Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/29/2023 i The Big Issue

A ministry of poverty could help us change course I am taking through the Lords what has been called the Friday release Bill, barring letting people out of prison on a Friday. A difficult, at times impossible day to get the support services you need to see you over the weekend. With a third of people leaving prison without accommodation and work or financial support, someone becoming homeless on release is a real possibility. It is made even more likely if you are let out on a Friday. And you are more likely to get back into trouble if there is nothing for you in those crucial days following being de-institutioned. Suddenly the roof over your head and regular meals and some kind of social association is removed from you.…

One of the things I remember about being 16 is that we never washed our hair more than once a week. There was one shampoo called Amami and the ad said, “Friday night is Amami night.” I also remember craving open toed sling-back sandals, but I didn’t ever get them because I couldn’t afford them. In those days there was no credit. If you didn’t have money, you didn’t have it. My mum was a bus conductor. She earned four pounds a week, and that was to look after two kids and herself. Some things were hard on us, but I do remember the freedom of it as well. My sister and I were able to go up the road and over the stile into the fields for days and…

ANALYSIS Can Spider-Man save us all from multiverse fatigue? Ever been in a lift where all the wall panels are mirrored, so you can see recursive clones of yourself stretching out seemingly forever? That’s when I feel compelled to do a theatrical window-cleaning wave to all those other Graemes and exclaim (in a Dracula voice, for some reason): “Velcome, my friends … to zee multiverse!” Great fun, and if it bothers the other people in the lift they usually keep pretty quiet about it. That’s the key thing when it comes to the concept of a multiverse: it should be a blast. An endless domino rally of parallel dimensions where the familiar is remixed or upended in some profound or dizzying way. But so far super-powered cinematic universes seem to…

BIG GIGS More is more for new generation of stadium stars I was lucky enough to become one of the first people in the world, give or take 60,000 or so others, to experience the opening night of Beyoncé’s stunning Renaissance world tour at Stockholm’s Friends Arena. Predicted to gross close to £2 billion by the end of its run, which will make it by far the most profitable concert tour ever, it took the stadium pop arms race to a new level with a giant screen as wide as a football pitch, dancing robots, a flying white horse and a sort of weird moon-buggy type vehicle which for reasons unclear Queen Bey at one point drove up a giant CGI approximation of her own vagina. Plus all the standard…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Taking care of business I agree with John Bird that there is a need to “redesign the ways governments work” in order to end poverty [Issue 1565, 22 May]. However, his argument that governments need to be “businesslike” raises a question. Governments should be businesslike in the sense that they should be efficient and practical. But it is important to recognise that many businesses are neither efficient nor practical. In addition, being efficient and practical is at best useless and at worst dangerous if one lacks the correct values. Poverty will not be overcome without essential services that work for everyone. This is as true here in the UK (where our…

“There’s no deep meaning that initially motivates any of my collage work,” says regular Street Art contributor Robbins, who is 95. “I cut and gather a pile of random shapes and images and place them on the paper, creating interesting juxtapositions of form and content. The Acrobatic Eye is playful at first glance, but the hooded eye suggests something quite menacing watching from up high.” Rene works regularly with the 240Project, an arts and health activity centre in London for people affected by isolation, homelessness and exclusion. 240project.org.uk…

I went to Cork last week. I’d never been before, shamefully. It was only down the road, growing up. Well, a few hundred miles. But still. I heard so often about the micro-climate and the joyful Corkness of the locals I felt I knew it. Cork people carry real pride. If you tell them that you like Cork, which I found myself doing a lot, they affirm that it’s great. There are a lot of prints around the place featuring the outline of Ireland. The county of Cork is drawn in. Everything outside the line is called simply Not Cork. Though, frankly, I expected more murals of Roy Keane. One evening we drove to Kinsale and beyond to Charles Fort, an old 17th century citadel, hanging on the rock pointing…

Can the Renters Reform Bill be transformative for tenants? The long-awaited Renters Reform Bill is finally unveiled. Was it worth the wait? In April 2019, then-prime minister Theresa May promised “the biggest change to the private rental sector for a generation”. There have been four prime ministers, a new monarch, eight housing ministers, six housing secretaries (including Michael Gove twice), one whole pandemic and nine Ed Sheeran number ones since the Renters Reform Bill was first promised. Who knew that it would take four years for the bill to come into view? May was talking about banning no-fault evictions, also know as Section 21 evictions, which allow landlords to evict a tenant without giving a reason. “With little notice, and often little justification” as she put it. The government finally…

In the 1760s, the Calder Valley in Yorkshire appointed its own king. With the traditional cottage industry of the area facing ruin as factories and mills threatened to radically alter both the landscape and economy, times were tough. Only landlords were getting rich, or even getting by, in this neglected part of England. But then local lad David Hartley returned from Birmingham with a literal money-making scheme that would transform the community and almost bring down the Bank of England. Shane Meadows writes and directs this adaptation of Ben Myers’ compelling, brutally poetic 2017 novel The Gallows Pole – expanding the scarcely believable true story (and the myths and the legends that go with it) of one of the biggest and most audacious frauds in British history. “I couldn’t believe…

REVIEWS Separating art and strife There was a time in my life when I considered Annie Hall to be my favourite film. For obvious reasons, that isn’t something that I readily admit now. In the wake of #MeToo, we find ourselves asking again and again what exactly are we meant to do with the art of bad people? If I sit down and watch, say, Rosemary’s Baby, does that mean I am forgiving Roman Polanski for his crimes against a young girl? How do we morally traverse a cultural landscape that has been so deeply stained by the reprehensible actions of others? This is the question that Claire Dederer seeks to answer in her essay collection Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Beginning with Polanski and working her way through a rogue’s…

I was under my favourite railway arch turned bar when the ghost of a stand-up comedian came and tapped my skull. It was not Tommy Cooper or Little Tich, it was a ghost of me. I spent much of my working life defined as a stand-up comedian, though I always felt like an imposter, the one in the green room pretending to be a comic while all the rest were pros. In the last decade, I have let myself off the leash of limiting definitions. On stage, I let my impetuous brain rush around, making connection after connection after connection, sometimes these are connections to jokes and sometimes to stories that have no punchline, but which I think are worth sharing. Though I am not as driven by laughter, I…

VANESIA PANAGHITA, 22 Before I started selling The Big Issue, I used to work as a domestic cleaner. But when the pandemic started, everything stopped. So I gave up that work – I had to travel a lot and it was making me pay a lot of money on that kind of stuff. That’s when people recommended that I started to sell magazines. I felt like that was much easier. I could catch the bus and go to sell the magazines much more easily. The pandemic stopped that when we were off our pitches but the people from The Big Issue were helping me, giving me vouchers to buy groceries. They were helping me to buy nappies and meals for my kids. They were there right beside me because I…