Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/11/2023 i The Big Issue

The biggest problem faced when you ask people what they think is them actually telling you. When that truth comes, reality bites. For a long time, the Westminster government told everybody that due to lack of money they’d have to make cuts. The legitimacy of the austerity programme – taking from the poor to, well, take more from the poor – was emboldened by election victory in 2015. A further general election victory in 2019 that scored a massive majority must have left those in the big chair thinking, why hello – all those people out there believe in the righteousness of our political ideology. We can cut public spending, cut public services, make the case for small government and sail on the shining deck of the good ship market…

Chris Bryant used to be a curate in the Church of England, a role that taught him not to be too much of a fundamentalist. It’s a mindset he has tried to maintain throughout his 22 years as a Labour MP. “I am not someone who thinks everyone on the other side of the house is a monster, most MPs are there to do good,” he says. In recent years, that optimistic outlook must have been severely tested. Since 2020 he has chaired the Committees on Standards and Privileges, providing him with a front row seat for one of the most chaotic and corrupt parliaments in living memory. For him, things reached a nadir in 2021 when his committee found Tory MP Owen Paterson guilty of paid advocacy (taking payments…

INTERVIEW: ANNA FUNDER ‘I think Orwell would have much preferred to be able to express himself as a homosexual man’ Anna Funder is a big shot. Always a clever clogs (she graduated college in Melbourne as dux), she was revered as an international human rights lawyer for the Australian government before her eloquent political essays were so widely published she decided to become a full-time writer. Her first book, 2004’s Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, a study of resistance and collusion during Communist-era East Germany, won almost every literary award going and flew onto school reading lists around the world. She followed that with a devastating novel, All That I Am, based on the true story of a group of young Jewish activists who fled to London during…

Having had the rare experience of spending one month in just one city, the final weekend of the summer became a haste of travelling as I performed at three music festivals in three days. I have been performing at End of the Road for 16 years and it has one of the finest comedy stages in the world – a wooded slope leading to a stage of immaculate slats that I am told I once described as straight from the imagination of the forest pixies playing Jenga. To be surrounded by so many squirrels and so much photosynthesis emboldens a performer. I am blessed by one comedian being stuck in traffic, which allows me an extra 20 minutes of tangential stand-up under the canopy. In past times, the storyteller Sarah…

The impact of Covid has blurred the lines between home and work and many offices are likely to remain empty. So what to do with all those redundant office blocks? It’s logical to look at the empty buildings in town and city centres or out on industrial parks and see an opportunity to tackle the long-running housing crisis across the country. There is even a mechanism in place to quickly and easily transform an office into residential homes. First introduced in 2015, permitted development rights (PDR) were used to create 22,770 additional dwellings in 2021-22, with change of use on 10,303 properties across England. That included 8,359 cases where old offices became new homes. The method doesn’t require planning permission, which allows homes to be created at rapid pace. But…

GPs across the country are oversubscribed. So what happens when housing developments bring thousands of new residents? Bicester in Oxfordshire, has a population of around 37,000 and, thanks to a string of new builds, is projected to grow by 20,000 by 2035. GP surgeries are feeling the strain. To meet extra demand, a “super surgery” dubbed the Health Hub promised to bring two existing surgeries together in one larger facility. But in March 2023, the £14 million project was abandoned, hampered by rising construction costs and inflation. Assura PLC, the Hub’s construction company, said there was “an inadequate level of funding available from NHS sources” for the project. Back in 2016, NHS England was consulted as part of a proposal for 1,700 homes in Bicester. It concluded that the resulting…

The current housing crisis began over 100 years ago in the First World War. In order to put a stop to the continuing increase in rental levels faced by returning soldiers, an increase that had begun almost as soon as war commenced, the government imposed a control on rents. And that control continued in some form or other until the Conservative Party’s Rent Act of 1957. Between the rent controls of the First World War years and 1957, rents stayed low. The 1957 Act brought in a novelty: once the property was vacated, a new market rent could be imposed on the new tenant. This opened up the working-class housing market to changes that had not happened for almost half a century. With rents artificially low as inflation increased gradually…

When I was 16 I was at high school, getting into rock bands like Rage Against the Machine. And starting to get into drinking. But I was also quite politically engaged and idealistic. I was concerned with social issues like poverty and starting to attend protests like the Make Poverty History march. My grandma in particular was very political, very socialist. Throughout her life she was on Ban the Bomb marches and very politically engaged. Any time we got together as an extended family, it would always result in big, political, very heated debates and people storming out of the room. I was fortunate to have parents who opened up their own successful restaurant business, so I grew up in relative privilege. As teenagers we used to give my dad…

REVIEW Hot fuzz: 50 years of movie moustaches One thing you can say about Kenneth Branagh’s recent screen take on Hercule Poirot: those little grey cells come with an impressively large moustache attached. But if the cinematic popularity of handlebars, walruses and banditos has waxed and waned over the last 50 years, there have still been plenty of notable examples. Let’s pluck a few hairy highlights. One moustache casts a long shadow over 1970s cinema. But before we get to Burt, an honourable mention for Marlon Brando’s relatively discreet effort, tucked neatly between those regal cheeks. Midway through Francis Ford Coppola’s ravishing mafia saga, a drained Don Corleone is recuperating in bed. Then a slow cross-fade to rural Sicily makes his lip-warmer appear to bloom into a tree. It’s a…

