Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/24/2024 i The Big Issue

“I went through the largest national tragedy in this country since the Second World War. I watched 72 people perish in front of me,” says David O’Connell, who lives in a flat in Lancaster West estate, home to Grenfell Tower. “I have to carry on living in the area. It’s traumatic for me and my partner. On top of that, I have to pay for something that’s more expensive and doesn’t necessarily work better than what we had before. I want to be trying to get my life back together.” Seven years after the fire, residents speak of promises of change and justice unfulfilled. The Grenfell Inquiry’s final report won’t be delivered until September, while the Met admits charges won’t be brought for another year. It has left residents fearing…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue A housing solution On 18 June BBC One’s Morning Live looked at what is being done to address the problem of the one million empty homes in the UK. The program looked at one charity in Leeds, LATCH (Leeds Action to Create Homes), which works with the local council to identify and purchase some of the 3,000 empty homes in the area and renovate them for affordable rent. This also benefits the community by training and using unemployed people to give them construction skills which will make them more employable in the future. Politicians from all parties talk about building more new homes – many of which will be unaffordable for…

GENERAL ELECTION 2024 Benefits, bills and safe routes for refugees – all the things the major parties aren’t talking about that would help make Britain better Britain needs change. That’s why Big Issue put together a comprehensive plan for political leaders standing on 4 July detailing just what they should do to end poverty with our Blueprint for Change. They have their own plans, of course. We’ve combed through the manifestos to see what’s missing from the conversation and the campaign trail ahead of the general election. Reform the energy price cap Our blueprint argued that the energy price cap is unfit for purpose for low-income households and pensioners. The cap, which reflects the typical price paid, fell to £1,568 in July but remains £300 more than in 2022. There…

Kylian Mbappé has a nose for change I’ve become a little obsessed with Kylian Mbappé’s nose. And why wouldn’t I be? The noble nose met the rather substantial shoulder of Austrian centre-back Kevin Danso during France’s opening Euro 2024 match against Austria. And while the shoulder remained solid, the nose moved in several different directions. Mbappé is the French national captain and a global superstar about to embark, next season, on a career-defining period with Real Madrid. Planets were aligning for him to be the talismanic player of the championship, the one who would become accepted as the world’s best player. But the impact of the collision has changed that. Associated Press ran frequent updates. Media around the world was on alert. L’Équipe, the huge French daily sports paper, carried…

I’m always interested in new voices in fiction, writers looking to push boundaries. The mainstream publishing industry is very conservative in its tastes, so it can be hard to find daring, transgressive authors. But this week we have two writers who are taking chances with thrilling results. First up is Deliver Me by Elle Nash. The British-American author has had a couple of novels and a short story collection previously published by small presses, all of which were beautifully written and deliciously dark. Deliver Me follows in the footsteps of those books, while demonstrating an ever-improving sense of craft. The book centres around Dee-Dee, a young woman living in a small town in the Ozarks. Dee-Dee has had a number of miscarriages already, so is thrilled to discover that she’s…

Zoë Wanamaker is exasperated with politics. “Where do we get these people? Where do we get these politicians?” I had asked the star of theatre, television and film for thoughts on the general election. But true to her US roots, she also has Donald Trump on her mind. “The fact that America now will probably have Trump as a president, who is basically a television star and a bully… Language has disintegrated completely. Mental health is probably struggling because of it. The licence to treat other people badly has spread so much.” Wanamaker was born in New York, but her family fled to the UK when she was three. Her father Sam Wanamaker (who rebuilt Shakespeare’s Globe) was blacklisted in Hollywood because of his communist views, and she’s spent much…

The Bear is returning for a third series. And earlier this month, REM were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, reunited as a four-piece to perform Losing My Religion at the induction ceremony, and Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry gave a 41-minute interview to CBS News. [Who has been accessing my dreams? What’s next? A new UK government maybe?] Despite never existing at the same time, these two cultural phenomena are forever linked. And not just in my dreams. Because, when The Bear launched in 2022, 11 long years after REM disbanded, Christopher Storer’s series used the band’s music in such a stunning, heart-rending way it made even the longest of long-term fans listen anew. In season one of The Bear, the entirety of Oh…

