http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/09/barabara-ellen-trudie-styler-big-issue

Dear Editor,

Barbara Ellen says if she was selling The Big Issue guest edited by Trudie Styler she might be tempted to burn them. Why? Because Ms Styler has 6 homes and has the temerity to be married to a famous man.

If Ms Ellen was forced by a change of circumstances to have to end up selling the Big Issue she would more than likely relish the chance to sell an issue full of well known contributors. Because, as has been proved Big Issue vendors income increases when the well connected get on board of The Big Issue. Of course Ms Ellen, in desperate circumstance might choose to beg to survive, or steal and get caught up with the police. Or even offer her body in return for money. But sure as eggs is eggs she would not choose the cavalier destruction of her only legitimate means of income.

Ms Ellen has actually missed the boat. The person who gave me, John –one home- Bird , the chance to start the Big Issue was a multi homed Gordon Roddick. Who with his wife Anita had not been homeless, ever. Should we have refused their multi homed support?

I appreciate the moral guidance, but please don’t demean those that have to live by their labours, and who have not the chance to make a funeral pyre out of their living. Please Ms Ellen don’t behave so spoilt by your choices and impose those on others who have none. They are there to make money, not to pass judgment on the over provided for.

John Bird, Founder, Editor in Chief,
The Big Issue.

The Big Issue 1-5 Wandsworth Road,
SW8.

Today’s Daily Mail has a story about Trudie Styler becoming guest editor of The Big Issue. It seems to have rattled this particular journalists cage, causing some sourness. The 6 times homed Trudie, with her husband Sting seem to be worth going on for nearly £200 million.

We asked Trudie to be guest editor because we know she is well connected and will bring some  big names to The Big Issue. Bringing big names means bigger sales, so therefore more income for homeless people.

The reporter did not refer to the last big, well housed guest editor David Cameron, or the big Christmas Issue featuring the many many times housed Prince William.

Nor did the writer refer to The Roddick family who gave me the money to start The Big Issue, who were not short of a few houses at the time.

I remember once having lunch with Lord Rothermere in his exclusive dining room to talk about helping me become London’s mayor. His family I believe own the Daily Mail and I know they are not homeless, nor have been for quite a while.

The problem seems to be that only presumably the mono-homed should be guest editors of The Big Issue, and only the mono-homed should put the money into starting The Big Issue.

I thought the Daily Mail was a firm defender of the many homed; the monarchy and the wealthy. As a mono-homist I have no envy of the multi homed. If they can help me in my work of helping the homeless to help themselves good. The ones who do not help me may they have dry rot in all their properties and have badgers dig up their croquet lawns.

Check out the article below – your thoughts?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2046207/Stings-wife-Trudie-Styler-guest-edit-Big-Issue.html

Big Issue doesn’t stand out in a crowd, admits founder

John Bird tells Nina Lakhani why his 20-year-old magazine is being revamped

JOHN LAWRENCE

John Bird calls himself a self-appointed grandee of the poor.

Celebrating its 20th birthday this Thursday, The Big Issue is undoubtedly one of Britain’s most successful social enterprises, and magazines. But its vendors have seen a significant drop in sales since last month’s riots – of between 7 and 10 per cent – and its founder, John Bird, agrees with some critics that the publication has lost its edge and feels a bit tired.

“Back in the early Nineties we were the new kids on the block so everyone was buying the paper,” says Mr Bird, ahead of a relaunch next month. “Now, we are among a number of street manifestations: there’s chuggers (“charity muggers”) , all those free magazines, a big return of begging. We’re not as exciting as we used to be. Which is why we are trying to refer the whole thing, make it more buzzy.

“It’s a real struggle producing a magazine that’s fresh and we now desperately need reinvention. Desperately.”

A new London edition launches in October which will be followed by more locally driven Big Issues across the UK. Around 100 vendors (out of the total of 3,000) will be trained as journalists, rented smart phones, and set up with blogs, for which they’ll be paid £100 a month as local Big Issue reporters. Bird wants a more self-help focus in the publication, but has yet to convince his editorial team.

