Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/3/2023 i The Big Issue

At any moment in The Simpsons, Homer will be distracted by a doughnut. Homer was ahead of his time in foreshadowing how easily turned we are from what we are supposed to focus on to something ephemeral and ultimately unrewarding. And while we can salute the makers of The Simpsons for the ever-evolving foresight, one thing they can’t have seen is that this form of misdirection is would become a key function of our government. Over the past week a whole host of crackdowns were unveiled by Number 10. A crackdown on small boat crossings; a crackdown on anti-social behaviour, that will involve criminalising further the most marginalised, such as rough sleepers; a crackdown on noisy Airbnbs; a crackdown on men in their 20s with bad moustaches. Incredibly, only one…

Joanna escaped her gilded prison only after the apartment’s cleaners raised alarm bells when they realised their guest had no room key of her own. She had been locked inside. Brought to the UK by her employer, Joanna was locked in a serviced apartment at night, and collected each morning to be taken to the hospital where their elderly father was receiving treatment at one of West London’s internationally renowned private hospitals. Joanna – not her real name – had been hired as a domestic carer to look after the sick man in Dubai. Having received healthcare training in the Philippines, she was tasked with his care 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In Dubai, she would sleep in the same room as the man, who would hit…

Why the tax system is so confusing Tax could be so simple that everyone understood it, but then 100,000 tax accountants would have nothing to do, so instead we have a bewildering array of different taxes and thresholds and exemptions and tens of thousands of pages of legislation to get lost in. You should ask in whose interest is it to have such a complex system. Because it’s certainly not in your interest. The complexity allows the government to raise your taxes while giving tax cuts to millionaires without you noticing. Which is exactly what they’ve done. Do I pay more tax than the richest man in the world? One of the crazy things about tax planning is that once you get to a certain level of wealth you no…

REVIEWS Dark visions of a future that could be ours The world is going to hell in a handbasket, right? Authors can deal with this by either sticking their heads in the sand or facing modern life head-on. This week, we have a couple of cracking novels that do the latter brilliantly. First up is Rachelle Atalla’s Thirsty Animals. Atalla made a splash with her debut The Pharmacist last year, and this follow-up has a similar dystopian vibe, while being more expansive and accomplished. The story is set in a near-future Scotland which, due to climate change, is suffering a severe drought. Scotland is independent and receiving a big influx of refugees from England where conditions are much worse. Until, that is, the border is closed. Aida is a teenager…

Freema Agyeman is in Dreamland. Literally and figuratively. The actor, who first found fame as Martha Jones in Doctor Who and has more recently starred in cult hit US series Sense8 and medical drama New Amsterdam, is back working in the UK. And her latest series, a sparky comedy set in Margate, reminds her of her youth. Sure, she didn’t grow up in Margate. But she did grow up in a similar situation to the family at the heart of Dreamland – in which Agyeman stars alongside Lily Allen, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Gabby Best as sisters struggling to be heard. The depiction of working-class women and their relationships was fully familiar. Agyeman plays Trish – intense, driven and desperate that her third child with Spence (Ghosts star Kiell Smith-Bynoe) will…

GOVERNMENT CRACKDOWN Rishi Sunak’s anti-social behaviour action plan is ‘dressing old laws up in new clothes’ Rishi Sunak unveiled an anti-social behaviour action plan last week that could see rough sleepers face fines of £500 for breaching community orders and criminalised in similar ways to the 200-year-old Vagrancy Act, experts warned. The PM announced more powers for police and local councils to take action against people obstructing shop doorways or begging at cash points. His plan to “stamp out these crimes once and for all” will also make it an offence for criminal gangs to organise begging networks. Meanwhile, fines for breaching public space protection orders and community protection notices, which have been used to target rough sleepers in recent years, are set to be increased from £100 to £500.…

I lived in France 20 years ago for a year, and 30 years before that I lived there for four months. The French are definitely different from other Europeans. They do believe in their tradition of not accepting the rules if they disagree with them. It is almost a cliche that they will demonstrate and possibly set fire to dustbins, and at times even throw Molotov cocktails if they are driven to it. Macron, who sees himself as a moderniser like Thatcher, has run into the biggest problem: the French believe in a quality of life that working way into old age undermines. They don’t want to be Americanised as they see it. They want to be a society that has time for the small things; like wellbeing and taking…

Twenty-five years ago this week, Northern Ireland was on the brink of change. Seemingly intractable, the Troubles had been tearing lives apart for 30 years. More than 3,500 people had been killed, more than 47,500 injured. Nobody in the north of Ireland escaped unaffected. But in 1998, there was a tentative sense that talks might finally be getting somewhere. Children sang for a brighter future outside Hillsborough Castle as inside the political parties thrashed out details of the treaty that would usher in a new era. Perhaps imperfect, the peace achieved by the Good Friday Agreement was at least a chance to put civil war behind us. Many brave, dedicated individuals got us there – from both sides of the Northern Irish conflict, from the UK and Irish governments, from…

