Table of contents for 9/30/2024 in The Big Issue

The Southport riots are the kind of thing we like to pretend we didn’t see coming. But the men on those streets didn’t appear from nowhere. A generation ago, many of those same men were on the terraces, wrapped up in Stoney and club lore, scrapping with rival firms for bragging rights, for a sliver of respect in a world that gave them little else. But there was a strange honour to it all, in its own chaotic way. Football hooligans only fought other hoolies, men who understood the rules of engagement. You fought to show you could hold your own against game opposition, then shared bruised camaraderie in the pub. But with that ritual having been outlawed and their ranks cherry-picked by nationalist extremists, it’s all been replaced by…

AJ Odudu is supposed to be sorting tins. The Big Brother host is lending a hand at her local food bank in Blackburn. She’s been put on the packaging station: divvying non-perishables between parcels and checking expiration dates. But she keeps seeing people she knows – and she wants to catch up. “Oh yeah, a few people,” she explains later, duties complete. “One of the volunteers here does a keep fit class with my mum down at the local leisure centre. She was asking, ‘How’s your mum? Heard that she had a knee replacement, send her my love.’ “And I saw someone who was in the year below me at secondary school, she came in with her three kids to donate… there’s people who recognise me from the local church…

Sixteen was a bad age for me, various things were going on. Obviously I had the normal stresses of GCSEs. And I was a bit lost, a bit difficult for my parents. I was arrested for shoplifting at the age of 16. I’d been a shoplifter since the age of 11, on and off, and it was becoming a bit of a compulsive thing. A sort of way, I suppose, of handling stress. I’m now diagnosed with ADHD, but obviously, in the ’80s, I hadn’t been diagnosed. So I had lots of stuff going on I didn’t know about. I started smoking and drinking and sniffing petrol behind Blockbuster Video, just being a bit of a waster. My nan died that year. I haven’t got the best memories of my…

The world’s worst hitchhiker is sleeping under a tree in the woods on the Luxembourg border. He never had any intention of going to Luxembourg and doesn’t even know where it is but hey, that’s all part of the experience. This is what happens when you’ve read too many Jack Kerouac books and your attempts to emulate him are mainly based on his clothes. The hitchhiker is freezing cold, his Kerouac jeans and Kerouac lumberjack shirt are soaking wet, and his Kerouac climbing boots are leaking. This idiot – let’s call him Jeff – is in this mess because he’s guided by mistakes, and stupidity, and recklessness instead of wisdom, and planning, and sound advice. A tendency to go down the dark back alley everyone has told you not to…

Wham, bam, the 1980s are back. And not just in the form of the massive disparity between the wealthy few and the rest of us following years of Conservative government. Because with ITV’s Joan – which arrives on our screens just weeks before Disney+’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals – TV drama is going back in time. Joan stars Sophie Turner – a big return to the small screen following her long-running role as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones – as Joan Hannington, the real-life jewel thief who gatecrashed the high life thanks to a knack for swallowing diamonds and a penchant for playing dress up. It’s full of high-end fashion and soundtracked by top pop songs from the era, but also packs an emotional and political punch. “It’s…

Dante Alighieri: poet, philosopher, and potentially the pettiest man in all of 14th-century Italy. Which is, to be clear, meant entirely as a compliment. If you’re not familiar with the name, and don’t know why anyone might be discussing a medieval poet’s levels of petty, let me introduce you: Dante (as he’s most commonly known – you know, like Beyoncé, or Cher), wrote a narrative poem made up of three sections – ‘Inferno’ (hell), ‘Purgatorio’ (purgatory) and ‘Paradiso’ (heaven), collectively known as The Divine Comedy. These poems are still famous today, partly because they have inspired loads of other cultural depictions of the afterlife since they were written – most recently, my book, The Dark Within Us, in which a modern teenager descends into Dante’s version of Hell. So, why…

Hosted at Seoul’s Hanyang University in South Korea, more than 450 players who have experienced homelessness took to the pitch representing 38 nations to compete for honours. It’s the first time since the Netflix film The Beautiful Game put the tournament in the spotlight, sharing the Homeless World Cup Foundation’s mission to use the power of sport to inspire people to change their lives. Completing a hat-trick of firsts, the tournament also gained the backing of Fifa for the first time with matches broadcast for free on global football governing body’s Fifa+ platform. But once the teams arrived and got down to business, the tournament continued to be the uplifting, life-changing experience that has made it a success over the last two decades. The traditional opening ceremony was the usual…

