting ex-goalie David Icke. For the more balanced interview, Brand suggested people purchase the magazine and posted a picture of himself buying from his local vendor: “Here I am buying the The Big Issue from Rebecca (she didn’t recognise me/care that I was on the cover BUT THEN WHY WOULD YOU!?) it’s a good interview that I did to draw attention to my tour.” Thousands of likes – 3,900 on Facebook, close to 11,000 on Instagram – and comments followed.…

Empty houses are a hot-button issue. Some of London’s wealthiest streets are dotted with second homes, assets left to linger as they appreciate in value. But there’s a second kind of problem – empty homes left to the elements. And that’s where Phases comes in. Glenn Heaton runs the social enterprise turning abandoned properties into homes. Take the case of a single mother, who had been living with her four-year-old child in a “lightly repurposed” tax office in Lewisham for four years. “It was just like living in an office, but they’d put a toilet in there,” Heaton recalls. “There was a mattress on the floor.” Phases put her in a property they’d refurbished in Brockley – a two-bedroom flat. For Heaton, that’s a real perk of the job, “being…

Johnny Marr used to play cover versions of Blondie singles Denis and Hanging On The Telephone (both, ironically, covers themselves) in his first teenage band. When he met his wife at a house party in Manchester, aged 15, he remembers their classic 1978 album Parallel Lines being on the stereo. His love of the New York post-punk legends has been a constant throughout his life. So how does it feel that he now writes songs for them (he contributed My Monster to their 2017 album Pollinator and has written another, Spectrolite, which will appear on their next record) and is about to join them as special guest on their UK tour. “It’s magical,” he says “I’ve always shared a musical sensibility with them. Plus they’re great people to be around.…

At 16, I was a class clown in school. I was pretty confident, pretty chirpy, had lots of friends. I was the stage manager of a theatre group. At the same time, I was a Royal Marine Cadet. Some people didn’t think it was cool, but I completely bought into the idea. I’d already spent time with these ordinary blokes that did an extraordinary job and what really struck me was that they went to work every day, doing something amazing, with their best friends. This was the early 2000s. I was also a big rap fan, so my heroes were as likely to be Tupac as a Royal Marine. I grew up believing you were part of a community and you should contribute. My sister’s a nurse, my brother’s…

1 Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen Austen pokes gentle fun at Gothic novel addict Catherine Morland, who is atingle at staying in what she assumes must be a haunted abbey and mortified when her romantic preconceptions are overturned. Sometimes a house is just a house. 2 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James Bly is plagued by the spectres of its former governess and her lover, ghoulish corrupters of the two innocent children in their charge – or hang on, possibly not. This, too, could all just be an overheated fantasy on the part of the new governess. 3 Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Manderley, Max de Winter’s Cornish estate, has an unnervingly loyal housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, whose devotion to the first Mrs de Winter almost…

Bertie Carvel has serious range. How else to explain how he has been cast as Rupert Murdoch (in Ink , for which he won Olivier and Tony awards), Miss Trunchbull in Matilda the Musical (another Olivier), Tony Blair in the next two series of Netflix’s The Crown , and now Donald Trump? In The 47th , a new play by Mike Bartlett, Carvel takes on Trump, set to the rhythms of Shakespearean verse. In the near future, at the next US election, Trump bids to regain the presidency and Kamala Harris stands in his way. Comedy or foreshadowing tragedy – time will tell. But the play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the Donald. THE BIG ISSUE: How hard was it to not play a caricature of Donald Trump?…

Kind-hearted Andy Sproston has shown plenty of warmth to LGBTQ+ people experiencing homelessness in Liverpool – he’s knitted 2,000 hats to hand out in the city. The full-time carer, 57, was inspired to take up the hobby while looking after a woman in his native Derbyshire five years ago and he “has never stopped since”. Sproston makes at least one hat every day using donated and discarded wool, and he decided to donate them to homelessness shelters The Whitechapel Centre in Liverpool and Derby’s Padley Group. Now he has teamed up with Everton’s LGBTQ+ supporters group Rainbow Toffees to get the hats to people who need them. “I discovered I could knit hats on knitting looms and I’ve worn out about four sets now because I’ve made that many hats.…

It should surprise no one that our callous and unfeeling government would be doing less for its people than that of other countries. “But furlough” I hear you cry – and while, yes, that was a big deal, it hardly makes economic sense to kick people while they’re down. Raising taxes at a time where people are literally seeing the cost to heat and light their home double overnight is a new level of cruel. “Oh, but we’ll cut income tax in two years’ time” – well that’s no bloody good now is it? Salaried_Zebra I don’t see any evidence that Sunak has any strategy apart from don’t hurt his base so he can be leader of the Conservatives. The rest is controlled by the penny-wise, pound-foolish Treasury in tandem…

