Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/5/2023 i The Big Issue

How long do you expect to live? Eighty years? Ninety? Perhaps you’re hoping for the big 100? Thanks to advances in medicine, these aren’t outlandish goals – we now live longer than ever before. But while we benefit from this miracle of our modern world, there’s also a cost: older people need more care. Already in the UK today, there are at least six million people caring for a loved one who’s long-term sick, elderly or impaired, or all three. That’s around 9% of the population. And it’s only going to increase. Modern medicine has extended our lives, increasing the number of ‘oldest-old’ (over 85s) and extending the longevity of those suffering from diseases – someone with Parkinson’s can now expect to have the same lifespan as someone without, and…

COVER FEATURE “The end of the film is so triumphant. So where could we go from there?” Robert Carlyle is explaining why it has taken 25 years for the cast of The Full Monty to reconvene. As a new Disney+ series brings back the beloved characters from writer Simon Beaufoy’s 1997 comedy-drama masterpiece, Carlyle has the inside story for The Big Issue. “The film was all up, up, up,” he continues. “It is full of these amazing moments. There were no real avenues to take it down. But, of course, time has solved that.” The Full Monty became the highest grossing film in UK history. Worldwide box office receipts were more than £250 million (almost 100 times its budget). It beat Titanic and Memento to win Best Film at the…

At 16 I was just discovering a little bit of freedom. I’d done my O levels and I was just dying to go out and do things. My mum was super protective and never let me go anywhere. So I was preoccupied with trying to get out the house. School was not fun for me. I was not one of the cool kids or the fashionable kids. So at 16, I started working part time and getting my own money. And I was able to buy a few bits of clothing. That’s when I started to come into my own. My parents are Nigerian immigrants, so the other students laughed at my name, my mum’s accent, the clothes she wore, the clothes she bought me. So when I got my…

CLASSICAL LGBT+ artists taking Pride of place this month Two immaculately dressed men, both sporting tailored tweed jackets – one wearing a cravat, the other in a knitted roll-neck – are caught on camera in an uncharacteristically casual pose. The taller man, hair swept off of his face by a breeze, cuddles a miniature dachshund, gazing affectionately towards her bright eyes. The next man looks directly at the lens, his expression relaxed. The picture is black and white; the story is colourful: here are Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Clytie the sausage dog, shown at their home in Suffolk around 1954. If Clytie was on TikTok today, her posts would be about her dads getting ready for the next Aldeburgh Festival and the latest musical star to have called in…

DISABILITY BENEFITS ‘They made me feel like a liar, a charlatan and a pathetic human.’ Government accused of disability benefits crackdown The Department for Work and Pensions is rejecting a large number of appeals for the disability benefit personal independent payment, known as PIP, as revealed recently in The Big Issue. PIP benefits are for working-age adults with a physical or mental health condition who need additional support. As claimants reapply for their payments, many are being rejected and being redirected to make an appeal, called a mandatory reconsideration. However, recent figures for England and Wales show the DWP is rejecting 89% of appeals relating to initial applications. Sarah was among dozens who contacted us whose PIP application and MR appeals were rejected. She eventually gave up on her tribunal…

Here is a Pegasus cup. Cups are sold liberally at a cafe by the River Orne near Ranville in Normandy, northern France. At this time of the year, early June, the place is abuzz with tourists wanting to buy these cups and other memorabilia from the cafe, still in the family after a hundred years. Why? Because just before midnight on 5 June 1944, a number of gliders arrived silently and their passengers overwhelmed the German guard, capturing the strategic bridge the cafe sat next to. The bridge that was taken was renamed Pegasus Bridge because of the insignia – on the shoulders of the liberating soldiers of the 1st Airborne Division – of the horse Pegasus being ridden by Bellerophon. The significance of the cafe’s location is that it…

CULTURE “One step forward, five steps back,” sings Kathleen Hanna on Le Tigre’s FYR. It is the eternal lament of the progressive. The initials in the song’s title allude to an argument in seminal feminist text The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone, in which the radical activist describes the “50 years of ridicule” American women had to bear between getting the right to vote in 1920 and the book’s publication in 1970. Three decades later, in 2001, Hanna’s electroclash band was once again facing the fact that every time we get a win, reactionary forces are right there with the backlash. Here in 2023, while on a video call to The Big Issue to mark their reunion, Kathleen Hanna is reflecting, with bandmates Johanna Fateman and JD Samson, on…

