Innholdsfortegnelse for 8/7/2023 i The Big Issue

I have been in arrears to Stockport Council for over three years now. The council tax keeps on going up every year and the council will report you to bailiffs after one failed payment. I have made an instalment plan to pay off my council tax debt but more help should be offered to avoid people being referred to bailiffs in the first instance. Jessica Whittaker These figures demonstrate why council tax reform is long overdue. The system is regressive and economically inefficient. Outdated rules do nothing to help struggling households or local authorities. @penny_rimmer2 I wonder how much of a role the cyber attack at Hackney Council played. I lived there a few years ago and didn’t get a single bill for more than a year…

The other night I had a dream that I was helping a much-respected person I knew to make a large meal for 50 Big Issue vendors and staff. Things seemed to work well. Then it went badly wrong and the well-respected person got angry and threw everything away. I was gobsmacked but tried to rescue everything by going out and buying 50 fish and chip suppers. Turning disaster into something else, because what united us was not so much what we ate, but that we ate together. When I awoke I realised I had to get on a train and go to London to attend a ceremony that I had arranged to commemorate the 50 years since my mother lost her fight for life. The ceremony meant returning to the…

There’s no money left. That’s according to Labour front-bencher Lucy Powell. Because of the disastrous economic conditions the UK is facing, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is changing the mood music and becoming more reluctant to splash the cash if he becomes prime minister. Recent weeks have seen the party row back on its green investment plans because the Conservatives have “crashed the economy”, in the words of shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, and controversially commit to keeping the two-child benefit cap. In a bid to project fiscal credibility, Starmer will follow the current government’s fiscal rules if he gets to Downing Street. No money for public services. Talk of balancing the books. A grim set of policy choices. It’s starting to feel a lot like 2010. The language also echoes Labour…

REVIEWS Family dynamics that beg closer inspection If you search for Veronica Raimo’s latest novel, Lost on Me, on a certain online marketplace it’ll tell you it is a “100,000-copy Italian bestseller for fans of Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy”. Honestly, what did British publishing do before Cusk and Levy came along? Raimo’s novel, which is excellent and comes to anglophone readers through a suitably stylish translation by Leah Janeczko, isn’t really similar to Cusk or Levy at all. Instead, reading it I found myself thinking of the Ferrara novels of Giorgio Bassani, works that dramatised his younger years in 1920s and 30s Italy. The novel is told by an older Veronica (or Vero, or Verika, or Veronika, depending on whose company she is in) as she looks back over…

In a world marked by borders and passports, I exist as two people – Peyvand who is British and Parisa who is Iranian. Now, lots of people have dual citizenship, and/or change their names. But both aspects of my official identity, in every sense of the word, are not of my choosing. I might not have chosen the name Peyvand, but I do like it. It translates to “a connection” or “joining”. But it is an illegal name in Iran, and official names have to be chosen from the official list, and Peyvand ain’t on it. This isn’t that unusual in Iran – when news in September 2022 broke of the death of a young woman in Iran after being detained for “improper hijab”, sparking the start of the Woman,…

I spent the last week or so watching grown men cry. I hadn’t tried to, it just worked out that way. I’ve been putting in a lot of time at the vet again. A lump had grown on the tail of Toastie, my springer. The only way to treat it was to cut it off – the lump, I mean. It was a straightforward operation, but the recovery is long, and the dressings need a lot of changing. So, initially I had to get him back into the vet’s regularly so they could dress the wound. And it was there, as Toastie was being tended to and I sat waiting, that I started to notice the men crying. I couldn’t understand why at first. There’d be a strange hush in…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Foreign affair Amidst the current political and economic climate, we are seeing times of hardship in the UK as we plunge further into a cost of living crisis. It is now, as we experience these shared struggles to make ends meet, that we can empathise most with those less fortunate than ourselves abroad and appreciate to some degree the small fortunes that we possess within the safe haven of a first-world country. Around the globe more than one billion people are living on less than £2 a day. And contrary to the common myth that foreign aid consumes high percentages of the UK’s GDP, the reality of this statistic sits at…