As the conflict has raged on in Ukraine, life in Kharkiv has moved underground. Hundreds of people are taking shelter from Russian bombs in the subways and metro tunnels of the city in Ukraine’s north east, just 15 miles from the Russian border. Now homelessness support workers and even people who were homeless themselves before the war are risking their lives to help their countrymen survive. Father Vitaliy Novak, the chair of trustees for the Ukrainian branch of international homelessness charity Depaul, has spent a week and a half in Ukraine’s second-largest city after delivering aid in cities across Ukraine. He told The Big Issue that Kharkiv has been all-but destroyed by the war. “The current situation in Kharkiv is horrible. They are bombing day and night and they bombed…

Blondie were formed by then-couple Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in New York in 1974. They were regular performers at iconic punk venue CBGB and by 1979, when Heart of Glass was topping charts everywhere, could justifiably claim to be the biggest band in the world, with Harry one of the most recognisable faces. Their run of hits (including Sunday Girl, AtomicandRaptureas well as countless others) was astonishing. But in 1982 the band called it a day, and Harry spent years nursing Stein back to health from a rare autoimmune condition. The pair eventually split romantically, but came back as Blondie with a refreshed line-up in 1997, scoring a sixth UK Number One single with Maria in 1999, and have been together ever since. They were inducted into the Rock…

Rene is in her nineties and suffers from arthritis and a degenerative eye condition. Following the death of her husband and son, she experienced a period of homelessness. At a low point one of her friends invited her to attend an art project and she has been returning ever since. Several of her works have since been published, exhibited and sold. The daughter of an architect, Rene enjoys making intricate collages of geometric shapes.…

When I was a teenager I had this mate who would go into record shops and buy any album he saw poking slightly above the others on the rack. He took it to be a sign from the cosmos that the record would change his life. My god, he wound up with some shitty music. I should probably add that his state of mind had been severely affected by some dodgy acid he’d taken in India – yet more evidence that the supposed connections between bad narcotics and good music are entirely spurious. Anyway, although this arbitrary policy didn’t always work out for my mate, there’s something about it I like in principle. There is a tonne of music out there and it feels lazy to just stick to whatever…

Outside Marks & Spencer, Chiswick, London Monday-Saturday 10.30am-5pm LAWRENCE, 58 I was in a really rough patch when I started selling the magazine all those years ago. I was living in a squat in the Nineties and a guy came down to London from Barrow-in-Furness called Billy. He got quite a few of us on to it. It seemed like a way to help you out to help yourself. I did a couple of years then and a couple in the 2000s. When you come back to The Big Issue there’s no judgement, no palaver. Before I sold The Big Issue I graduated from university in politics and administration and I worked as a sub-editor for a national newspaper. I fell into it after university after I took up a…

Research by the National Audit Office revealed that billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money went on PPE at the start of the pandemic – often procured through ministers’ private contacts – which is either not fit for use or still in storage. Around 14.1 billion pieces of equipment – 10 per cent of the total PPE purchased – are costing the country nearly £85 million per year just to store, roughly 3.6bn pieces of which are not suitable to be used by frontline services. Around half the equipment in storage will expire within the next six months. The figures were released as campaigners criticised the government for offering too little support to low- and middle-income households as the costs of food, energy and fuel skyrocket. So what could ministers be…

‘Yes, you’re naming and shaming, but what is going to be the consequence of that? Where are the teeth behind it?’Kwajo Tweneboa Naming and shaming rogue landlords on social media is the government’s latest proposal to help renters. Campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa has used social media so effectively to hold housing providers to account in the last year that the government has opted to copy his tactics, publicly shaming rogue landlords who fail to provide acceptable housing on official channels. Will it work? Tweneboa is not so sure. He told The Big Issue, “Yes, you’re naming and shaming but what’s going to happen? What is going to be the consequence of that? Where are the teeth behind it?” Here are four other ways ministers could implement proposed help to protect renters.…

A brilliantly conflicting work in which Statovci manages to bottle the rampant uneasiness of a fraught era There has been much discourse in the literary press recently about the perceived inability of young male novelists to break through. Be it because young men aren’t attracted to such a precarious profession any more, or that the industry doesn’t have faith in being able to market their voices, or simply due to a change in the tastes and attitudes of the general reading population. Whatever the reason(s), it does make a critic’s ears prick up when they notice that not one but two major novels are being published on the same day by two male writers born this side of 1990. The Kosovo-born, Finnish writer Pajtim Statovci earned his wunderkind status back…

When it was announced that Paul Verhoeven was working on a French-language biographical drama about a notorious 17th-century lesbian nun it was hard not to approach this particular combination of artist and subject matter with some immaculate preconceptions. The veteran Dutch director behind Total Recall , Basic Instinct and raunchy semi-musical Showgirls (a huge critical flop recently reclaimed as bulletproof camp) had built a splashy Hollywood career by orchestrating sensational scenes of violence and sex. As a filmmaker fascinated by sinners, surely Verhoeven’s Benedetta would be less Sister Act and more Ken Russell’s censor-baiting nunsploitation shocker The Devils ? The result is certainly not short on potentially blasphemous material, from habitual nudity and passionate sex scenes to unpleasant torture and at least two fart jokes. But for anyone already inured…