Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/5/2022 i The Big Issue

There are many priorities, including solving the #BuildingSafetyCrisis. End Our Cladding Scandal@EOCS_Official Millions of leaseholders remain trapped and unable to sell/remortgage their apartments, and it is locking many first-time buyers out of the market. Cladding@Cladder38093490 Keeping their commitment to ending #homelessness. The Connection at St Martin’s@homelesslondon The climate emergency – there is nothing bigger. Though there are now a whole bunch of immediate crises to deal with on top of that: they also need to prioritise cost of living and workers’ pay, NHS crisis, pollution... Helen Whitall Shape@AutumnDaisyHW Homelessness, mental health, addiction, vulnerable community and supporting smaller charities that do huge work. Dogs On The Streets@dotslondon Prevent craft/micro/any drinking outlets taking over streets where children or the vulnerable live and turning them into complete hell, full of drunken uncontrollable idiots!…

My dad, a doctor in Dorset, went to a boarding school, so he sent me to one too. To be honest, I was having a lovely time with my mum and dad – I had a wonderful childhood living down in Poole – so I’d rather not have gone. Later on in life I said to my father, the only thing I would have liked was not to have been sent away. And he said, we didn’t want to send you away, but I thought I was doing my best for you. It’s not that I was unhappy at school, though I was a bit of a loner – I’ve never had many close friends. But I just wanted to leave and get into music. I had a guitar at…

REVIEW Surgery is the new sex in Cronenberg’s latest ick-flick For a while there it looked like David Cronenberg had retired as a film director. Since 2014’s Maps to the Stars – a brittle, brutal satire of Hollywood celebrity starring Julianne Moore – the Canadian provocateur seemed to have refocused on his acting sideline, popping up as a series of forbidding authority figures with a silvery, leonine bearing in films and TV shows shooting in Canada. (Most recently Cronenberg has been guest-starring as a cryptic, self-amused psychologist in Star Trek: Discovery, rocking a very cool pair of boxy 32nd-century glasses.) But even if he never made another film, Cronenberg’s legacy as a path-breaking auteur/gore-exploring cine-weirdo would be secure. The term “body horror” had to be coined just to try and…

ENERGY Scotland’s new wind farm could help bring down energy bills. Though not immediately With bills soaring north of £3,500 a year from October, solutions to the energy crisis are top of the agenda. And Scotland is looking ahead of the game. The country’s biggest offshore wind farm has begun generating power that could make bills cheaper while also slashing emissions. Seagreen, located 16 miles off the coast of Angus, had been in the works for more than a decade. The first turbine was commissioned and connected to the grid last month. When finished next year, the wind farm will comprise 114 turbines and generate 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of electricity – enough to power about one million homes. It will save around two million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. Mary…

Get in touch letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW Private thoughts The article on nationalisation [Cover Feature, August 22] rather misses the target. It talks about privatisation as if it were the natural state of affairs, as if every other country under the sun routinely gouges its population under any circumstances, which is obviously not the case (see France’s four per cent energy price rise). It also doesn’t mention the “how”. Privatisation of public utilities and services like water and rail was driven by a long-term right-wing economic plan, which we are currently seeing with the NHS. De-fund it, run it down until it stops working, hand it over to private capital. The energy prices rise, the trains are beyond…

Beaches across large parts of England and Wales have been contaminated with sewage pollution in recent weeks, as heavy rain punctuated the long heatwave. Monitoring alerts revealed that sewage was discharged into the sea at more than 50 coastal locations, sparking widespread anger as images and videos of the spills appeared online. The mass discharges come just weeks after calls from the Environment Agency for water company bosses to face jail terms for repeated sewage discharges in a report showing that companies are actually getting worse at tackling spills. The report showed that sewage spills hit their highest level since 2013 last year, with sewage flooding into England’s rivers over a period of 2.6 million hours in 2021 alone, without including spills into the sea. England is now one of…

Heaven and earth have been moved to make the men’s World Cup in Qatar a reality in a couple of months, and it’s already had great human cost. The country’s human rights record has been under the microscope owing to its treatment of migrant workers, yet the tournament has defied the Covid pandemic and disruption to the club football season to go ahead. Not every football competition has been afforded the same opportunity. It’s now three years since the Homeless World Cup was last held. The (usually) annual tournament is a showcase for the unifying power of the sport to tackle social exclusion. It was last held triumphantly in Cardiff back in 2019, thanks in no small part to the personal intervention of Michael Sheen, who poured his own fortune…

