Table of contents for 10/14/2024 in The Big Issue

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Bunk up Here’s an idea: how about MPs from constituencies outside London sharing an American-style dorm during their working week? There would then be no need for the ‘second home allowance’ they currently claim, which would be a considerable saving to the taxpayer. Maggie Cobbett, Ripon A wild claim Nadhim Zahawi, in your 1633 issue [16-22 September], made the astonishing comment that “during lock-down... we did the most incredible work protecting the nation... We treated the nation like adults and it worked.” Really? Arrows and circles on the floor – go here, stand there! – wear a mask in the pub to go to the toilet, but not when sitting down…

When any child of the ’90s came home from school, chances are they’d stick the telly on and watch Ant and Dec living life at the fictitious Byker Grove youth club. Nearly two decades after it ended, the show is coming back, but the lads sitting in a very real Byker youth centre at 4pm on a weekday have never heard of it. The Chevron is a place to play a game of Fifa, beat a journalist at pool, and perhaps even find a job. “It’s not the best space in the world, but we’ve tried to make the most of it,” says Jennie Maughan, a youth worker at the centre. Those who come to the centre face obstacles rarely portrayed on mainstream TV shows: high levels of poverty, persistent…

BIG COMMUNITY ROADSHOW A LIFE-CHANGING CHARITY It all starts, Dan Northover explains, with a chopping board. “Early on, we would get the offcuts of wood that other people were throwing out. We got people to plane those down and stick them together to make this really nice striped-effect chopping board,” he told the Big Issue. “That’s still our day-one project that we get people doing.” Northover founded Handcrafted, a charity empowering socially excluded individuals to gain skills and find housing. The chopping board may be the “day-one project” at the charity’s wood craft sessions – run regularly at its Durham, Gateshead and Chester-le-Street hubs – but from day two, the world’s your (hand-carved) oyster. Chairs, football tables, illustrated clocks, guitars, garden sculptures, skate ramps, a soap box racer; attendees have…

When I was 16 my preoccupations were music and books. I’d probably gone past my science-fiction period by 16. So I was reading history books, The Communist Manifesto, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. American writers like Richard Ford and John Cheever. A big thing for me when I was 16 was the ‘Red Light Zone’ on Channel 4. That was a sign of cutting-edge content – I saw Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Antonioni movies there. I didn’t enjoy school much but what was great about that time is it’s when Radiohead started. We all rehearsed in the music room at school when we were on breaks. I was in the same year as Thom [Yorke, singer and guitarist] and we had classical guitar lessons with the same teacher. Then…

In real life, men can be disappointing. When they’re not being unreliable, weird, boring or sexually deviant, they’re often busy not doing things. Like remembering birthdays, carrying out basic domestic tasks or texting you back. Men in romcoms however, are a different breed, because they’re usually composites of what straight women are looking for. They’re always hotter, more vulnerable and of course, funnier than any man you’ve ever met in your life. Instead of whingeing about the thermostat or cracking their knuckles, they say exactly the right thing at the right time. They can see through your bullshit to the Real You. They can cook and they always listen to every piffling little thing you say, while gazing at you in unbridled wonder. Oh, and also they can be masterful…

Remember you’re a vendor It has been four years since Earl John Charlton last sold the Big Issue – but he went back to his native Newcastle for three days only, to take part in the first leg of Big Issue’s Community Roadshow. Big Issue was in Newcastle at the start of the month as part of our efforts to find ways to work for good, bringing all aspects of the group to cities and towns across Britain. Newcastle was the first stop and our man Charlton, joined by a Womble special guest, was happy to don his red tabard one more time. Charlton’s remarkable story, which was featured in the film Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son earlier this year, saw him beat drug addiction and get off the streets through…

EXCLUSIVE Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell: ‘I’m worried about excess deaths under Labour’ By Isabella McRaeBig Issue Senior Reporter Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has said he is “terrified” the government will make “another wrong move” and cut benefits in the autumn budget. The MP for Hayes and Harlington, who has had the Labour whip removed, warned “people will lose their lives” if austerity measures are introduced. Speaking exclusively to Big Issue, McDonnell said: “There’s been a lot of noise about painful decisions and I’m worried they’ll look again at some form of impact on welfare provision.” Keir Starmer has promised there will be “no return to austerity”, but the government has already cut the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners and refused to drop the two-child limit on…

“My mum and dad brought me as a really massive treat to see Joe Pasquale in pantomime at Newcastle Theatre Royal one Christmas. I’ve got a tattoo of Peter Pan on my arm because of that moment.” Meet Jamie Eastlake, an Olivier award-winning writer-director-producer from Blyth in Northumberland, who’s not just a vital voice in theatre, he is living proof of the benefits access to the arts brings for working-class people. Eastlake runs Laurels – a fringe theatre and nightspot in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, while working as a playwright and director. Laurels is a quietly radical proposition, combining a welcoming bar in a 120-year-old social club with a theatre focused on telling stories from underrepresented groups and amplifying working-class voices. When Eastlake founded Laurels with comedy writer Steve Robertson…

