The Big Issue 5/9/2022

From pizza to lipstick, palm oil is present in almost half of all packaged products found in supermarkets. It gives products a longer shelf life, it’s odourless, colourless and used as a cooking oil across the world. Indonesia is responsible for the majority of palm oil, but late last month announced it was banning exports. This came as the price increased 200 per cent since 2019 and after hundreds of people in Jakarta had to queue to obtain affordable supplies. It’s not just the supply of palm oil that’s drying up. Ukraine produces around half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil, and since the war began exports have dropped by 95 per cent, prompting retailers in UK and Europe to limit the number of bottles customers can buy – Morrisons and…

HOUSING Boris Johnson wants to bring back Right to Buy in a very big way. There could not be a worse time to do it, warn experts Boris Johnson’s plan to extend the Right to Buy scheme to allow housing association tenants to buy their home at a knockdown price has been labelled as a ploy to secure votes from low-income households in traditional “red wall” areas. The Prime Minister is looking to give as many as 2.5 million people the chance to buy their home for a discount of up to 70 per cent on the market price, depending on the number of years they have spent living in the property. Johnson is also exploring using money spent on housing benefit to contribute to mortgages, according to reports in The Daily Telegraph that…

Nothing brings a sense of place and people more than being there I get a little obsessed by the 10,000. If I don’t get the steps in, I feel jittery. If it’s close to the end of the day, I’ll take the dog out, again, or find some other reason to walk round and round. Talking to others about your step count, I’ve been reminded more than once, is like sharing your dreams. Not your hopes and aspirations, but the actual details of what you dream about. It’s of little interest to others. And yet, here I am. The 10,000 step thing is a confection. It’s a marketing ploy, dreamed up in the early 1960s by a Japanese corporation to sell their new pedometer. Scientists have since calculated that around 7,000 steps a…

Prima Facie, according to the dictionary, means ‘at first appearance’; self-evident, obvious. And this is the term that playwright Suzie Miller has used for the title of her courtroom drama. Played by Jodie Comer, it is a 90-minute one-hander, not a monologue, but a play that is skilfully handled by a single actor. I went to the press night last week expecting nothing in particular because I wasn’t feeling like a West End night out. My mind was too full of matters like ‘it’s very expensive to keep people poor’, and the fact that I had just finished a silent retreat. The play seemed initially to be a portrait of a comprehensive school girl making her way inexorably towards some high point in her chosen career of law. Everything looked to be…

Housing priorities Tom Forth thinks we need lots more empty homes in Britain [Dispatch, April 25]. Tom’s theory is that if we build enough homes, so that say, one in 10 are empty, then housing will become cheap again and we’ll all be happy and cost-effectively housed. That is why homes in places like Kensington and Chelsea are so cheap, right? After all, 11 per cent of homes (one in nine) there have no one living in them – we are talking long-term vacant properties and homes with no ongoing residential use. The odd thing is that Mr Forth’s tool says the number of vacant properties in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is only 1.3 per cent long-term and only 2.4 per cent total (including short-term vacancies during renovations and…

BIG ISSUE ART Artist Heath Kane on why he set up an auction to raise thousands for Big Issue vendors “People take it for granted that there are billionaires, but nobody ever really thinks about the maths of a billion,” says artist Heath Kane. Kane points out that, to make a billion, you’d need a salary of £20 million a year for 50 years. “It seems impossible. So how is it we’ve now got multi-billionaires?” Such is the level of mega-wealth now that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is around 400 times wealthier than the Queen. It must be hard to know what to do with that kind of money. Musk is buying Twitter – but what would a regular person do? That’s the question at the heart of Richer Than, Kane’s new exhibition. Using…