Andrew is from London and has been a regular contributor to Street Art for many years, working across a range of mediums, from painting to poetry to photography. He has struggled with mental health problems since 1986. “The artwork is based on some recent sketches of Blackheath [in South London], which has turned hay-yellow due to the hot summer,” he says. “Elements from other sketches appear, such as the mask or the church reflected in the pond water, which show my musings about what my little life contains. It is like an emotion map, combining real ideas and ideas from the imagination. “A friend thought it might be an example of magic realism, which may fit the picture well.”…

Remember how Samson defeated the Philistine army in Old Testament times? “Vanquished by a sorry jawbone [of a donkey], the victory was not in the arm, not in the weapon, but in the spirit.” Five years ago, a film was released that took its title from this quote. Jawbone was written by and starred Johnny Harris, at the time best known as the monstrous Mick in This Is England. It followed a man called Jimmy McCabe’s decent into alcoholism and homelessness, who returns to the one place he ever felt safe, his old boxing gym. Harris’s film was not autobiographical, but it was deeply personal. At 13, he dropped out of school but found direction at the Fitzroy Lodge club in South London, where trainer Mick Carney took him under…

Football can be a force for all that’s good Being a football fan brings two main afflictions. The first is delusion. And how that colours belief. Before kick-off, particularly if you’re going to the match, the delusion grips. It comes around 20 minutes before the referee blows his whistle. There are few greater feelings than walking into a football ground 20 minutes before kick-off. There are people around, buoyant, heading to the same end as you, sharing the same feeling as you. Regardless of any result previously, despite how poor any player’s performance has been, despite all evidential reality, you are gripped with a belief that everything will turn around. You are probably lying to yourself, you may know you’re lying to yourself. But at a core molecular level, for…

Sixteen teams will take to the pitch at Dundee’s Caird Hall, City Square over the three-day tournament from September 9. Eight nations will be represented, with a men’s and women’s team playing for each country. Each match will follow the rules used during the Homeless World Cup: four players per side with each match lasting 14 minutes. Here’s a rundown of the nations taking part. SCOTLAND The host nation can count Street Soccer Scotland patrons Sir Alex Ferguson and Liverpool star Andy Robertson in their corner. Started by David Duke in 2009, SSS organised the tournament as part of their growing operations which has seen a new Dundee base opened in the last year, as well as new efforts to reach smaller cities and towns across Scotland. ENGLAND Street Soccer…

REVIEWS The lonely voyage of the child refugee Seven years have passed since Gulwali Passarlay’s The Lightless Sky memorably documented his experience as an Afghani child refugee forced, after the killing of his father, to flee thousands of miles across hostile lands and seas in search of a fear-free life. His year-long journey, which began with being smuggled into Iran, and included time in prison, a crossing of the Mediterranean in a tiny boat and a bleak period in a Calais camp ended with a triumphant Hollywood-style freeze-frame; after being fostered in the UK, Passarlay graduated with a politics degree from Manchester University, and was chosen to carry the Olympic torch in 2012. Since that landmark book, the contemporary child refugee’s journey, from war or threat to asylum or a…

PROFILE The righteous reinvention of Rebecca There are lots of reasons why Rebecca Lucy Taylor AKA Self Esteem’s Prioritise Pleasure could, should and probably will win the 2022 Mercury Prize. For a flavour of them, you only need do a cursory sift of the critical acclaim heaped upon an album hailed as one of the best if not the very best of last year by most of the British music media. “It’s a powerfully intense record that some may recoil from,” wrote Laura Snapes in a five-star review for The Guardian, “confrontational and liable to catch you off-guard as Taylor crisply extracts gutting truths from the general murk of self-loathing, never sugarcoating grimness nor over-egging her attempts at self-affirmation.” Placing Prioritise Pleasure top of their 2021 end-of-year list, The Times…

DARREN BROWN, 48 It’s been two weeks since I came back to selling The Big Issue and I’m loving it. When I stopped last time, just before the first Covid lock-down, my head was all over the place. Everything was shut and I got sick in my own head. I started drinking heavily. I managed to put a stop to all that and then I bumped into Tracy, who runs the local Big Issue office, so I asked for my job back. Since they’ve put me back in my life has improved drastically. I’m just so happy now. I can buy a loaf of bread now and stuff like that. I used to hate going to foodbanks and I still have to go on some days when I’m a bit…