JAZZ Ryuichi pickings from a French collective The Japanese pianist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March after, in his words, “living alongside cancer” for several years. Two months before he passed away he released an album called 12, his 12th solo studio recording, a collection of minimalist etudes poignantly accompanied by the sound of his own occasionally laboured breathing. Sakamoto once said that the “piano symbolises interiority”. This startlingly intimate record marked the end of a decades-long career exploring the spaces between distant poles of genre and sound, from trailblazing techno-pop in the late 1970s with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, to his 1978 debut solo album Thousand Knives, mixing modern synths with classical piano, to brushes with funk, afrobeat and hip-hop on 1980’s B-2 Unit to his Oscar, BAFTA,…

JEFF KNIGHT, 56 I’m a street person, I like to greet everybody with open arms. How’s your day? How’s life? How’s things? How’s uni? How’s the kids? My pitch is on Stokes Croft in Bristol. You get all sorts of people, lots of nightlife. It’s busy. I’ve been selling The Big Issue for 10 or 12 years. I’ll be out there every day, from eight in the morning, with a break for lunch, until the afternoon or the evening. Before, I was rough sleeping and begging in Castle Park. I got directed to The Big Issue after being stopped by the police. It changed my life, helped me get off the streets, and uplifted my spirit. Sometimes I’ll talk to my customers for 20 minutes, half an hour. I’ll be…

We need to build 3.1 million homes over the next 20 years, according to Shelter. That number may seem daunting, but it’s far from unprecedented. From the Second World War to 1980, around 126,000 social homes were built every year. The cost of 3.1 million homes, estimated at £10.7bn per year by Shelter’s calculations, goes down to £3.8bn “when savings in benefits and increased taxes are considered”. This comes to £76bn over 20 years. (If that still seems like a lot, it’s still less than HS2’s projected cost.) But for the last few decades there has been little political will to push for social housing. It’s often depicted as poorly built and maintained; hotbeds of antisocial behaviour and crime. There is some truth to it. Councils don’t receive enough funding…

When trying to find a new home, letting agents are there to help or hinder, depending whose best interests they have in mind. Homes for Good is different. Since its launch in 2013 in Glasgow, it’s been on a mission to transform empty houses into quality homes for people on low incomes. It does this through one small yet fundamental mindset shift. “Almost all agents see the landlord as their customer. But it’s actually tenants who are the customers,” says founder Susan Aktemel. Homes for Good employs an interior designer to work with tenants to create the look and feel they want. The idea came a decade ago, when Aktemel, a landlord, grew unhappy with letting agents she was working with. “I realised my tenants also weren’t getting a good…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Low energy Energy is currently rationed by price. This prices many of us out of the market. Energy should be rationed so that everyone can have a basic amount. Since April 2023 I have budgeted 10% of my income from pensions on my energy bill, but this is unlikely to keep me warm over the winter. I am not in a position to pay more than 10% because I would be unable to pay the other essential bills. Worrying is a waste of time and energy. I became ill from worrying last winter. I worried myself sick. But I can’t do anything about it. I’ve made the best budget I can…

CULTURE John Sheehy is a well-respected outsider artist who has exhibited throughout Europe. A long-time regular Street Art contributor, he first discovered his natural ability and enjoyment of painting in 1999, aged 50, as encouraged by The Big Issue. Sheehy has gone on to be exhibited at prestigious galleries in the UK and abroad including Somerset House, the British Museum and the Royal Academy. The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com. At least half of the profit goes to the artist.…

Mawaan Rizwan is one of the brightest comedy talents in the country. He also wears a tracksuit better than anyone since Brian Clough. Rizwan’s debut television series, Juice, which grew out of his hit Edinburgh show of the same name, blends surreal humour and confessional comedy in a genuinely groundbreaking and properly funny way. It is, says Rizwan, the culmination of years of learning, growing and honing his craft. From roping his brother and, later, his mum in to his YouTube videos as a teenager, to eight years of returning to the Edinburgh Fringe and building a show, finding his voice, creating a style all his own. Over the years in Edinburgh, he grew from playing in corridors where “people were only there to shelter from the rain” and would…

NETTLES A sting in the tale Wild nettle (Urtica dioica) is one plant most people know about; we encounter it in childhood and soon learn about its sting. For some, giving nettles a wide berth is all they need to know, but for others their ‘look, don’t touch’ is an invitation to explore more deeply. Others seek out the sting of the nettle as a purported salve for rheumatism, arthritis, hay fever and other allergies. Many of our most loved British butterfly species – the Red Admiral, Painted Lady, Comma and Small Tortoiseshell – lay their eggs on nettle leaves. At certain times of the year nettles are a valued foraged food source. The leaves are so nutritious that without their sting they might have been grazed to extinction. In…

“It brought me right out of homelessness. I was on the streets and then Jimmy’s saved my bacon for the last time.” Big Issue vendor Eamonn Kelly was homeless before the pandemic struck. After years of battling addiction and living on the streets, he was given his own home in Cambridge through homelessness charity Jimmy’s. Within a couple of years Prince William and wife Catherine were on his sofa. But his home wasn’t brick and mortar. It was constructed in a factory and shipped to a new housing development for people with similar backgrounds to Kelly’s. It was a modular home: a type of housing that has become an increasingly popular way of helping people experiencing homelessness off the streets. Building good-quality homes is difficult, especially at a time of…

Mouldy walls, poor value for money, even rodent infestations – these are all depressingly familiar for those in UK student accommodation in 2023. One third of students identified damp in their properties, according to a recent survey by money gurus Save the Student, and another 14% reported inappropriate or unannounced landlord visits. And while rents rocket, alternatives appear to be few and far between. It is something that Hakim, 27, a Governance, Development and Public Policy MA student at the University of Sussex, does not have to worry about. Hakim lives in Brighton’s first student co-operative, a shared home run by and for its tenants. They share chores, run their own finances and even set the property’s rent – which comes in at just £540, a fraction of the £1,281…