INTERVIEW:Ever argumentative, controversial, along with being a brilliant self-publicist, John Bird, co-founder of 'The Big Issue', believes welfare rules must be reformed root-and-branch, he tells MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
SHORTLY AFTER HE took up office in No 10 Downing Street, Conservative prime minister David Cameron invited John Bird in to hear about his thoughts on reshaping the UK’s welfare system.
Despite having once lived on the streets, along with spending time in prison, Bird, the son of Irish parents brought up in grinding poverty in north London, is today comfortable telling his truths to the powerful.
Sitting in terraced cottage outside Cambridge, Bird says: “I asked him, ‘How much did it cost to produce the posh guy that you are?’ He said: ‘Hmm, about a quarter of a million.’ I said: ‘About a third of a million.’
“That’s for the expensive education. For the ski lessons, for the schooling, for the university. For the silly green Barbour coats and the Land-Rovers,” he goes on, as his four-year-old daughter plays quietly nearby.
"I did a survey of a 100 of our vendors, I told him. Eighty per cent of them had been in local authority care. Do you know how much it costs to produce one Big Issuevendor? About a million pounds because most of them have been in care for 10 years," he goes on.
In 1991, he was approached by Gordon Roddick, whose late wife, Anita founded The Body Shop chain, to help create a magazine to be sold by the homeless, based on a street publication Roddick had seen in New York.
The two had met years before in a pub in Edinburgh when Bird was temporarily living north of the border to avoid the police in London because of fraudulent debts he had run up, while Roddick was in the city for a rugby match.
Today, the magazine has become a global creation: “We’re now working in Africa and Asia. We opened in Korea in October, working with thousands there. There is a lot of poverty. And we’re opening up in India and Pakistan.
“We are working everywhere with the same model: you get the poor to work, you don’t give them something for nothing because if you do you make them dependent on you,” he said, speaking with certitude.
Even a casual reading of British local papers reveals stories, such as Joel Hodgson in Tottenham in north London, once homeless because of drug addiction, but who is now training to become a fitness instructor having sold the magazine.
“The rewards can be pretty good,” says Bird, “A really good salesperson could keep themselves alive, put a bit aside and begin the long, slow process of getting out of homelessness, or if they are not going to get out of homelessness they would be able to pay for whatever they get.”
Some, but not all, of the Conservatives’ agenda for welfare reform appeals to him, including the creation of a universal welfare payment; along with the belief that the State should press those who can work to work, rather than idle on benefits.
Last year, he went so far as to describe himself as “a working-class Tory”, but he says now that he did so only “to piss off the people who asked”, though it garnered him another slew of publicity at the time.
“I’m a coat-trailer, you know what that is? I am always looking for a fight. I consider myself a Marxist, Engelist, Trotskyist, Conservative-Labourite. I am a bit like a 50p piece. I face every which way. I think I do try to stir,” he says.
Born in an Irish/Cockney slum in Notting Hill, he was raised in “a little Ireland”, he says, realising only later – after three years in a Catholic orphanage – when the family moved to Fulham that he was “in an Englishman’s world”.
His father Alfred was a Protestant from Belfast, while his mother came from Mount Nagle, outside Mallow, Co Cork: “My father signed the paper that we would have to be raised as Catholics; otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to marry in 1941.
“It was interesting because my father was the one who insisted that we went to church, insisted that we went to Catholic school. My mother took a more lackadaisical attitude, but my father had signed a contract, so he didn’t.”
His mother, Eileen Byrne, had left Mount Nagle in 1939 at 18 years of age to go to London for, she thought, a life as a nurse, only to find out when she arrived that they only wanted Irish cleaners: “It was just a way of getting them to come over. She decided to move in with her sister, Kathleen, who had come over in 1937, in a place just off Portobello Road. She got a job working in the Golden Cross on Portobello Road. She was the Irish cailín, because you didn’t have many good-looking Irish girls there.
“She looked like an Irish/Spanish cross. If you put earrings on her she could have been a flamenco dancer. She met Alfred, who was a distillery worker. He used to play the piano. Tall, with a high forehead, he was the bees-knees.”
His father came from a British Army family. “Were they Irish? Depends on who you believe, really. He came from Belfast, but the family came from Lincoln in the 19th century. My father always insisted that he was an Irishman and never had any of that dislike of Catholics that others had.”
The couple married in 1941. “He was considered an invalid because he had a larynx problem. He couldn’t be understood. Throughout his life we had to translate for him. My mother was no good with money and my father liked to drink.”
By 1951, the family were behind with their rent. “When I was five, I came home from St Michael’s of the Angels school at five o’clock and all our worldly goods were on the street and my father was fighting with the bailiffs, which he was quite good at.
“Before long, we were at our grandmother’s, living in a void in the roof, which wasn’t a room. Mum and Dad slept at one end of the bed. I and my brothers slept at the other end and then there was another brother in a drawer on the floor.
