Innholdsfortegnelse for 8/28/2023 i The Big Issue

Next year, election year, will be the 60th anniversary of Harold Wilson’s rather partial triumph with his four-seat majority Labour government of 1964. He had to go back to the country for a second election 18 months later, which gave him the majority that saw him through to defeat in 1970 at the hands of an astonished Edward Heath. Polls – a warning here – are not always a guide to voting patterns. So 60 years later we are facing the chance of a revitalised Labour opposition preparing for power, and getting it. There is as much buzz around Keir Starmer as the potential new prime minister as there was about Harold Wilson in 1963. Wilson had taken over after the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell who was considered prime…

EDUCATION SPECIAL The future of education remains one of the big issues of our time. Debates rage over health and immigration, but if the nation fails education it will fail the future. Within the last decade students leaving colleges and universities have become among the most indebted in society; teachers speak of ever heavier workloads and diminishing pay – recent strike action illustrates the teetering levels of frustration. And now certain subjects are deemed less worthy than others and classrooms are finding themselves in the crosshairs of culture wars. So what is education for? For the joy of learning; for the necessity of priming for work; to provide working parents some childcare; for maintaining an essential circular economy in certain towns and cities? As schools return and students get ready…

EDUCATION SPECIAL MUSIC EDUCATION A lack of funding for music education in schools means learning an instrument could become a hobby only for the rich. If music lessons are funded only by parents with extra cash, where does that leave working-class kids? And what impact will this have on the musical landscape? A worrying lack of diversity would make popular culture very dull. A study from Birmingham City University reckoned that A level music could drop completely from the curriculum due to spending cuts, with zero entries for the subject predicted by 2033. In Scotland, proposals by Midlothian Council to cut music spending by 60% created an uproar earlier this year, before a Musicians Union-backed campaign forced them to reconsider. Research by the Independent Society of Musicians in 2021…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming education. While there are fears of students getting AI to pen essays and course work, technological breakthroughs also provide huge opportunities. So could the benefits of AI in the classroom outweigh the negatives? The Big Issue asked the people involved. UNIVERSITY STUDENTS Second-year student Ellie studies sociology and political sciences at the University of York, and said she benefited from using ChatGTP to support her exam revision. Ellie said, “I put my questions into ChatGTP, and it gives me bullet-point answers that are really easy to understand. These have helped me structure my practice essays and support my further research.” Balancing between studying, working low-paid jobs and maintaining a social life can be challenging while at university. With the emergence of tools like Open AI…

REVIEWS An otherworldly rock star At its best, speculative fiction takes narrative risks free from the constraints of the ordinary world. This week we have two writers who have done that their whole careers, and who are both writing at the very top of their games right now. First up is Barbadian author Karen Lord, who’s previously dabbled in both fantasy and science fiction. The Blue, Beautiful World is set in the same science fictional galaxy as two of her previous novels, but can definitely be read as a standalone. The book is technically a first-contact novel, set on a near-future Earth, though it is very unlike the standard alien encounters portrayed in movies and television. We start in the company of Owen, an extraordinarily popular rock star, touring the…

CULTURE INTERVIEW “In the absence of compassion, something really nefarious grows. And that thing is really hard to bottle up, it seeps back into the culture, often as violence. We have this hope in America that we can build a wall and shove things we hate behind it. But that doesn’t work. We don’t get to hide a poison in this one little hole, it grows out everywhere. Because it’s people who are poisonous. That uncaring, ‘wealth over everything’ kind of thinking was emboldened under Donald Trump, but it has existed forever. It’s as American as America.” Speaking on the phone from a hotel room in Manchester, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is on fine, fiery form. Five years ago his collection, Friday Black – a provocative and inventive set of…

ROUGH SLEEPING The government has promised to end veteran homelessness in England by the end of the year. A new helpline set up to do it has been in high demand This is the year that veteran homelessness in England will come to an end, according to Johnny Mercer, minister for veterans’ affairs. He said – on air on LBC Radio in February – that this huge achievement will be all thanks to Op Fortitude. Backed by £8.5 million of government money over the next two years, the scheme is a new pathway for veterans experiencing homelessness focusing on supported housing. It aims to help them overcome difficulties adjusting to civilian life after service and other drivers of homelessness, including PTSD, alcohol misuse and relationship breakdown. A new Op Fortitude…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Sound advice Regarding the letter from Monika Gabrielova [Issue 1576, 7 August] detailing the awful situation facing her family following a Section 21 eviction notice: what she describes [a family facing imminent homelessness] is one of the most terrifying possibilities I can imagine. She mentions the local council, but not any involvement with other organisations. If they haven’t already, I’d recommend contacting Shelter’s free emergency helpline on 0808 800 4444 for help and advice. Citizens Advice, Crisis and The Salvation Army are also worth contacting. The family may have legal rights that haven’t been made clear, and one of these organisations should be able to go through options with them. Places…

