In conversation with Lord John Bird

Summary

In this interview, Lord John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, is interviewed by RSA Chief Executive Andy Haldane about the challenges to developing a systemic approach to combatting poverty in our society. As Lord Bird reflects on his fascinating life and pioneering role in advocating for those in poverty, he calls for a revolution in thinking, emphasising the need for social mobility and education reform. Lord Bird also highlights the understated value of providing access to creativity to inspire individuals to break free from the ‘inheritance of poverty’. 

Reading time

12 minutes

Artist, novelist, raconteur, social entrepreneur and Founder of The Big Issue Lord John Bird talks with RSA Chief Executive Andy Haldane about his journey from privation to the peerage – and what it will take to end poverty once and for all.

Andy Haldane: John, welcome to the RSA. We’re going to chat about courageous communities. I know your history, but not everyone might.

John Bird: I was born just after the Second World War, in 1946, into a London Irish slum family in Notting Hill. At the time, it had the highest infant mortality rate, apparently, of anywhere in the UK. If you wanted to murder your kids, you moved to Notting Hill. We had two rooms in this collapsed property, which had sagging roofs, blocked drainpipes, bits of board instead of glass, rats, mice, lice, fleas – and one toilet for eight families. I like to say I was born into a collapsed civilisation, a thrupenny bus ride from Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. It was the maddest place to be born.

Haldane: From Notting Hill to where after that, John?

Bird: We were thrown out when I was five because my parents weren’t very good with money. They had three children, then four and then five and then six. We then lived in a gap in the roof of my grandmother’s slum cottage around the corner before we moved to another slum, and then we were thrown out of there because we didn’t pay the rent. We ended up in a Catholic orphanage in North London where I was for about two years. I went in quite a reasonable human being, and came out nasty and aggressive.

Haldane: When did things take a turn for the better?

Bird: I spent from 10 to 15 being excluded from school and then being brought before the magistrates for stealing. Every time I got done, they taught me something. By the time I was 15 and had left school, I was quite reasonably educated, because I’d been through these institutions. Eventually, I ran away from the young offenders institution and ended up in a boys’ prison, where I was taught to refine my reading, because I was dyslexic.

I was there for a couple of years and I became this obsessive painter and drawer. When I came out, I had an enormous portfolio. I walked up the Kings Road one day and started going to life-drawing classes, pretending I was an art student. I was working for the Royal Borough of Kensington as a garden labourer and I got a place at Chelsea School of Art and, wow – that was when I moved inexorably from being a working-class boy into a middle-class boy. That’s when things started opening up for me.

Haldane: So, art and literature were the key to the corner being turned in your case?

Bird: I wrote my first novel when I was 17 and I’ve been writing books ever since. I’ve been painting and drawing, I’ve had exhibitions, and people say, “Oh Johnny Bird, you’re a wonderful social entrepreneur!” I say, “I’m a failed artist.”

_{^{Above: Begorrah, by John Bird}}

Haldane: The theme for this edition is ‘courageous communities’. What’s the most courageous thing you’ve done in your career?

Bird: After I’d become an art student, I ran away to Paris, met a load of haute-bourgeois Marxists, and, in the space of three months, stopped being an anti-Semite, anti-Black, anti-Indian, and became a Marxist internationalist. That was the most courageous thing because when I came back to England, I couldn’t talk to my family as they held very racist ideas. I couldn’t talk to the people I grew up with. I had no friends, but I stuck it out. That two or three years was the only time I ever felt really on my own. Courage is when you know you’re doing the right thing, but there’s nobody with you.

Haldane: Let’s talk about The Big Issue. Was that inspiration striking?

Bird: I am not the Mother Teresa of Fulham Broadway. I’m a very simple sort of geezer. The idea did not come to me – it came from Gordon Roddick [Founder of the Body Shop – Ed]. He was in New York in 1990 and saw a street paper called Street News being sold by a guy who had been in and out of prison. He said the street paper lifted him out of stealing and made him feel kind of honourable, and Gordon thought this was brilliant. He came back to the UK and spoke to all the major charities about starting a street paper – none of them would touch it.