At 16 I was utterly in love with music. I was so ambitious in knowing exactly who and what I wanted to be. My grandfather, who was a plumber, was already sneaking me into nightclubs and bars and doing free plumbing work for club owners and musicians who let a 16-year-old kid get up on stage and sing with them. I was in love with Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, Harry Connick Jr, Ella and Louis Armstrong and Louie Prima, the great Italian-American singers. And I loved Elvis. It was interesting – at that age, I had a sense that I was unique. Part of what was so romantic for me was that I knew I was different, and we all want to be unique. I thought wow, this…

Every family has its own power struggles. For example, I am currently in the midst of high-level negotiations with the Sink and Dishwasher division. At the moment we have some operational issues. An unnamed employee (OK, my husband) is going against process, thus creating two workstreams – namely he is handwashing items instead of putting them in the dishwasher, and then putting the dishwasher on half empty. As you can see, efficiencies will need to be made, and I will be calling him into my office (the sofa) to let him know that I plan to outsource this department and create a new role for him within Machine Washing and Hanging. And if he doesn’t like it he can, in the words of Logan Roy, ‘Fackoffff !’ If you find…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Ian Field 04/05/1963 - 10/03/2023 In 1993 there used to be a section in The Big Issue called Capital Lights (precursor to Street Lights), where all articles were written by vendors. Lucie Russell ran the group from the Farringdon office and some of the Lights best work came from this period, especially from a vendor called Ian Field, whose pitch was outside Selfridges. I’d never seen any piece of his work turned away. My first entry into The Big Issue was printed in the Christmas 1993 edition and being a 17-year-old not only was I excited my poem was going to be printed, what was more impressive was my work was…

ANALYSIS As President Biden, the Clintons and other VIPs head towards Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, you could ask, what exactly is there to celebrate? The much vaunted power-sharing government, which was meant to unite unionists and nationalists, is currently not functioning. Indeed the Stormont administration has been in some form of suspension for as many years as it has been up and running. Brexit ignited concerns about the land border with the Irish Republic, an area where tensions had previously abated due to a combination of joint Irish-British EU membership and the dismantling of the network of army frontier checkpoints and observation points which grew up during the Troubles. Dublin’s worst fears about the erection of a new “hard border” were assuaged by…

Cho-Yee submits her work via the 240Project, a London arts and health activity centre for people affected by homelessness and exclusion. Her artwork finds her immersed in what she calls “the therapeutic dottiness of pointillism… I’m fascinated by the intricacy, precision and detail of the style.” Cho-Yee’s enthusiasm for painting came from attending art groups with her mum over the last few years. She also loves playing football. It is, she says, “A way to exercise, compete and connect with people after laying down dots all day.” 240project.org.uk…

INTERVIEW NAOMI ALDERMAN ‘I’m hopeful because there is anger’ “The sheer quantity of horrible things that happen in the world to women’s bodies is so impossible to imagine… So, yes, I think there is a role for creating images of powerful women electrocuting the shit out of people.” It’s a bit over six years since Naomi Alderman’s searing feminist novel The Power electrified readers, and she’s looking forward to reaching an even bigger audience as it transforms into a major new TV series starring Toni Collette. “I hope it sparks more conversations,” she says. “I hope that some blokes sit down and go, ‘Oh, this looks like an exciting, thrilling show’ and then just get their heads blown off.” Whether on page or screen, The Power is based around…

CLASSICAL Reprieve for BBC Singers is a welcome one “And that’s what you pay your licence for,” beams Chris Packham in most episodes of BBC Two’s ‘watches’, usually following the careful dissection of an owl pellet or nighttime footage of a beaver eating an apple. As a fan of Springwatch and its seasonal siblings, I quite agree – I’m more than happy to contribute to the programme’s low-fi pie-charts and superb nature footage, just as I’m pleased to pay for the Proms and other BBC projects. Of course, not everyone feels the same way, and there are ongoing battles about what does and does not represent value for money – against murmurings about whether a state-supported broadcaster should exist at all. The BBC recently reviewed its classical music work, appointing…

SHANE, 35 I nearly died on November 18 last year. I get seizures and it’s like I don’t even know who I am, I don’t even know my own name, it’s like I’m brain dead. I was in intensive care for a little while in Torquay. I was living in a tent at the time, and I had five seizures in one day. The hospital said if I hadn’t got to the hospital when I did I would have died that night. I’m from Gloucestershire originally, but I moved down to Devon after I got attacked about 14 years ago. I hit my head on the pavement and I had to have my skull stapled and glued back together. It left me with brain damage. It’s why I have seizures…