RENTAL CRISIS Landlords are worried about rent controls. Will Labour introduce them to cap record-high rents? By Liam GeraghtyDeputy digital editor The right-wing think tank linked to Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget has warned against the UK government bringing in rent controls to curb sky-high private rents – and it’s caused an almighty row. The Institute of Economic Affairs’ (IEA) research claims that rent controls do far more harm than good after publishing a review of 196 academic studies over 60 years across 100 countries. Most studies – 56 out of 65 the group analysed – showed that rent controls succeed in lowering rents for controlled units, the IEA found. But 14 out of 17 studies found that rent control leads to higher rents in properties where rents aren’t controlled. The…

Because I go on about it all the time, politicians and the public ask me, what would you need to do if you sincerely wanted to get rid of poverty? What would be the first thing? The first thing I would do is an audit of what is being delivered by government at the moment. What works and what doesn’t work. Where are the holes in the Swiss cheese of governmental delivery? I would make this audit as thorough as time would allow. It might take six months to complete. It would highlight sterling examples of poverty-busting activity. And it would highlight the things that governmental practices do which end up enshrining people in poverty. ‘Warts and all’, it need not dress things up as workable when they are unworkable.…

Oubaiche is an Algerian-French artist. She submits this painting via the 240Project, an activity centre in London supporting vulnerable adults. “I have been drawing since the day I could hold a pen,” she says. “When I am painting, I am in my bubble. “Lashes is part of a series of drawings I made around 2002 from my imagination using mixed media like acrylics and pastels and anything that I can get hold of,” says Oubaiche. “These characters are diversely loud in colours and exaggerated, just how I like them. This particular one was inspired by Seventies flower-power vibes.” More of Oubaiche’s artwork is on exhibition and available for purchase at Artisan Eatery, a coffee shop on Ladbroke Grove in London, as well as at instagram.com/il_m_art The work on this page…

Arriving in Selby a few hours before the show, I take my normal route of wandering without destination. I arrive in streets that have signs asking for quiet and put my crisps away for fear of crunching into resident fury. I photograph chipped paint and the doors that interest me, and come across a corner house that intrigues. As I look, Paul calls out. He lives a few doors down and is packing his car. “Want to know what that is? Used to be the ticket office of the Hippodrome. They all played there, George Formby, Rita Hayworth…” He tells me it burned down halfway through a film and there are dreams of rebuilding it and opening it up with a screening of that film that starts at the precise…

We are now in the period of parental listlessness. Not all parents, but that percentage whose kids have gone to university, particularly those who wave goodbye to their youngest. It becomes increasingly clear, as bowls – clean bowls! – are where they should be in the kitchen and there are no longer piles of slightly damp towels gathering, as if by their own cotton magnetism, on bedroom floors, that there is a particular, not altogether welcome, silence that falls on a home when it has emptied itself of teenagers. At the most recent count, over 35% of 18-year-olds in England enter higher education. Obviously not all will leave home, but that is still a lot of clean bowls. But fear not future parents: this exodus may not hit you! As…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Stamp of approval Your editorial on bigissue.com on the importance of writing and receiving letters has inspired me to write one to you. Children must learn the value of proper communication and an ideal way of developing good habits should start in the classroom. Teachers should encourage pupils to write and post one letter every month. They should be asked to make a list of people they could write to and then draft their first letter. The class should be asked to vote for the best letter and a small prize could be awarded. This could be a regular feature of the English lesson. Andrew Bainbridge, London A healthy alternative This…

Often, the novel will step back from the narrative at hand and (narrator) Tange Lange himself will take over Nikolaj Tange Lange’s Romeo & Seahorse begins with a line that, in my mind, recalls Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca — “I just told my boyfriend I have Hepatitis C again.” And who knows, if du Maurier were still alive, perhaps she too would have written a novel set among the darkrooms and cruising areas of Berlin. Tange Lange’s novel is the first of his to appear in English, translated by the author himself and brought to us by the ever-reliable smut pedlars Cipher Press. A crafty work of autofiction that mixes narrative with musings on place, love, sexuality and cinema, Romeo & Seahorse is less a gay novel and more a…