Innholdsfortegnelse for 7/31/2023 i The Big Issue

Does prison work? In theory, yes. If someone is locked up, they can’t commit crime. Except, they can. And they do. Soaring rates of violence, self-harm, suicide, rioting and even murder give an insight into life in our prisons. Recidivism rates show that almost half of prisoners reoffend within a year of release. So, does prison work? There’s no easy answer, but the theory is very different from the reality. I spent almost 10 years working as a prison officer. During that time, I learned just as much about the outside world as I did about life inside. There’s a certain comfort to be found in seeing prisons as hidden worlds, nothing like the ones we inhabit. And the people inside, they’re nothing like us. But that isn’t the truth.…

Street paper vendors across the world might come from many different circumstances, but they have always had common challenges to overcome. In the past, these focused on homelessness, poverty, social exclusion and inequality. But now, as roasting temperatures scorch much of Europe and other parts of the planet, the climate crisis has been added to the mix and, for some, is becoming the biggest issue of them all. The International Network of Street Papers, which connects organisations like The Big Issue that give opportunity to those in need, estimates that 13 street papers in southern Europe and the Balkans have been badly affected by the recent heatwave. Another 40 across the rest of the continent have had to respond to higher than normal temperatures, impacting hundreds of street sellers in…

Philippe Moryoussef makes an unlikely fugitive from the law. He’s not hiding out in a cave in a mystery destination in Afghanistan or Bolivia. He lives in an apartment in the centre of Paris; if you walk around the corner you see the Eiffel Tower a short distance away, looming large. Sharing his home are his wife Karine, and their two sons who attend a local school. From the outside it looks like he leads a more-or-less normal life. But Moryoussef ’s situation is anything but normal. No one will employ him. If he came to the UK, he’d stand a good chance of being handcuffed, bundled into a police van and sent directly to His Majesty’s Prison, Wandsworth. That’s because he’s been on the run from British justice ever…

At 16 I was probably a little shit. I was really mischievous. I knew that all I wanted to do was play football. But I also knew that it would come at a cost in terms of being able to afford to play. My mum was really supportive, so I chose to work in a supermarket to help pay my subs and buy football boots, as opposed to going to college. I took the risk of wanting to be a footballer, knowing that was all that motivated me, all that excited me. I was a total street kid. I never watched TV or films and wasn’t into music. Just football. I’m one of four kids, and Friday and Saturday nights were Blockbuster nights. We’d rent a movie, get ice cream,…

REVIEW A gross experience guaranteed How can other films compete with luxury blockbusters like Mission: Impossible? One way is to try to tempt audiences with the sort of risqué business Tom Cruise has not dabbled in for years. That means lots of swearing, gross-out physical comedy and properly filthy jokes (another useful shortcut: throw in an inadvertent drug trip). While The Hangover franchise stands as this cheerfully disreputable genre’s high watermark – in billion-dollar box office, if not actual quality – there is a long tradition of immodest comedies punching well above their modest budgets, from the bacchanalian Animal House to the hair-raising There’s Something About Mary. The new road trip comedy Joy Ride arrives sandwiched in a summer where cinematic raunch seems to be making a concentrated comeback. We…

CLASSICAL Getting the Rite education A haunting bassoon solo weaves a lonely path across the woodwind section; strings flutter into life, the orchestra judders – and starts. On the screen, the darkness is disrupted by a ball of light; a planet emerges from the blurry pinkness. Volcanoes erupt in time to the pulsing strings and staccato winds – timpani provides ominous foreshadowing. Just as the lava flows and the gasses circle, I’d press fast-forward on the video player – bypassing the underwater cell division and the creeping evolution of the seas. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – the music that Disney set its dinosaurs story to in 1940 animation Fantasia – disturbed audiences when it was premiered in 1913. Such was the power of The Rite of Spring and its…

HOMELESSNESS Tens of thousands of children among the highest number of homeless people on record Early 2023 was the worst period for homelessness in England since records began, according to the latest government figures. Almost 80,000 households in England contacted their local council between January and March 2023 because they were homeless or at risk of homelessness, the highest number since these records began in 2018. A further 105,000 households were living in temporary accommodation in the period, also the highest on record since 1998, including more than 130,000 children. “The time for empty words on building social homes and overdue promises on ending no fault evictions has long passed,” said Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, which estimated nearly 25,000 people had been made homeless in the last year…

Oppenheimer is a string of events contained in a box called a cinema. The Hollywood character they made of Oppenheimer was beautifully played by Cillian Murphy, a product of the Old Country, of Cork where my parents came from. At moments it is louder than anything I have ever heard in a film, although the director did also make Dunkirk which was a surround-sound shell and bomb-dropping beanfeast. Oppenheimer though is not, like Dunkirk, an optimistic film. It is pretty much about all the wrong done by technology in the hands of government; Oppenheimer himself the potential facilitator of the demise of the world through bombs and explosions. It is a film about cleverness and the nature of threats, with Oppenheimer the only consistently reliable character in the film. Explosive…

Europe is not alone in facing record-breaking temperatures. When 53.3C was recorded in Death Valley on 16 July, one third of the United States was covered by heat warnings and this summer looks set to be one of the hottest on record. “All this month it’s either been blazing heat or intense storms,” says Nathan Poppe, editor of the Curbside Chronicle in Oklahoma. “We’ve been doing pretty much the same thing we do every summer – offer bottled water and sunscreen. Try our best to suggest selling in the mornings and evenings. Despite the weather, we’ve still had pretty strong sales, thankfully.” On one of the hottest days to hit the state, Poppe walked around Oklahoma City to see how people experiencing homelessness were coping. “Right now, OKC is among…