Following the sales drop-off he wants vendors to apply for compensation through the government scheme set up to help affected businesses. “The riots hit us tremendously. We had to remove the vendors for a few days but even now, people are not so happy on the streets, they feel more threatening to older people so they’re rushing home. It was like this, but worse, after 9/11.”

While eager to condemn the public sector strikes (“absolute shit”), he is more circumspect about the rioters. “I did warn Blair and Cameron and Brown that if you have a whole group of people who have no role in life apart from to be young, in the end, some of them are going to turn against you and bite you because the devil makes work for idle hands.” He criticises proposals to punish rioters and their families by taking away benefits as “political spitefulness”, driven by ministers who didn’t enjoy feeling politically and socially impotent.

He says his relationship with Gordon Roddick, the co-founder and financial backer of The Big Issue, has suffered since wife Anita Roddick’s death four years ago. Mr Bird first met Mr Roddick in Edinburgh in the late 1960s, having fled there to escape the police who were pursuing him for benefit fraud. He describes Anita Roddick as “the most splendid, mad, creative woman I ever met”.

Born in West London in 1946 to poor Irish immigrants, Mr Bird first became homeless at the age of five. He spent three years in an orphanage from the age of seven, was excluded from school, and spent several spells in prison in his teens and 20s where he learnt reading, writing and the basics of printing. He went to art school for a year in 1964, dropping out after his girlfriend became pregnant with his first child.

Now in his third marriage, to Parveen, a former television presenter 24 years his junior, Bird is a father-of-five, with children aged between four and 45. He is officially no longer a Londoner, living in Cambridge, where he is organised by his wife and assistant.

His first art exhibition opens in London next week, 47 years after he went to art school. He drew each piece for “Arses, Grasses and Trees” on an iPad and is eager to stress his technological know-how, although this doesn’t extend to working his phone.

Bird hits back at recent criticism about the rise in Romanians selling the magazine, who now make up nearly 30 per cent of vendors. “Romanians are probably some of the hardest working people in Britain right now, but they are half-citizens, so they have some rights but not many, which opens the gate to all sorts of illegal practices and abuse.”

He adds: “We know some of them are on the fiddle and we know we work with some horrible people but we don’t hide things and we work with the police, with the Borders Agency, but Big Issue is an open system, like the NHS, which makes it open to abuse.”

He sums himself up: “I am a self appointed grandee of the poor. I am one of them who got out and got into a position to help, so I will mollycoddle Lord Mandleson, Cameron, Blair, and Brown, anyone if it helps.”

He remains refreshingly critical about the magazine: “I don’t want to read The Big Issue and read how miserable it is living under capitalism. I want to know what you’re going to do about it, how you going to dismantle it.

“If you condemn the bankers or the Government without finding a solution, then all you are doing is defining yourself by the failures of others… That’s why 20 years ago I invented the Big Society. I didn’t want to wait for the Government, I wanted the local community to take responsibility.”

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3784573/The-Big-Issue-changes-lives-for-the-better.html

…….to give my take on the contrasting Tory/Labour explanations for the riots.

Then tune in to Radio 4′s Today Programme tomorrow morning at 8.10am for more Bird’s views

John Bird: Fashion has become a weapon on the streets of London

What you wear can be a matter of life and death – as last week’s riots demonstrated

Many terrible images are thrown up by the rioting and looting: the Malaysian boy helped up and then robbed; the flowers left where three men were murdered on the streets of Birmingham; the police cars being pounded.

But for me one of the most significant is the shorter, weaker, white boy being made to strip while a bigger black boy, or man, watches. The uniform that the white boy, and many white boys wear, is being taken from him. He is no more a human being. He is no more one of the boys who run with the riot.

Supremacy on the street is a black supremacy. It is the uniform of the poor black inner city boldly adopting an identity to say “fuck you” – taking a social position of emptiness and nothingness and making it into a social power statement.

People make the point that the rioters were not all inner-city black kids wearing their sport suits and hoods. There were others who were not poor blacks from the inner city. They were white, maybe poor, from social housing and social security; but there are others who come from more prosperous or comfortable backgrounds.

A good point. But understand this: poor inner-city black people are fashion leaders. They are the style leaders. They are the leader. And you follow.

