Innholdsfortegnelse for 7/3/2023 i The Big Issue

The NHS’s 75th anniversary is on 5 July. It’s an extraordinary milestone for an extraordinary institution, which has improved the lives of millions of people since it first began. It’s right that we celebrate the day, because the NHS is a representation of so many good things. Health. Safety. Progress. Care, which is extended across the country and to every single person in their hour of need. Yet the service is currently struggling enormously, under the weight of problems which have been building for years because of the decisions and actions of politicians. So alongside our celebrations it is imperative that we hold politicians to account. If they don’t change their behaviour, reverse their actions and rebuild our public healthcare system then it is unlikely to survive for another 75…

No one should slip through the gaps. That’s the ethos of the wraparound care provided by opticians and audiologists Specsavers, and it leads the thinking on the offer of gift vouchers for eye care and ear wax removal to our vendors across the UK. It couldn’t be simpler: all Big Issue vendors and our frontline team will be given vouchers, which will give them access to a free eye test – including an eye health scan using Optical Coherence Tomography equipment – free glasses, plus free ear wax removal, which can help people experiencing hearing difficulties and tinnitus. There are no clauses, no small print; it’s straightforward, providing help to everyone. “Many homeless and vulnerable people are not in receipt of financial benefits, so face difficulties getting an NHS eye…

INTERVIEW John Rhys-Davies In the Indiana Jones films, Harrison Ford brought the heroism and handsomeness, but it was John Rhys-Davies who brought much of the heart and humour. The Welsh actor played the fez-festooned Sallah. And, after reportedly turning down a cameo in the fourth film because it wasn’t substantial enough, Sallah is back for Indiana Jones’s final adventure, The Dial of Destiny. The Big Issue dials into Rhys-Davies, now 79, in a London hotel room. “I’m actually at the Shard,” he says, letting us see his £800-a-night view over the Thames and Tower Bridge. “We’re over here for a few days checking out universities for my daughter and since I’m partly on somebody else’s penny I said” – and he says it very grandly – “Make it the Shard!”…

WALKING TOUR An interactive journey into a post-apocalyptic Manchester “Those with most money went first.” We Cut Through Dust offers an apocalyptic vision of Manchester in the not-too-distant future in which those with the means to flee have done so, leaving the disempowered to inherit the city. It begins with a phone call: yours. We Cut Through Dust is an immersive walking tour devised by art collectives Blast Theory and Manchester Street Poem for this year’s Manchester International Festival (MIF). Participants station themselves outside Deansgate’s railway and Metrolink stations and call a number. The response guides them through backstreets, along canals and under viaducts as the audio story unfolds. “We were looking for tucked-away spaces in Manchester that people wouldn’t normally go to,” says Manchester Street Poem project manager Simon…

EMPLOYMENT Refugees are twice as likely to be unemployed. A new scheme in Coventry might have answers In the week it was revealed that the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda would cost £169,000 per person, the indisputable economic benefit of migrants coming to the UK has been put in the spotlight again. Take Tsehaye for example. He left his home in Eritrea 13 years ago. Since then, he has journeyed across the Sahara, been imprisoned by a militia in Libya, spent seven years in Germany, and tried for four months to cross the English channel in a lorry. He is a refugee, and he wants to work. “It’s a very bad journey,” he says. “Terrible, dangerous journey.” Now living in Coventry, all he wants from life in the…

Twenty years ago Jim took a flat for rent that, if he’d had the money, he could have bought for £100k. He didn’t, so he didn’t. Over those 20 years the rent doubled. Now he is being asked to leave because the owner wants to sell and he has been issued with a Section 21. This is a no-fault eviction notice. Since 2003 when Jim moved in, the flat’s price has increased to £500k. So £400k has been added to the value of the property. He has never missed a rent payment. As it was a buy-to-let, the money borrowed from the bank was paid for by Jim’s rent. The person who borrowed the money did not have to pay for the mortgage. The buy-to-let arrangement, as long as the…