“It was Dickensian circumstances. Even though it was a blasted life everybody was in it together. You felt that you were in a village and belonged to an extended family. That is virtually impossible to understand today.
“Poverty is about isolation now; it used to be about coming together. Then, we were given a council flat after a year because we became very ill. The house had been condemned, but we were given a few rooms in it,” he goes on, with remarkable candour.
Soon, however, the rent was once again in arrears. “So we had a choice. We could be taken into care by the local authority and put into one of their orphanages, or go into an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity in Mill Hill in north London.
“I was there from seven until 10. I came out a complete and utter crack-pot. I really missed my mother. The fact that we had clean beds and loads to eat and put on a load of weight and became very healthy didn’t matter to me.
“My other brothers fitted into the system, but I didn’t – always in trouble, running away, nostalgic for Notting Hill,” says Bird, whose family was reunited three years later when his parents got a council flat in Fulham.
“I felt I was in exile. And I never really got over it. I love Fulham now, but back then it was a lifeless place. There were six of us by then. I went to school at St Thomas More’s in Chelsea and went to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. We lived a little Catholic life in this strangely English place. Strange thing to say, but we had been brought up by people we thought were normal and then you meet these English people who are more aloof, more detached and they often looked on us a problem.
“I immediately got into trouble with the police, was held for shoplifting, stealing bikes and house-breaking. I then began a life of petty crime which ended up with a short, sharp shock at the age of 14 and then I ended up in a boys’ prison and a reformatory.”
Inside, Bird learnt the first of his lessons about the relationship between poverty and crime. “The largest contingent of aliens was London Irish. In one, there were 100 boys and a quarter of them+ were London Irish.
“Today, I go to prisons now and talk to a lot of black kids and they only represent about 2 per cent of the population but they are about 70 per cent of the prison population. Poverty equals crime, whatever some people say,” he goes on.
“I was born into the under-class and it was back then a very small part of British society. Now, there is about five million in it who don’t get the chance of ever seeing their children move on. It is state-sponsored poverty.
“The State is the greatest creator of poverty and crime, where the criminal justice system takes control of somebody like me, puts you into a system and you are worse coming out. They spend billions on that. They spend billions on giving you a derisory form of education.
“If you go to certain schools you know where those children are going to end up, you know they are not going to be eye-surgeons, they are not going to ending up in the universities or have middle-class jobs.
“They won’t even have the unskilled jobs that have gone to people who will work for less; people who come from Europe, Africa and Asia. This is not socialism, communism, or liberalism: this is the unintended result of bullshit thinking of a very high kind,” he says in a rush.
Much of the blame, he lays at the door of Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, though the seeds of failure in the system were sown long before she ever began to pull away subsidies that had propped up heavy manufacturing.
“Thatcher was asked what she would do with a million workers left idle because of the removal of subsidies and she said, according to Willie Whitelaw, ‘Let them have benefits’, rather like Marie Antoinette,” he continues.
In effect, Thatcher parked the lives of millions in a system where it grudgingly gave out “an infinitesimal amount of money that was never going to be enough to actually have a holiday, or buy a book, or develop the lives of your children”.
In effect, it destroyed social mobility, he believes. “At some stage we are going to have to make a major short-term investment in getting people out of poverty, because it breeds ill-health. Go to the major AEs, the vast majority there are on social security. They have been parked up.”
Bird is endlessly critical, often quite scathingly, of the myriad of organisations and charities that try to combat poverty on the streets in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere. Equally, it must be said, many of them have jaundiced opinions of him.
The existing models do little more than offer temporary relief, he argues, before going on to laud efforts by some in Westminster City Council in central London to ban on-street soup-kitchens that nightly feed hundreds of homeless.
“My attitude is that it is inhuman to give people relief on the street. You need to get people off the streets. It is inhuman to say that it is some kind of democratic right to sleep on the street.Having been a street-liver myself, it is not an ideal life,” he says.
Unerringly, Birds finds his way to the memorable quote, one he knows that will register: “It is a bit like feeding pigeons on Trafalgar Square, you give them reasons to come back again and again and then they become dependent.”
Firstly, the authorities must work to deal with problems in the hostels. “They should change their name to ‘hostiles’, because they are very, very threatening places. If you go to a homeless organisation between nine and six you might have hundreds of people there.
“When is the best time to be homeless: between nine and six. When is the worst time? Where are the key workers during the night? You have two people looking after 100 men with drink problems, violence problems, mental problems, all sorts.”
Hostels were not always thus. “Fifty years ago when I was a boy of 15 pretending to be a 17-year-old I used to sleep in the Rowton House – started by a Lord, hotels for the poor. Every morning we traipsed across the road to make Swiss Rolls for Joe Lyons and we worked there all day.
