Dismantling poverty: an interview with John Bird MBE

“I believe I always cared, but it was buried in crime, poverty and wrongdoing.”

Last year, John Bird MBE visited the University of Aberdeen to speak at the inaugural Watt Hepburn Lecture. Beforehand, we spoke about reconciling the self and society with the issue of poverty.

John Bird is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue, the UK’s most successful social enterprise for crime reduction. He is an ex-offending, ex-rough sleeping iconoclast, universal father, artist and self-styled ‘ugly face of good’. Bird is forthright, warm and resonates with a worldly rough- around-the-edges charm when sharing his story.

Trauma that provokes a person into homelessness and disaffection often occurs in early years, and Birds start in life, one of seven boys born in to abject poverty, was no exception. “When I was five” Bird reminisces, “we lost the place we were living in because we didn't pay the rent and we moved in to my Grandmother’s cottage, which sounds very lovely but it was a slummy shithole in London, highest infant mortality rate than anywhere else in the UK at the time. My father would go out to the pub with my mother on a Friday night and they would drink themselves in to oblivion and then they would come back and my father would turn on my mother and scream and hit her. My brothers would scream with fear and I would comfort them. I didn't have any fear. I thought my job here, even though I was five and they were seven and eight, was to look after them.” These early hardships defined his sense of self: “I think there is something kind of weird about me, from a very early age I was interested in the well-being of others. That’s why I'm a kind of universal father. I believe that the poorest people in society are our children and that we have a responsibility to look after them and to aid and abet them as and when they need and not to turn against them. So that is why from an early age I was cursed to stick my nose in the concerns of others” This sense of self-regulated justice stuck with him as he grew up “When I was older in boy’s prisons I would often confront bullies who bullied weaker people and on almost every occasion I managed to defeat the bully, not by punching them, but by talking them down. I’ve never liked injustice, even when you have got the kind of mouth that I’ve got — which is a big mouth — I can be very aggressive if I so choose. I’ve probably been a bit of a bully myself.” His tone shifts slightly “I’ve bullied people in to doing things they didn’t want to do. So beware of your own purity, because sometimes you turn around and you think, fuck me, I’m a bit of a bully myself.”

Bird suggests how one can cope with the tragedies that befall them in their life, a way to fill in the chips and cracks entrenched in a sense of goodwill. A mantra he offers for this is “the greatest cure for grief, remorse and loss and the accumulated damage done by growing, is to aid someone other than yourself”. This particular grief, I found out, has a personal context for Bird who explains, “I was referring to myself when I lost a mother, when I lost a lover – who got crushed to death – and when I lost a brother: three seminal griefs that I went through. When I lost my brother I went drinking and fighting and walking on train lines. When I lost a lover I immediately devoted myself more wholeheartedly to helping others and I found it really enriched me and put in to perspective the loss of this person.” Bird then shared a beautiful observation, “when you lose people, when you love somebody, it should increase your humanity.”

In spite of his wrongdoing, Bird has negotiated the dichotomy between personal and public mortality and found an admirable bottom line. In a hangover of abject poverty, Bird co-founded The Big Issue, a crime reduction programme which today boasts a circulation greater than titles such a Vanity Fair and Nuts. He explains the enterprise, “what we’re trying to do is separate the relationship between crime and poverty, if you can have people who are poor you can support them out of poverty, then they will say goodbye to crime.” Bird’s efforts in social enterprise revolve around the idea of ‘a hand up not a hand out’, a social opportunity rather than social security, but it is not limited to the work with the street vended paper. “One of the things we started was the Big Issue Invest which is taking the money from wealthy people who give it to us and investing it in preventative projects which prevent people from falling in to homelessness, crime and poverty.”

Bird, a searing anti-idealist, is critical of the role of the state and society in setting out a responsible social model; he describes the current investment in the homeless community as superficial and insubstantial. “I'm very concerned at the half journeys that society takes the most dispossessed on, so I stick my nose in to care in the community for mental health issues, I stick my nose in to the pedagogy that we train our children in, I stick my nose in questions around children getting involved in crime and violence. I raise the argument ‘why is it that the most reduced of people in circumstances get the least support?’ I'm trying to get the government to face up to its responsibility for people on social security, because they have been led in to this trap, that doesn't lead to university or to jobs, that leads to patent forms of dependency. If you don’t fare well on welfare you can’t say farewell to welfare.”

On resolving this and dismantling poverty, he offers restructuring and some worrying statistics — “you would have to reinvent central government, because central government is the fly in the ointment. Why is it that 85% of the people in the prison system have come from a social security background? This is a dangerous indication that we've got a whole group of people that we part-invest in, that we don’t actually give them the tools and the means of moving on and becoming, like you and me, able to participate in democracy. The poor don’t get involved in democracy because the poor are stuck in a world of need.” Bird has reconciled himself with his life of crime and poverty “half of my life was spent costing the state and the tax payer an enormous amount of money, that’s why I'm proud of the fact I pay tax. It’s redistribution, when I was fifteen I was in the reformatory and it cost £62 per week to keep me there, which doesn't sound like a lot of money, until you consider my father was earning £10 or £11 a week. If they put me in to Eton it would have cost £45 a week. The cost of educating at Eton now is about the same as it costs to keep our young men banged up in prison. What an absolute fucking waste of money.”

John Bird is also a particularly talented artist, who became obsessed after teaching himself to paint and draw, with a penchant for the female form, as his book entitled ‘Why Drawing Naked Women is Good for the Soul’ would suggest. “Art was always very important to me, when you’re rushing out to an art class to draw a naked lady, and you’re not there simply because it’s a sexual turn on but because you are obsessed with drawing, then you’re not going to have much time to go shop lifting or house breaking are you?

When I got out (of institutions) I got myself a place in art school and even though that only lasted a year – I got thrown out because I met a girl in the lift and made her pregnant, not in the lift…” He smiles, and I am reminded of yet another anecdotal quip he had shared earlier, “I am a devout ex-catholic, so I always marry my pregnant girlfriends.” He continues, “Art changed me and made me the posh geezer I am, and a useful geezer, because I can tap in to the passions of others. I am very interested in passionate people.”

Now living happily in Cambridge with his third wife and two youngest children of five, indulging in his art and working hard in the continuous struggle to dismantle poverty, John Bird has not only reconciled himself with his own past, misfortune and misdemeanour's but has become one of the most relevant, wise and genuine forces for good of our time.