Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/3/2022 i The Big Issue

Keir Starmer, the next British prime minister? A cautiously optimistic mood prevailed at this year’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool. Yet hope is tempered with fear, befitting a party that has contrived to lose eight of the last 11 general elections. The scale of the electoral task confronting Labour makes realism – not always the party’s greatest asset – the right approach. To win an outright majority, a gain of 124 parliamentary seats is needed. That would require a swing of 10.5 per cent on Labour’s 2019 election result – which is larger than the one achieved by Tony Blair in his 1997 landslide. Yet there is much to cheer Labour in an electoral landscape transformed since its December 2019 nadir. The Wakefield by-election last June saw a 12.7 per…

Koestler Arts is a charity that helps ex-offenders, secure patients and detainees to express themselves creatively. This year its 15th annual UK exhibition in partnership with the Southbank Centre in London will be curated by Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian and activist Ai Weiwei. The vision for the exhibition is inspired by the artist’s visit to the Koestler Arts building to view some of the more than 6,500 artworks entered into this year’s Koestler Awards for arts in criminal justice. Ai Weiwei wanted the exhibition to be as inclusive as possible, and to let the artwork show how humanity responds when put in extreme circumstances. The artwork pictured, titled Almost Perfect, is by an inmate at HM Prison Dovegate. It won the Silver Award for Ceramics. October 27–December 18, Southbank Centre,…

New BBC One hit drama Inside Man is sharply written. The dialogue is whip-smart and witty, while the twisty-turny story demands full concentration from viewers as it poses some big moral dilemmas. Would we intervene on witnessing misogynist harassment on a train like brave Janice (Dolly Wells) does? Should we find a death row murderer quite so charming (well, come on, he is played by Stanley Tucci)? Would we rather violent offenders face severe punishment or are we content to allow them to, in some way, atone for their crimes? Inside Man also walks a fine line between being relatable and being preposterously unbelievable. But such is the sparkle in the writing and the mesmerising messiness of the moral quandaries that we go along for the ride. In short, it…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Rich pickings One fact alone can sum up the hideous new, unelected government: The changes now being brought in will mean that anyone earning £1 million per annum will be £50,000 better off. Clive Pygott, Shropshire House rules Most people who own a house have it as their home and they are not planning on selling for a long time. [The cut in stamp duty] is to help out landlords who have vast property portfolios. If you own property to make a profit then you are laughing all the way to the bank. For everyone else, their mortgages are going to increase. Plus for anyone renting, that will go up too,…

STACEY SOLOMON Being a celebrity isn’t non-stop glamour. Stacey Solomon is on her way to Asda in Leeds. “I’m going to meet some of the staff who put out the displays for one of my ranges. I just wanted to go and say thank you.” The Big Issue joins the pop star-turned-polymath on the journey up the M1. Solomon has an interesting CV. From X Factor wannabe to cultural commentator, she’s a TV presenter, fashion designer (with collaborations with Primark as well as Asda), DIY guru and bestselling writer. The longevity of a reality star is hard to predict, but the reasons Solomon has survived were evident the moment she stepped onto The X Factor stage in 2009. The bubbly 19-year-old from Essex was genuine, down-to-earth, delightful and delighted to…

REVIEWS Lucrezia, the resistant bride of a devious killer Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, is so deliciously good that I gobbled it rapidly down, like a toddler face-planting into a long-awaited birthday cake. But this is a story to be savoured. In the same vein as her widely lauded Hamnet, this historical fiction imagines the experiences of Lucrezia de’ Medici, the Italian noblewoman alluded to in Robert Browning’s famous poem My Last Duchess. According to the historical note prefacing the book, in 1561, a 16-year-old Lucrezia died within a year of entering the court of her husband, the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II d’Este, a man almost twice her age. What follows is a narrative that teases our anticipation of Lucrezia’s murder by her husband, the beastly duke.…

CLASSICAL Soundtrack to a send-off “I’ll just put the telly on for a bit,” I announced, fully believing the intention. I’d catch some of the funeral coverage, then get on with work before getting sucked in to the endless commentary that would inevitably be as useful as a scatter cushion. Bank holidays – particularly ones you hadn’t planned for – aren’t much of a treat when you’re self employed. I watched the pallbearers with fascination, transfixed by orb and sceptre, polished into position on top of the coffin. The pipers and drummers of Scottish and Irish regiments, the Brigade of Gurkhas and Royal Air Force continued their solemn beat. I took my place on the sofa. The services at Westminster and Windsor – and all the traipsing in between –…

BRIDGETTE SIBLEY, 67 Things are very good indeed on my pitch. I’ve been there for 21 years now, and I am part of the fixtures and fittings. I’ve got many regular customers and I look upon them as my extended family. At Christmas I send over 130 Christmas cards to my customers, all with their names on. Sometimes they buy me biscuits and cake, which is very nice of them. I’ve worked in all sorts of different establishments, I’ve worked in hotels here, there and everywhere, all very high-end jobs. I bought a hotel with my husband in 1981. He was a civil engineer who worked and lectured all over the world. He had his consultancy business while I owned and ran the hotel and we were very, very rich.…

Bowie thrived on chaos, but the current disorder is something else I went to see Moonage Daydream last week. It’s the film about David Bowie, but not about David Bowie. It follows his life through some unseen footage, cut-up interviews, some new information and photos, the music (of course) and some arresting, repetitive kaleidoscopic images. It’s an elegy, a maximalist piece of work, said director Brett Morgen. It’s about art and creativity and the innate genius and oddness of Bowie. I was left feeling physically unsettled for reasons I can’t quite decipher. But it also had me wanting to run home and listen to Bowie. There hasn’t been anybody in popular music like him since he died. One thing he said was that he enjoyed chaos. He liked to draw…

I wasn’t particularly wild when I was 16. I wasn’t into drugs or alcohol or anything like that. I was somewhat disinterested in the boring classes at school so I wasn’t a great student, but I showed up just so I could hang out. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I went to a very large high school in Los Angeles, 6,000 kids. There were 12ft fences all around it and armed security. It was kind of heavy, kind of urban. There were these big cliques; the popular kids, the sporty kids, the kids in gangs. Then there was this little band of misfits that I was in. We weren’t particularly friends; we all listened to different records, but they were all subculture records; punk, new wave, psychedelic. We…