"At night, we went back and paid – paid, mind you, for our bed," he emphasises with a flourish. "Some went drinking, some went smoking, but everything we did was about work. If you went to a hostel then, 90 per cent would be working. Now, 97 per cent of them would not be working."
Later this year, The Big Issuewill celebrate its 20th anniversary – a date Bird intends to mark with a new project for homeless with drink and drug problems that is similar to rehab programmed for the rich.
“I am getting together a Rolls-Royce project for the poor, the broken, the dejected, because if we don’t invest in people now, when they are 35 years old, by the time they get to 60 they will have cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds in prisons, mental hospitals, or whatever.
“So why not try and get hold of that money and spend to save. Why not spend £50,000 on you now. The Priory addiction clinic has, on average, a 70 per cent success rate. Say, we get a 35 per cent success rate, because our people are more chaotic than pop-stars, the financial savings would be enormous.
“What people don’t realise is that it is incredibly expensive keeping people poor. We have the most expensive poor in the world in the UK.When I was in the approved school I cost twice what it cost to send someone to the most expensive school in England: Eton.”
Equally, welfare rules must be made more stringent and, here, Bird divides markedly from those of a more liberal bent of mind: “You could attach rules about how they run their lives,” he says trenchantly.
“If I am paying to bring up children because they are not capable of doing it, then I have to have a say about how they are doing it. I say if I am bringing up the children, then I want to know that they are not sniffing glue, that they are not going to be fed terrible food that will make them obese.
“We led the poor into this trap. We told them not to worry, get the doctor’s certificate and don’t work for 25 years. The British middle-class expanded by 70 per cent in the 20th century. You only have to scrape the middle-class and you’ll find that they were picking spuds two generations back.
“My obsession is to get all of the poor into the middle class: that is where you have clean underwear; that is where you can have holidays; that is where you can educate your children; get dignity through labour rather than just stacking shelves in a supermarket.”
Everything Bird says about the UK can be just as easily applied to Ireland, he believes, because it ‘is so sociologically tied to the UK that when the UK makes mistakes that just create dependency then it means that Ireland makes the same mistakes.”
In coming months, Bird intends to become more involved in the running of The Big Issue in Ireland, which has been run independently for some years. "Our model in Ireland works with Romanians and doesn't work with Irish poor. People tell me that they don't see Irish poor selling it. It is important for us that you don't get a whole group of native-born people left behind. The Big Issuewill have to be re-invented in Ireland, but it is all being done in a spirit of co-operation," he says.
Now 65, Bird stops, but only briefly, when he is asked what made him different from most of those around him in his days on the streets: “I think from a very early age I felt I was blessed by Jesus. Even though I was a devout Catholic, I was also a devout shop-lifter.
“It is weird that you can have these two opposites but I always felt that He was there for me. So what I never suffered from – and everybody around me suffered from – was low self-esteem. I always believed that I was sent to help the world. And I have, I have helped thousands of people.”
The Big Issue on Irish streets
There’s no shortage of Big Issue vendors on Irish streets these days.
Homelessness is on the increase with up to 5,000 people in emergency accommodation or homeless shelters. Rough sleeping is also a problem, with at least 70 or 80 people sleeping on the streets of the capital each night.
"We've anything up to 2,000 homeless people registered with us who sell the magazine from time to time," says Sean Kavanagh, editor of Ireland's Big Issuemagazine.
“We see the people changing. Even people from what might be middle class backgrounds are getting involved. It never entered their heads that they might end up in this situation.”
The magazine, he says, has a crucial role to play for people who are trying to keep their heads above water.
“It allows people help themselves by doing something positive. They get half the cover price, it’s get them out mixing with people. It’s an honest living,” says Kavanagh.
While many vendors come and go, one of its most famous is Paddy Finnegan, who can be seen selling the magazine regularly outside Trinity College Dublin.
“He’s been there since day one. Paddy is a bit of an intellectual. He’s very well up and Irish history and poetry. He has a unique way of selling: he just stands there and now people approach him because they know him so well.“
Kavanagh, a former electrical contractor, was an occasional contributor to the magazine when it was first established in Ireland in 1995. After it went bust in 2000, he gave up his job and resurrected the magazine a year later.
He’s also the founder of the Street League in Ireland, a soccer league aimed at young Irish men who have overcome problems of addiction and homelessness.
“If anyone doubts the importance of football in the lives of these lads just take a look at their achievements since their involvement,” he says. “The structure, discipline and sense of self-worth that they get from taking part gives them renewed confidence and allows them to believe that life has something to offer them.”
In the teeth of the economic downturn, Kavanagh says selling the Big Issueis an option for anyone in acute difficulty, and not just homeless people.
“I know people might feel stigmatised by selling it, but I’d encourage anyone who feels in a very difficult situation and is struggling to make ends meet to look on this as an option. That income could be crucial for someone trying to pay for school books or a mortgage.“