Much of what has happened over the last week is about fashion and style. It’s about belonging, or not belonging. Often the boys who have been knifed on the streets of London have not just been members of other gangs; they have also been unfashionably attired.

They have not got the true stamp of originality. In the same way that youth culture of former times meant everyone had to have the mod look, or the Ted look, or even the new romantic look, now there is a new look. And you either adopt that garb or you are terribly vulnerable.

There is a fascism of fashion that is deadly and taking place on our streets and spilling over into our lives. A “life and deathness”, and if you don’t adhere to it you are likely to become a victim.

The Somalian boy, for example, threatened on a bus in south London, is so frightened he gets off the bus at a stop that is not his normal stop – and is stabbed at that bus stop. He dies a few feet from his disembarkation, in the cold light of day.

He will have stuck out as not from their gang, maybe, their postal code. But also he may well have stuck out because he was an African. He was not a part of the great number of young blacks who come from the African diaspora; from the West Indies. And because of that he may well have looked gauche and out of place.

Along the Walworth Road in south London live many black families that came from Africa. They were not a part of the displaced black culture of the West Indies and for the last 20 years the parents of Africa have been fighting a battle against the fashion and styles of West Indian youth. And they are losing.

Their African children are adopting the uniforms of West Indian youth: the language patterns, the patois. The style. So they are imitating them in order to become a part of this big mix. Often not deprived in the way that many West Indian children are, they nonetheless imitate depravation.

When someone says this is not an inner-city black thing, they are kidding themselves. The imagery of the inner-city young black kid, in his shell suit and hood, and his throwaway contempt for authority, is the bar, the standard by which many are judged. I saw this coming. Twenty-five years ago I was driving my son to school and we picked up one of his classmates. This 10-year-old boy came from a very solid middle-class family, but as soon as he got in the car he asked my son: “Guess how much these trainers cost?” My son disinterestedly replied: “£10, £20, £50?” Even then, trainers were big money.

In the end, the boy declared proudly that the trainers had cost £50. Disgusted, I turned around and said: “How the hell did you manage to con your parents into paying such a price?”

He was so proud that he had got the best. The best label. The best look. What he was saying was a precursor of later times when fashion, a new kind of fascism and social control, would be the decisive factor in determining one’s position on the streets. That boy has become a man. Listen to him closely. He works in the city, yet he still has the traces in his accent of West Indian-kid patois.

That middle-class boy was a precursor, the shape of things to come. A whole generation of people imitating the street supremacy of the poor. Because the poor have got the style. But let us look below the surface of this shell-suit hoodedness. This also is not an original thing. In the same way that young black kids copy a kind of stumbling, mumbling patois – speaking in imitation of how many of their grandparents’ Windrush generation may have spoken – they also take the garb of another.

That other is the inner city of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, where people die for their style. And style is a kind of dying anyway. Style wars mixed with oppression of a level that would make the black youth of England look anaemic.

Stop-and-search is not all that black people have to put up with in America. They have a police force geared up to prevent the use of water hydrants in the hot days of summer. The oppressiveness of the US political, social and racial system is the tinderbox that created the fashion you see on the streets of our riot-torn cities. This style, along with the music and the fashion and the attitude, has been exported and imitated down to a tee.

Even the way that young black people imitate the speech patterns and style of their elders who largely came over from Jamaica, the young inner-city blacks of the US imitate the Southern voices of their grandparents with their prosaic Dixie speak. All of this is style. All this is about identity. You need an identity.

What we have to realise is that this supreme style is a form of social control that wards off social development and keeps people subdued and unable to rise to the occasion.

The only people who do well out of this kind of style oppression are the white people on the edge: the imitating young middle classes who can use it as an identity and call each other “bruv” from morning until night in their advertising jobs.

They wear tattoos, taking another inspiration from another oppressed culture: Latino prison and street culture.

If we are to get to the bottom of what has happened in our damaged streets, we need to look below the surface and see the oppressive fashion. And we need to see how this self-defeating world of outsider’s uniforms may suit the fashion industry and the record industry, but is not good for our kids – black or white, inner city or leafy suburb. We have to break the power of this disgusting form of social control.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/riots-down-to-criminality-says-david-cameron-2338009.html