My parents told me when I was five years old I could be anything in life I wanted to be. And I believed them. I wanted to be an astronaut or an archaeologist. I wanted to be all these things before I landed on musician. At 16, I had already decided that I wanted to be in an all-girl band. Which I knew, to a degree, was going to be difficult. But the absolute joy in trying to accomplish that – and actually accomplishing it [Jett formed The Runaways when she was 16, they released their debut single, Cherry Bomb, when she was 18] – really outweighed any sort of danger warning signs that should have been flashing in my brain. I thought that people would love 16-year-old girls playing…

There’s a rumour that goes around every year at the Edinburgh Fringe. Somebody’s cousin’s mate’s friend’s brother has been out leafleting during the month-long festival of comedy, theatre, music, dance and every other conceivable corner of the arts. It’s been a wet day, as Edinburgh in August often is, and the poor sod didn’t have the proper footwear. Saturated and exhausted from a day standing on the Royal Mile, he comes back to his rented hovel to unpeel his socks and – shock, horror – realises he’s got trench foot! That tale is almost certainly apocryphal, but the fact that it feels true to hundreds of exhausted performers, producers, directors and reviewers each year tells you a lot about how gruelling many people find Edinburgh. It was ever thus, says…

MICK MORROW, 61 I’m originally from Glasgow. I was born in the Gorbals but I grew up in Arden in Thornliebank. I moved to London because I had just finished a 10-year prison sentence and I wanted away from Glasgow because I would have ended up doing a lifer, basically. I’ve been selling The Big Issue since it started thereabouts, down in London. I’ve been back up in Glasgow about five years, but I’ve sold all over the place. I used to raise money for kids’ charities. I was running an office down in Croydon, that’s why I was down in London. I was living in a B&B hotel where I met an outreach worker for the paper and it sort of got me into selling it. I was trying…

To understand the crisis now facing Israel, you first have to understand the dominance of Benjamin Netanyahu over its politics. Few politicians in democracies have survived as a party leader for as long as Netanyahu, let alone as prime minister. So far, he has been PM – on and off – for over 15 years. Israeli politics used to be a competition between visions, with the once dominant Labour establishment making way for the upstart Likud in the 1970s. In recent years it has effectively been a contest between those who want Netanyahu as PM and those who don’t. Even out of power he has always been the prism through which governments refracted. Israel has always been led by unwieldy coalitions, thanks to its proportional representation system. Netanyahu has been…

COVER FEATURE Paapa Essiedu may just be the finest acting talent of his generation. At 33, his career is already remarkable in its ambition and breadth. A mainstay at the RSC in his early 20s, he made a surprise breakthrough when he was an understudy thrust into a leading role mid-performance in Sam Mendes’s King Lear at the National Theatre aged just 23 (helpfully, in front of The Guardian’s theatre critic), before playing the hottest Hamlet in years for the RSC, firmly establishing him as the most exciting new talent on stage. Then came a series of impressive screen roles. Essiedu caught the eye in Russell T Davies’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starred alongside his drama school pal Michaela Coel in her Bafta-winning I May Destroy You – all repressed…

CULTUREINTERVIEW After forming Public Enemy in 1985, Chuck D helped take hip-hop into the mainstream with a combination of raw energy and radical social commentary. Thirty-eight years later, the band still play to packed-out venues across the world – but Chuck’s message remains uncompromised. “I have to speak on behalf of others who can’t,” he says. “As a Black man in this world in 2023, I can’t be afraid to say what I think.” Now Chuck D has taken his unique power of expression into print with a new book, Livin’ Loud, which lends insight to his life and work via a collection of his own illustrations and a 13,000-word commentary on his formative years and extraordinary career. THE BIG ISSUE: Your book grew out of downtime on tour. Is…