Their argument was: why would you give somebody the opportunity to make money selling a street paper when they’d spend it on drink or drugs? I said, “What do you think they’re doing at the moment? They’re robbing old ladies, breaking into shops. I’m going to decriminalise them. When they buy my street paper, they’re going to be able to say ‘I earned this money. If I put it up my nose at least I haven’t stolen it from somebody else.’” The only people they would be harming is themselves.

And this resonated. Margaret Thatcher thanked me, Norman Tebbit was, “Wow, hallelujah” and [Tony] Blair, he was all over me. And all I was doing was something simple. I was giving the homeless the chance to decriminalise themselves.

Haldane: More than that though, you created an army of social entrepreneurs like yourself.

Bird: The Big Issue is good, bad and indifferent. There are always people looking for perfection. I’ve never been a perfectionist; I’m frightened of perfection. I love the idea that The Big Issue is good in parts. I love the fact that we work with people who are going to get into trouble if we don’t.

To me, The Big Issue is all about potential. This government needs to get behind the idea of creating social mobility away from poverty. What we do now is spend 80% of our poverty money on keeping people poor. We just give them a bit of money, a bit of top-up. ‘Give the poor more’ is the slogan of both houses of Parliament. I’m in the House of Lords, and the vast majority of the Commons and the Lords are obsessed with giving the poor more, but they’re not obsessed with getting them out of poverty, they’re not obsessed with prevention and cure.

Haldane: There is this idea of The Big Issue as a pathway out of poverty. You’re engaging with people across a much wider spectrum than previously, and that nurtures the social skills alongside the money in your pocket that can then serve as the platform. There is good research recently that the key to social mobility is social connectivity.

Bird: Yes, that is really, really interesting. I believe that The Big Issue is a national or international network of people in need who are helping each other. As a devout ex-Catholic, I’m a great believer that there’s only one thing we’re here for in this world and that’s to help others. I do believe that you get people at their best when they are helping other people.

Haldane: All the evidence speaks strongly that of all the things we can do that boost our wellbeing, volunteering – doing something for somebody else – is towards the top of the table.

Bird: But there is a kind of class divide, because it’s those who are having things done for them or to them and those who are doing it, and we have to bridge that gap. My heart goes out when I meet ex-homeless people working with pensioners, or I meet people who have come out of the prison system and they’re working on doing things like cleaning up the environment and helping people who can’t do their shopping.

Haldane: Maybe you’ve hit the nail on the head – is a courageous community one with lots of courageous people like that in it?

Bird: Yes, you park your own dissatisfactions with life. I meet so many people who are in the wrong relationship, who are in the wrong job, and I say, you might get a different outlook on life if you were also thinking, what can I do with the spare time that I have? If you ever talk to the volunteers, they’re totally and utterly committed, and their lives are enriched by it.

Haldane: We’ve got lots of communities, though, across the world, where those ‘pro-social’ behaviours aren’t ruling the roost. We’re seeing anti-social behaviours springing up in communities. How can we get more of the pro-social behaviours that you’ve been talking about?

Bird: I bet you a pound to a penny that virtually all of those people are people who come from the inheritance of poverty. Poverty distorts your life. Poverty destroys your mind. Poverty can make you into a saint or a sinner.

Forty per cent of government expenditure is spent on poverty, and yet we don’t have a department or a place in government to sort out poverty. You’ve got eight government departments dealing with poverty. It’s a ridiculous situation. It’s scattergun. We’ve got a real problem in the UK, and that is that we’re not doing something to break open the poorest communities and make them work as communities.

Haldane: Here’s the bridge, then, because you’ve been making the case for a ministry for poverty prevention and cure. I’ve been making the case that we need a strategy for social connection. Who’s in charge of social connection and cohesion in the UK? Everyone and, therefore, no one.

Bird: Yes, that’s right. No government has ever really tackled the major problem – the inheritance of poverty, the fact that you inherit poverty from parents who were former children of people in poverty. Forty years ago, maybe a bit longer, you could be poor, but you’d be the working poor. Thatcherism destroyed the working poor in large areas. That was a major, major mistake.

We have to find a way of breaking the inheritance of poverty. That means we have to move all of the resources that are being scattered everywhere. We need to concentrate.