A level results are here. Half a million young people are thinking about whether to take up an offer of a place, take out a student loan and move away from home. No one wants to put a young person off going into higher education, but thanks to changes in government policy the cards are increasingly stacked against young people going into higher education in England and Wales. Times have changed Huge financial decisions have to be made swiftly, something anyone over the age of 55 just didn’t have to do. Back then, there were no university fees. In fact, free money called “grants” was given to students to cover their rent and living costs. How times have changed. Charging our young people sky-high fees is a political choice. If…

You better believe my passions were music. Music was one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. But I was also sporty. I love sport. I was doing a lot of athletics – 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump. All the things that taller people should do. Although we didn’t play football, because back then whoever heard of girls playing football? But music and theatrical performance were absolutely everything for me. I was already obsessed with Prince. The whole school knew I was this mental Prince fan. We did a student exchange about that age when I went to Lake Oswego High School in Portland, Oregon. A bunch of us were there for almost a month and then those kids came to us. I carried my Walkman with my cassette…

INTERVIEW The French connection Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Police Judiciaire de Paris does not solve crimes, he solves people. That is the essence of the world-weary yet doggedly determined detective, who operates in a period where the police could rely on hunches and evaluate suspects while dropping in on-duty to a bar for a Cavaldos or two. Between 1931 and 1972, Georges Simenon published books about Maigret at a prolific rate: 75 novels and 28 short stories, selling over 80 million books. The success of the stories meant that film and TV adaptations began almost as early as the novels were published. The most notable recent versions starred Rowan Atkinson. But since the books are more about the evocative atmosphere and contemplation on human nature and less about dense…

I’ve had a somewhat trying time of late, including the illness and death of the most important person in my life, dog diarrhoea on shag pile rugs, a broken toilet, an infestation of flies from the rotting corpse of a rodent that has died in an inaccessible place under the floor, and this morning the unexpected bonus of a spider in my hair. People talk about ‘looking after yourself ’ when bad things happen. I suppose they’re referring to eating, sleeping and not drinking vodka in bus shelters. But what does it mean in practice? Well, recently I’ve found solace in some unexpected (and frankly, quite boring) places. Washing the car (big gun with foam coming out of it = ace), doing the dishes, making porridge, ripping out weeds, throwing…

DARRIN LAVERY, 55 I was a street beggar back in Dublin, quite a successful one too, but I decided I’d rather do something constructive with my life now. So I’m putting all my efforts into selling The Big Issue. I’ve only been doing it for three months and I absolutely love it, I adore it. I meet so many nice people, so many friendly people. I’ve already got people coming back to me every week, and I’m friendly with the restaurant by my pitch – they call me Paddy the Irishman. It was 2011 when I came over here from Ireland. I’d had a heroin problem for seven years, so I came over to get help in a psychiatric hospital. Three years and eight months I spent there and I’ve…

If you’re lucky you’ll have had an education moment. There will have been a person to lift your eyes and expand your horizon. It may not quite be a Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society – though, frankly, that didn’t end well for everybody – but there will have been a teacher or somebody at your school who introduced you to something that stuck so fast you can trace much that came after to then. Equally, old annoyances linger. These could be anything: you might harbour abiding frustration at the new teacher who played you out of position so you’d eventually be benched from the school Gaelic football team, just a few months after you’d been captain and led them to greater success than they’d had previously, as your school…

EDUCATION SPECIAL JUSTICE This summer, students took their university to court in a landmark case. Five thousand current and former University College London (UCL) students joined together to sue the university for breach of contract after Covid and strikes disrupted their degrees. The case ended with the judge “strongly encouraging” both parties to engage in alternative dispute resolution (ADR) to agree compensation terms, but rejected UCL’s attempts to force students to use them before continuing to court. UCL must settle student complaints within eight months. If no progress is made in four months, the case will be back in court (and now lawyers are representing over 6,000 students). This was the first case to reach court and is likely to set a precedent for other universities across the UK.…

EDUCATION SPECIAL Every week a new debate on the school curriculum kicks off: ‘Add more maths’ or ‘add more languages and history’ or ‘add more tech’ instead. It’s a debate that the UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, stoked the fire of this summer when he announced plans to cap “low-value” degrees, value being determined by economic terms. Defining ‘useful’ or ‘useless’ degrees comes from an anxious need to know how we are preparing our students for an uncertain future as society navigates crisis after crisis. Examining the qualifications or vocational training opportunities for students at 16 shows how we are currently equipping them for higher education, beginning a career or preparing them for their future as new technologies – such as AI – take centre stage. What post-16 qualifications are…

CLASSICAL The sound of freedom On my own phone, there’s one to pay for car parking, another for identifying recorded music – and bird song – along with a tube map and various streaming platforms. But Roman Oleksiienko, trumpeter and deputy director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, has an app with far more serious implications. The 35-year-old’s mobile plays a loud warning if Kyiv is coming under attack, alerting its user to head to the nearest shelter. In an interview with BBC Music magazine, Oleksiienko and colleagues have shared unsettling details about life in war-torn Ukraine. While several members of the orchestra are now on active service, the rest of the ensemble continues to work in the capital, fitting rehearsals around all-too frequent rocket attacks. It’s not the…