John Bird is sitting in the opulent St. John’s Hall, among Cambridge students swarming over free sandwiches, having just participated in The Wilberforce Society’s homelessness panel on Sunday morning. Baron Bird – co-founder of the Big Issue – is on his fourth cup of tea when he announces that, “what they’re teaching you here is not up to much.” Speaking of Cambridge, he thinks its “ideas are lame,” and what he would like to do is “take over a college and really screw up what people are taught” to get “students thinking” and “interrogating the past.”  

He believes that “most university-educated people often have pretty limited education,” and are unable to answer the big questions: why today is the world dominated by the laws of unintended consequence? Bird sees politicians as seemingly always “putting out fires,” while the social fabric of the country as a whole is broken, with “such a lot of damaged people on our streets.”

"I'm not particularly interested in giving people relief"

The Big Issue was founded in 1991 by Bird and his business partner Gordon Roddick. He speaks fervently of wanting to break the “ugly political, social and economic divides” that afflict modern Britain. Speaking of founding the newspaper, Bird says: “I was aiming to give people on the streets the opportunity of doing something legitimate, so if they had any habits around drink or drugs they weren’t having to beg.” Often described as a social entrepreneur, Bird takes the term to mean “someone who believes in a business response to a social crisis.”

He maintains that he is “not particularly interested in giving people relief,” and instead is “interested in giving people opportunities” – namely the chance “to make a legitimate income.” This is why he contends that he finds it difficult to “fit very well in a charitable world,” largely because he believes “charities have traditionally seen the people they work with – although they are changing – as dependents, broken-spirited and all that,” whereas he views those excluded from society as “people who can join us in our lives.”

The Big Issue has been one of the world’s most successful homeless outreach initiatives, and was initially launched by Lord Bird in response to what he saw as a growing homelessness crisis in London. Operating on what appears to be a simple business model, vendors buy the newspaper for £1.25, selling it on for £2.50 and working as ‘micro-entrepreneurs’. It now has a weekly circulation of 82,294 and sold its 200 millionth copy in 2016. The newspaper has also expanded its reach into The Big Issue Foundation, which provides direct support and job training for rough-sleepers, as well as Big Issue Invest, which puts money in to social enterprises and raised £21 million in its first round of funding in January 2016.

"It was only when I could get work and get out of crime that I could move on"

Bird contends that much of his dedication to alleviating the plight of the homeless stems from his own early life experiences. In his memorable maiden speech to the House of Lords in February 2016, he recounted the “terrible hardships” of his earlier life, which was marked by “lying, cheating, and stealing.” Bird was born in Notting Hill in 1946, and as the child of two Irish immigrants he experienced long periods of homelessness from the age of five, plus a stint in an orphanage and in prison from his teenage years.

He is now settled outside of Cambridge with his wife and children, but contrasts this with his earlier life. “[I] had to go into the prison system as an inmate to learn how to read and write,” having failed at school, he says. Bird refers continuously to the 37% of British children who “fall out of the system,” and believes this creates an underclass who are unable to rise above menial, low-wage work. He saw a necessity for a programme like the Big Issue providing work opportunities: “when I was a rough sleeper, begging and on the streets drinking, I found it very difficult to become stable. It was only when I could get work and get out of crime that I could move on.”

A rise in homelessness under austerity has been a common theme in the national press in recent years, and Bird warns that the situation is approaching the crisis levels of the 1990s. He attributes this to the fact that “local authorities don’t have any money”. He says “they’ve been knocked, and there’s a large cutback in social support.” In Lord Bird’s opinion, the government must do much more to address the causes of the crisis, as Britain’s rough-sleeper problem qualifies as “a human rights abuse.” In order to fix it, he sees a need to address “who’s being made homeless in 20 years time” as part of a comprehensive strategy to combat the issue. This would involve “bringing prosperity into the lives of a whole slew of people” and making the social services function properly.

Instead, he sees the government as putting “all the eggs” into the immediate relief of current poverty, rather taking a more long-term view. He characterises government agencies like the Department of Education as “machines” which are “failing to give every child in this country what they should get: the choice of improving their lot,” and believes that none of Britain’s main political parties “understand the depths of the crisis that the government is in.”

"Anyone who gets into government always believes that they have the answer"

His time in the public eye has been marked by his political outspokenness. When asked about a 2010 Daily Express article where he wrote that his “guilty secret” was his identification as a “working class Tory,” he commented that the press has a tendency to run with a quote out of context. Instead, he takes a different position, that of a “working class Tory with Marxist revolutionary tendencies” – a “real mix-up.” He refuses to identify with any of the major parties, believing that none do enough to tackle persistent issues in British society.

He is also unimpressed by most MPs - saying that the majority come from “the comfortable side of the [economic] divide.” While he apparently sincerely feels that the last few generations of British Prime Ministers genuinely think they will accomplish what they set out to achieve, “anyone who gets into government always believes that they have the answer,” and so “they’ll promise the earth and they’ll deliver a flowerpot.” He thinks Jeremy Corbyn is “a breath of fresh air,” but that he still is not doing enough to address British crises. He briefly flirted with the idea of running for mayor of London, after being asked by the Conservative Party in 2008, which could have resulted in a very different twist for British politics in the last decade. He ultimately decided not to, as he refused to join the Conservative Party.

Bird used to be involved with Marxist societies and considers himself “inspired by revolution.” He characterises most British Marxists he has encountered as “skirting along” superficially, rather than profoundly engaging with a “deep, almost contemptuous commitment to tearing up the rulebook and starting again.” In order to have a revolution, he would “get rid of privilege,” and “open up” institutions like Cambridge.

In terms of his work as a life peer, Bird stresses that he went into the House of Lords “to dismantle poverty, not to make the poor comfortable.” With his experience in working with the homelessness, he aims to profoundly change how government policy addresses the issue. This came to fruition with his Creditworthiness Assessment Bill in June 2017, which tried to fix the fact that Britain’s 11 million renters do not have the same access to credit as mortgage-holders, and as as result, pay much more for access to utilities.

Bird shares that he is now writing a book, a tragi-comedic history of the causes of the First World War, citing Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers as an influence. He wants to tie together nearly a hundred strands of potential causes of the war. Over the next few years, he plans to “spend a lot of time thinking and writing and pissing everybody off.”