REVIEWS Amidst all the death, we celebrate life What is it about the heat that makes us crave mystery and murder? Perhaps the desire for pace combats the sludge of quickly melting minds. Perhaps the heat makes considering violence against the fellow commuter playing TikTok videos for the whole carriage to hear seem a tempting option. Whatever the reason, holiday recommendations always contain thrillers, and this is no different. Although I’m conflicted about the term “literary thriller” as its determination to distinguish itself from genre categories, I will concede here as both books contain the adrenaline and intrigue of the thriller without stooping to an admiration of the police. The feminist thriller has of late been concerned mainly with victims’ stories, including but not centring serial killers, filled with chapters…

I grew up in West London in the 1980s, a time and place that was pretty multiracial but not very multicultural. By which I mean there were plenty of non-white kids at my school, but we only really understood our differences in terms of colour. There was no understanding or discussion of the differences in the way we lived, the things we believed in or the backgrounds of our families. As far as I could see, the kids of African, Caribbean, Pakistani or Indian descent just fitted in with the rest of us: playing football, singing Christian songs in assembly, eating unseasoned food in the canteen and learning about all the wars we had won and monarchs that had ruled over us. When I got older, I announced to myself…

The reaction to Prince William’s homelessness plan is as much a story of our time as the plan itself. It’s worth recapping what he’s up to. Billed as Homewards, William said it’s his life work to fix homelessness. That is certainly an ambition. He has drawn together 15 organisations at the forefront of homelessness and homeless prevention to look at workable solutions. The Big Issue is one of them. Focused on six test areas across the UK, he’s asking key people and organisations in those geographical areas, each faced with a more prominent contributing factor around homelessness, whether it be lack of mental health provision or youth homelessness, to work together on solutions and then to see if those solutions could be rolled out. He’s sticking £3 million into the…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Luddites were right How come it is still considered acceptable to trot out hackneyed denigration of the perceived Luddite? Luddites were victims, in the main, of psychopathic tycoons. Their riches were made possible through coercion of cottage weavers forced to accept this new reality. And here we go again! Big AI Brother is already here dictating yet another enforced normality. Unlike your correspondent Christopher Paolini [Issue 1567, 5 June] I am not optimistic. Christine Allonby, Doncaster One giant leap Shout out to the @BigIssue. It has come on leaps and bounds since the last one I bought for £1 and is the most interesting magazine I have read in a while.…

As a kid, all I needed was a tennis racket and a football. I will always remember those summers where I would grab my tennis racket and my football, get on my bike, and that was me done. It was literally all I needed to have the best summer ever. I didn’t need to go on holiday, I was happy at the local tennis club. We would play football on the pitch, when we were bored of that, we’d play tennis. Then later we would play football again. We might ride to the sweet shop but that was about it. Sport was the main focus of my life – and not really a lot else. I always remember the good times. Never the bad. When I was there [Crouch and…

CLASSICAL Restoring the reputation of misunderstood composers In among the press releases for the latest smart speaker, concert series and – because I once worked on an industrial machinery magazine – a forklift truck, one sentence catches my attention: “Man with Glasses and Mullet at Coronation to Celebrate Birthday with Distinguished Concerts International New York at Carnegie Hall.” The person in question is Karl Jenkins, the Welsh composer responsible for The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, a popular choral work that juxtaposes sacred and secular texts and commemorates those lost in conflict. The 79-year-old was recently voted Classic FM’s most popular living composer with The Armed Man performed on average twice a week across the world. Yet, thanks to a joke that went viral, Jenkins is currently better known…

COLIN, 55 I’ve been selling The Big Issue in Manchester since 2010. Before that, I sold it for seven years in Birmingham. I moved to Birmingham from Manchester in 2000 to meet up with my dad, who I’d not seen for 23 years, and I ended up staying there. I lived in a Salvation Army hostel for eight or nine months, then found out where the Big Issue office was and signed up. I sold in the town centre for about 12 months, then asked about getting an out-of-town pitch, and sold in Acocks Green for about three or four years. I came back to Manchester in 2010 for personal reasons and I’ve sold the magazine here ever since. I’ve had a flat for 14 years now. It’s the longest…