In April 2022, I wrote for the Big Issue about Ukraine’s “song of resistance” Chervona Ruta – a groovy orchestral folk-pop number from 1968 which, in defiance of Soviet authorities, smuggled forbidden patriotic sentiment into ostensibly sweetly innocent lyrics. Written by 19-year-old Volodymyr Ivasyuk – who became one of the most famous musicians in Ukrainian history before dying in 1979, probably vengefully murdered by the KGB – it has taken on renewed resonance in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It left me intrigued about how music acts as a beacon of cultural sovereignty in Ukraine, blinking in the fog of “Russification” long imposed upon the country by its much bigger neighbour. I was excited, then, to learn about the release of Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic…

Here at Social Enterprise Academy, we have been working with changemakers from across the globe since 2004. We believe that now, more than ever, we need social entrepreneurship to tackle the challenges we face as a society. It really is an exciting time to be part of this movement: every day we feel inspired by the people we meet, their passion and ambition to change their communities for the better. We are working with a record number of adults and young people. And by 2030 we aim to create a fairer society by facilitating 10 million social entrepreneurs globally. We can’t do this alone – so it is reassuring to find partners from all sorts of industries who want to impact the communities they are part of in a meaningful…

‘The opportunity forced me out of my shell’ Jamie Rankine was a shy primary seven pupil when her teacher first encouraged her to get involved with Social Enterprise Schools. “I didn’t really speak to many people. I was really quiet,” she remembers. Pushed out of her comfort zone, 10-year-old Jamie found the role a challenge, but flourished as part of the team of four young social entrepreneurs at Our Lady of Peace in Linwood, just outside Glasgow. The school serves an area ranked among the most deprived places in the country by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. Seeing that many of their peers struggled to afford school essentials, the pupils set up a business to recycle good-quality, second-hand uniforms and sell them on at an affordable price. Their social…

Big Issue vendor Matthew Campbell has written a powerful letter to Keir Starmer in a bid to convince the prime minister to take action on the housing and poverty crises. The London seller is one of 15 people living in poverty who penned an open letter to the PM ahead of this month’s budget and as part of Big Issue’s Poverty Zero Campaign. Dear Prime Minister, I’m writing this letter to you to show my frustration and anger at the state of housing in this country. If your government is going to bring down poverty, ending the housing crisis must be a priority. When I moved to my place, I was lucky to get an assured social housing tenancy. But now the system has changed, and thousands of people are…

“I’m fed-up of seeing us stuck behind Manchester or Leeds, let alone London,” said Kim McGuinness during her bid to become the first mayor of the North East. The pitch worked. Since her election in May, the 39-year-old has set her sights on eliminating child poverty, bringing public transport under state control, and leading the region into a powerful future. But if Newcastle is to soar, she’ll have to be bold. How will she help craft a new North East? Big Issue spoke to McGuinness about her life, ambitions and a few controversies along the way ‘Talent is classless. Opportunity isn’t’ A few months into her new job, Kim McGuinness hopes to remain normal. She walks her two dogs, still has the same friends as she did before her political ascent,…

With 10 seconds left on the clock in his final run at the men’s BMX freestyle Olympic final, Kieran Reilly pulled it all out of the bag. In BMX jargon: he performed a 360 double whip into a flair whip, pushed into a 720 double tail whip, and finished with a perfect double whip as the buzzer sounded. In layman’s terms: he smashed it. “At the end of the second run, I just threw my bike away,” the Olympian tells the Big Issue. The performance bagged him a Paris 2024 silver medal. “And I felt that no matter what happened that day, I was going to leave everything on the course, and I was going to achieve my dream of riding at the Olympic Games. So that feeling of letting…

One of the most successful writers of his generation, William Boyd’s new novel is ostensibly a typical spy thriller. Yet he is not really a writer of spy thrillers, and Gabriel’s Moon is about more than sexual espionage and drinking stiff drinks in the hushed bars of foreign capitals – not to deny that there’s plenty of that. It’s really about the Cold War, and about independence. And it really is still as good a read as the rest of his continent-crossing, rollicking fiction. Gabriel Dax is a troubled person, troubled by the brutal deaths of both his parents during his childhood, and the psychological effects of their brutality. The house fire from which he miraculously escapes is blamed on the eponymous moonlight candle he kept in his childhood bedroom.…

CULTURE INTERVIEW Geordie Greep Most bands come with an in-built obsolescence button. Often it is pressed because of economics (collectively not making enough money or some members, ie the songwriters, making too much money), drugs or internal politics (spending so much time with people outside of your family is inherently unnatural). Splits are typically, and euphemistically, blamed on ‘creative differences’, but this often clumsily papers over outright loathing. But sometimes bands honestly do start to pull in very different creative directions. “Things fall apart,” warned famed rock critic WB Yeats, “the centre cannot hold.” Black Midi, when they arrived in 2017 as the most un-Brit School band to ever form at the Brit School, felt like a band that could comfortably push and twist in multiple directions simultaneously.…

As we face the huge problems besetting the world today – injustice, inequality, poverty, environmental destruction, climate change – it can be easy to feel overwhelmed, like tackling all of it is impossible… or maybe just above our pay grade. Yet all over the world, millions of social entrepreneurs are taking change into their own hands, plotting a more democratic path to progress. “Elon Musk isn’t going to solve the world’s problems,” says Social Enterprise Academy (SEA) chief executive Neil McLean. “But millions of social entrepreneurs are, at a community level.” There are now approximately 10 million social enterprises globally – businesses that, like Big Issue, exist for a social or environmental purpose. They account for 3% of all companies worldwide, according to research published earlier this year by the…