A good man from a bad life founded The Big Issue in the UK 24 years ago, in a bid to help those who slip through life’s cracks all too easily. Now that same man heads off to one of the cornerstones of the British establishment: the House of Lords.

We caught up with John Bird shortly after his appointment, for a dose of straight talk, straight from the boss.

Where are you from originally?
I’m from Notting Hill. My family from my mother’s side is from Ireland, and my dad’s family is from Somerset.

How would you describe your earliest years?
Tragic, violent, poor and hungry. I spent much of my childhood in trouble with the police and excluded from school. And I was a permanent ward of the court, which means that the court took over the responsibility of minding me from my parents.

What were your parents like?
They were socially and financially incompetent. They had too many children and not enough money. My dad spent a good bit of time in the pubs.

You had a number of brushes with the law and ended up in prison on more than one occasion. How did that affect you?
I was very blessed by the prison system. At that time, it took a lot of young people and taught them how to read and write, and it trained skills. I learned designing, printing, plumbing, plastering – you know, enough to get by. The people in prison really were the best for British working class in trouble.

But it doesn’t work now because they don’t transform you in prison. There are too many people in there and we have a bunch of artificial rights in prison that get in the way of the good prison could do, which is to transform people. The officers are no longer teaching anything. The human rights argument to me is about giving rights that are about dressing up things to make the liberal class feel good. But the people aren’t being transformed in prison anymore.

Personally I’d rather live in an authoritarian prison where’re they bothered to teach me, because being useless is a painful thing.

How did you come up with The Big Issue?
Well, I was in my late 30s when I remet a man I knew as a 21-year-old hiding from the police. [His name was] Gordon Roddick. He was very wealthy. He was in New York and saw a paper called Street News that tried to help homeless people make money. He asked me to do that and we took the American model for The Big Issue. But we were different, because unlike most people who work with the poor, I came from poverty.

How should society confront poverty?
You can’t keep giving people handouts, because you’re harming their futures. People on handouts are stuck in yesterday.

Everything about The Big Issue is a device about one thing, which is to give homeless people a purpose. If we win awards or the government blesses us, it doesn’t mean anything to us. To me, The Big Issue only works if more and more people say it helps them sustain themselves or move on to something else.

Lots of people feel solidarity with the poor but it’s often political. If you’re poor you don’t want rhetoric. You want to feed your children. There are too many people who use the poor to make themselves feel good or for politics.

What do you hope to achieve or advocate in the House of Lords, in terms of relieving poverty?
We need systems that work. There are all sorts of systems in the world – the education systems, the capitalist system, the financial system. But most systems of giving don’t work because they don’t focus on opportunity. The reason I have to think outside the box is because the box isn’t working. The box is the education system, the financial system and the government. So I’ll be campaigning for thoughtfulness around poverty – but not recklessness.

What makes you happy?
My children – except when they’re unhappy. And I’m very happy when I see some of the people I work with progress. But happiness has to be fought for. I’ll never forget that.