Five years ago, just ahead of the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, Tiago Alves entrusted The Big Issue with his story. We met in a quiet cafe in Central London. And Alves, then 21, quietly detailed the devastating night the building he had lived in since he was nine months old burned down. Alves was at home on the 13th floor when the Grenfell Tower fire happened. Along with his neighbours, he was saved by his father’s insistence that they leave – despite the stay put policy that was in place. As part of Grenfell United, a group of survivors and bereaved people campaigning for justice, Alves attended the inquiry every day. And he kept coming back to one phrase: “the inquiry will get to the truth”. Now…

CULTURE ART Originally from Malaysia, Dave left a post-9/11 United States for the UK and built a successful career. But nearly 20 years later, he found himself at the heart of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” tactics against asylum seekers and was pushed into homelessness. His artworks reflect his experiences, and have featured in books including The Book of Homelessness – the first graphic novel created by people who have been homeless. “My art explores my mood on how I feel which allows me to express different ideas,” he says. “I try to use my traumatic experience, as making art can be a cathartic one. Art is an escapism, fulfilment and gives me back my freedom. No one can tell me what to draw, paint or how I should…

“This film is the truth: it is the reality of our culture and Black culture and who we are as humans,” says filmmaker D Smith of her documentary Kokomo City, an intimate snapshot of Black trans sex workers in New York and Georgia. Refreshing and often funny, the film shows the reality of four women’s lives – “stripped down, no politics, no talking points” – via the lens of a fellow Black trans woman. A first-time filmmaker, Smith previously had a career as a Grammy-winning music producer, working with artists including Lil Wayne, Janelle Monáe and Timbaland. When she transitioned, she was forced out of the industry, resulting in financial and artistic destitution. “I nearly lost my life because I was so depressed, because I wasn’t able to do what…

Context is everything. Though even with context it’s sometimes a struggle to make sense of what is going on. A transfer fee of around £260 million has been offered for footballer Kylian Mbappé. Saudi team Al-Hilal have offered his current club Paris Saint-Germain the staggering sum. Whether it goes through or not, a change is here. We’re now in the era of footballers valued in increments of billions rather than millions. History has a curious way of tapping you on the shoulder when new history is being made. The Mbappé news came in the week Trevor Francis, England’s first £1m footballer, died. It feels a long way from £1m to a quarter of a billion. Though it is only a little over 40 years. Of course, nobody is worth that…

While the UK has been spared the worst of the heatwave for now, extreme weather is on the increase. But new research shows that even small temperature rises put people who are experiencing homelessness at risk. Academics from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) found people in London’s homeless population were 35% more likely to be admitted to hospital when daily temperatures were 25°C compared to 6°C. While cold weather is often deadly for people sleeping rough, the heat also poses a threat. In May, London councils warned local authorities needed support to continue the severe weather emergency protocol (Swep) to protect rough sleepers from the elements. The LSHTM research suggests more preventative measures are needed at lower temperatures as well as emergency protections put in place…

Supported by Experian’s United for Financial Health programme When you’re busy trying to keep on top of your money day to day, it can be tricky to find the time to seek out the help you need. That’s why Experian is taking personal finance advice directly to the people – with a helping paw or two. Over two days in March, the organisation’s credit experts teamed up with staff from local support services – including Advice Nottingham and Citizens Advice – to deliver face-to-face money clinics at Nottingham’s City Hospital and Queen’s Medical Centre. Nurses and other NHS staff were encouraged to book 20-minute sessions in advance or pop in during their breaks if they had a spare few minutes to discuss any personal finance worries. It was so successful…

REVIEWS The politics of kink When BDSM is brought up in a cultural context it is impossible to not feel the spirit of Fifty Shades of Grey haunting the conversation: the book and film series with poor kink representation that set us back decades in the discourse. Thankfully Alyssa Songsiridej’s Little Rabbit couldn’t be further from this misrepresentation, and stands more in line with Mary Gaitskill’s Secretary and Saskia Vogel’s Persuasion as it expertly dives into the messy relationship between perception and desire. Songsiridej’s debut novel follows Rabbit – as she is endearingly named by her lover – a bisexual writer in her early 30s who meets and becomes quickly infatuated with the choreographer, a 50-year-old man who is far from her regular type. Rabbit’s parents are shocked by the…

Whatever else the Edinburgh Festival Fringe may do to me, it allows me to spend an entire month in one city. There is no need for a bus or train. I will walk everywhere, inhaling the fruity fumes of the brewery and peering down alleyways where Ian Rankin has created murders by imaginary freemasons. I first came to the Fringe as a teen in 1987 and I have regularly returned. Once, the fear of the Fringe was so great that I could only eat thin soup and Coco Pops for the whole month. Time moves strangely there; the first five days can often last a decade. On the first night, performers carry excitement that has more luminescence than all the fireworks that explode over the castle on a nightly basis.…

COLIN, 55, AND ANDY BURNHAM, 53 When Manchester vendor Colin featured on this page back in early July, he revealed that Andy Burnham was a regular customer and the pair “chat all the time”. So who better to show the mayor of Greater Manchester what it’s like to be a Big Issue vendor selling the magazine on his pitch? Burnham donned a Big Issue tabard and joined Colin on his pitch outside HOME just a short walk from the mayor’s office in central Manchester on 20 July. The first job Burnham had was picking up a magazine he’d already bought. Colin said: “A couple of weeks ago he came past and said, ‘I’ll give you the money and pick up a magazine off you next time’ so I’ve just given…