Haldane: There’s the nine million currently counted as economically inactive, not seeking work or training. What can we do differently in schools, communities, the world of work, to create those pathways, to break that inheritance of poverty?

Bird: If I were prime minister, the first thing I would do is a social audit of what works and what doesn’t work in government provision. You have about £400bn a year being spent on the collateral damage done by poverty. The first thing I’d want to know is, what’s working? You can’t fix anything until you know why it’s not fixed.

You’d find that there are all sorts of things that show we spend our money unwisely. The Treasury is incredibly good at spending money when the shit has hit the fan. They’re really good. Brilliant money, out the door for Covid, all that money it’s going to cost to lock up all those rioters. But is the government any good at preventing rioters? Never.

We don’t look at the humblest of persons and say, how can we morph you away from poverty? One of the reasons is, we don’t look at what works. Look at John Anthony Joseph Bird. He’s in trouble from the age of 10, and a pain in the rear before that. If you look at the ingredients that make up the renaissance of this little chap, it comes from silly little things like letting the idiot draw, paint, go to life-drawing classes at art school, go to the V&A, buy a book, and get a library card.

These are social preventative tools, and we don’t use them. The government never, ever, ever prioritises what you might call social restructuring with regard to music or the arts.

_{^{Above: Airport, by John Bird.}}

Haldane: It’s about valuing and nurturing social infrastructure as much as we nurture physical and digital infrastructure. The youth club, the park, the boxing club, the art club, the tennis school, the museum, the library. The things that provide glue to communities, connection to individuals, that’s what our communities need to make them cohesive and nurture that social mobility you spoke about.

Bird: That is certainly the major preoccupation, but you also have to back it with a recognition that most schools fail the children who are coming from poverty. We’ve got to reinvent our curriculum because our curriculum is not preparing us for the 21st century. We have to embrace the natural intelligence of schoolchildren.

Haldane: And the natural creativity of schoolchildren. A lot of creative subjects – art, music, design – are in retreat in schools. Those courses are not seen as the route map to getting a job, and that’s a massive miss. A lot of the work that we’re doing at the RSA is about rethinking the educational journey.

Bird: Well, I’m glad you are. Someone’s got to. But where were you 50 years ago when I needed you?

Haldane: Well, I was seven. I was at school at that point, John.

Bird: I forgive you.

Haldane: This is the right time for it, though, because the situation in schools is getting worse. These days, you can be excluded much earlier because troublesome kids are costly – the easiest thing is to exclude them.

Bird: We need a revolution in thinking. When people ask me what I want my legacy to be, I say my legacy needs to be that I got people to think. Whatever we’re doing at the moment is not working. Having thousands of charities to intervene in the lives of the poorest only really keeps poverty ticking over. If we don’t reinvent society, we don’t reinvent breaking people from poverty, we’re not going anywhere.

Haldane: The last question from me is an RSA question. We were born out of the Enlightenment, and new ways of thinking. But here we sit in the 21st century and the problems are still acute. What’s the one thing that the RSA should be ahead of right now to tackle the issues you’ve spoken about so passionately today?

Bird: The RSA to me has always been about design. I once gave a talk to about 100 design students and they said, “John, what would you redesign if you were going to redesign anything?” I said, “I’d redesign thinking.” Thinking socially, thinking creatively, thinking about justice…

The best step would be if the government woke up tomorrow and said, “Whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it wrong, whatever we’re doing, we need to not be doing more of the same.” We have this weird world of governments that take on the mantle and the weeds of the previous government. They always have the same departments. Basically, we have the same machinery that was there at the time of Gladstone in 1892.

That is poisoning the way we think because what they’re saying is, we have done this this way before and we’re going to carry on doing it this way. So, that is going to take a different kind of thinking. Don’t tell me what the thinking is because I’m not a thinker. All I know is that the thinking is wrong. I would say RSA, get on with redesigning thinking.

John Bird is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue and a member of the House of Lords.

Andy Haldane is Chief Executive Officer at the RSA.

Jooney Woodward is an award-winning British photographer based in London. In 2011 she was awarded First Prize in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery with her portrait Harriet and Gentleman Jack.

This article first appeared in RSA Journal Issue 4 2024.