IAN, 58 I was 58 this month, and I’ve been selling the magazine for 18 years – 14 years in Wetherby, and before that, two years in Skipton and two years in Otley. I started selling the magazine because I went through a divorce and lost my home, and things went from bad to worse. I thought, I’ve got to turn my life around; I’ll sell the Big Issue, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Now I live in a flat in Beeston. I’ve been there for five years. I got divorced because of drink. I used to drink a lot – it nearly killed me. I did an apprenticeship in painting, and then I was self-employed and used to do council house repaints, but when they brought PVC…

Last week’s pioneering learning disability issue gained a lot of interest across the media. The magazine was the first to be created by and wholly feature people with learning disabilities. ITV Lunchtime News visited our Finsbury Park, London, offices on Monday 17 June to film a piece, featuring an interview with our very own senior reporter Isabella McRae, while Channel 5 interviewed Mencap ‘Myth Buster’ and CBeebies presenter George Webster live on their evening news bulletin. This world-first special edition was covered in over 200 publications, including The Independent, Daily Mail, The Mirror, Indy100, Evening Standard and The i. CBBC Newsround also covered the story. I love this. People with a #learningdisability should be seen and heard. Proud of George and his @mencap_charity myth busters for curating the @BigIssue for…

“No teacher, no doctor, no police officer is trained to get rid of poverty, but they have to deal with the problems thrown up by poverty,” reads the statement in the small but perfectly formed manifesto I published last week for the next government’s attention. It is an unhappy truth that our public servants are in the poverty firing line, but are capable only of responding to poverty’s toxic outcomes. Would we expect a doctor, teacher or police officer to have the tools, the skills, the knowledge to reduce poverty? No, of course not. Rather, we expect other parts of society and its government to fund and run poverty prevention and cure programmes so that the doctor, the teacher and the law enforcement officer do not have too much on…

When I was 16 it was looking like I was going to get a professional footballer contract at Greenock Morton. So my mum was on my case. She was quite adamant that I wasn’t going anywhere without my school qualifications, which would get me into uni later, just in case it didn’t work out. I was playing so much football, it was actually quite an intense time. My dad used to go to all my games and was quite hard on me. At the time it felt rough. But looking back you realise that he travelled to every single game, away or at home, and you appreciate how much effort that must have taken. I got that professional contract at Greenock Morton, and I got offered another one when I…

At the close of 1966, in my last year of high school, I was spotted by photographer Richard Avedon at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in New York. Though I was an insecure, introverted 16-year-old, Avedon and Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland inspired me to come out of my shell. Within months I was modelling for Vogue and other American magazines. That summer, having graduated from high school, I flew to London to work in a publisher’s office as a reader. I was not a very diligent reader, seeing as I was out every night dancing at Sibylla’s, or queuing for Top of the Pops where I encountered The Rolling Stones for the first time. In those days, London was a much smaller place; the class system seemed to be…

Most cultural eras are misrepresented in pretty cliched ways. I never knew anyone who had a mullet or drove a Sinclair C5 in the ’80s. I don’t suppose the streets were rammed with hippies in the ’60s or punks in the ’70s. However, I was around in the ’90s and can confirm that a lot of the familiar tropes of that particular decade ring true: we really did seem to be pissed most of the time. I was a student between 1994 and 1997 so my perception is somewhat skewed, I guess. But in those particular years a great many young people really did wear anoraks and sunglasses indoors, swagger about flicking the Vs at all and sundry, talk almost exclusively about football and listen to Britpop. At least that’s…

Like Saint to Greavsie, pie to Bovril or a hooligan to a weaponised rattan bistro chair, football and music seem drawn to one another as if by some inexplicable force of nature. Despite the two often making strange bedfellows. Let’s face it: no song ever written specifically about football is actually any good – and before you say it yes, I am aware of obnoxious dirge Three Lions. Live appearances by pop stars at major tournaments are always either pointless (seemingly Will Smith sang before the 2018 World Cup final?) or laughable (Diana Ross’s penalty miss at USA ’94) or pointless and laughable (Martin Garrix and The Edge with a creepy pixellated cyber-Bono at Euro 2020). And yet, when the beautiful game and beautiful song connect like a bullet header…