TOMORROW’S WORLD Science fiction gives us a deeper understanding of humankind’s future This past March, the Ministry of Defence in the UK announced they had hired science-fiction writers PW Singer and August Cole to write eight short stories about how developing technologies could shape warfare over the next 20 years. Surprising? Hardly. This is far from the first time governments have reached out to the world of fiction for help imagining the future. Most famously, authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle directly lobbied for and influenced Ronald Reagan’s decision to create the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983 (aka the “Star Wars” missile defence programme). In 2005, the Canadian army hired Karl Schroeder to write Crisis in Zefra, a “dramatised future military scenario”, that examined the challenges a Canadian peacekeeping force…

Last week we detailed the shocking reality many people with disabilities in Britain are facing. We reported that almost 90% of those who appealed after being turned down for essential personal independence payment (PIP) were refused again on appeal. That is people who can’t work and have no other viable income. The payment is, at most, around £170 per week. Not everybody granted it gets that amount. And even if they were granted it, they need to reapply regularly, just to prove again they’re disabled enough. We asked readers to share their experiences of going through the application system with the Department for Work and Pensions. We have rarely had such a response. The volume was incredible and the details were shocking. We carry some of the stories this week…

Smoke and mirrors The number of children trying vaping rises by 50% in a year, according to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). The despicable international smoking industry, is the driving force behind vaping, and they use every technique in their marketing armoury to target our children with nicotine in disguise. For years, that industry funded research to find ways to replace the millions of people quitting smoking. Once someone came up with the solution – vaping – the tobacco companies slowly and discreetly bought up the companies that made them, so they could get as much control of it as possible. The myth, which many were conned into believing, was that vaping was the route to quitting smoking. I get daily reports from a research group into vaping, who…

FIGHTING WITH PRIDE Patrick Lyster-Todd hid his fear when Dennis, his first love, was dying of HIV. He made the painful decision to sacrifice his career as a high-ranking officer in the Royal Navy to look after Dennis in his final days. But no one knew he was gay. No one knew he was so afraid. There was a ban on LGBT+ people in the armed forces, so Lyster-Todd kept his relationship hidden. It was a year’s notice before he could leave the navy. Dennis died two days before his last day. No one knew. Lyster-Todd faced homelessness and attempted to take his own life in the years that followed. Everything that mattered was gone. Three decades on, the 68-year-old is happily married and the ban has long been lifted,…

REVIEWS Finding meaning and healing in flat landscapes In A Flat Place, Noreen Masud journeys to different flat landscapes in the UK that compel her. In terms of genre, this book might be called a nature memoir: each chapter engages intimately with the natural world, from the Fenlands to the Orkney Islands, and even the stillest, flattest, and quietest revelations are inextricably tied to the environment. But equally, Masud pushes against determined traditions of nature writing. The expansive space of this memoir is an invitation to collapse boundaries and make room for experiences and bodies that are often erased from British history, and in doing so, Masud also voices the realities of this nation’s colonial violence. Alongside these various quests to find flat landscapes and beautifully articulate the ecosystems she…

If, like me, you’re addicted to that shiny, hideous capitalist machine they call social media, it’s hard to get the time or headspace to indulge in real-life pursuits. I’m not talking washing up, cleaning, ironing and cooking – amazingly there always seems to be plenty of time for those – I mean fun hobbies that aren’t on a screen. Before social media engulfed my life, I had a lot of spare time, and I would sometimes use it to customise clothes badly and paint furniture badly (this is now optimistically known as upcycling). Or I would make cards for friends with cartoons of their faces on them and write letters and put stickers on the envelopes. I was also a prolific writer of mesmerising diary entries like ‘Went to the…

STEVE CHILLWELL, 51 I started selling Big Issue in the north of England at the very beginning – I was vendor number six! I’m also the only vendor to ever get a chief constable’s High Commendation. A man jumped a woman with a knife in front of me when I was on my pitch in the ’90s. I took him down and kept him on his backside! I also got £250 with the Commendation. When I first became a vendor, I was using and committing petty crime. I started smoking at the age of seven and started shoplifting when I was a teenager. I’m not a bad person, I was just doing it to get by. I’d much rather go out and earn my money. The Big Issue gave me…