Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/24/2025 i The Big Issue

Sinead Morrissey is a very fine poet. I don’t say this because she’s Irish and because of some inherent loyalty that means I have to say the Irish are the best poets. That would be crazy. Though Irish poets ARE great – obviously. And the Irish value poetry, and when you value something you respect it and take it seriously. Amongst Morrissey’s many standouts is a poem called The Rope. It’s about the moment she realised, while watching her children, the bond that binds siblings – “sibling-tetheredness” – something that would knock them off-balance, when they least expect it “some afternoon/after work/decades hence” when they need each other and she is gone. It is, in the way of Morrissey, lyrical but precise and inflected with something that can, like the…

A few weeks ago a cartoon appeared in The Daily Telegraph that caught the predicament of the Treasury when faced with current events. A large poster on the wall of the Treasury showed a general pointing at the public saying ‘Get off benefits and fight for your country.’ It was based on the famous First World War poster of Lord Kitchener supposedly pointing at men to join up. It summed up graphically the problem that faces the government: how can it reduce its vast social security bill and get people behind the increasing need to build a military response to a new world disorder. With Trump bringing into question the nearly 80-year US involvement in protecting Europe from Russian ambition, it seems Europe needs its own protection. Hence Starmer’s conundrum:…

Kendal was deployed to look after patients dying of Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic. Formerly a nurse working with children in palliative care, she joined the front line as the virus spread, caring for desperately ill people while the government failed to provide proper PPE. After she caught coronavirus from a patient, Kendal (below) never recovered. She is one of at least two million people in the UK with long Covid, suffering with debilitating symptoms which have forced many to give up work. “We nearly died doing our jobs. I was willing but I naively thought that when I got sick my employer would look after me,” she says. The government wants people back to work, pointing to a rising welfare bill and growing numbers on long-term sickness…

Frequent long-time Street Art contributor Bird experienced mental health issues, homelessness and addiction before discovering art as an outlet. In 2023 he published his own book of artwork and poetry, titled Transmissions, excerpts from which were published in Big Issue. His latest artwork gives a haunting insight into a troubled mind. It makes visual reference to scenes from his past life on the streets in Scotland, as starkly described in his book. “Big Issue has been a consistent support to me over recent years,” says Bird. “It inspires and assists people who suffer from poverty, are experiencing homelessness or mental health issues.” outsidein.org.uk/galleries/chris-bird/…

Right now, as I type this, the Great Powers are trying to reshape the world so that it better suits their interests. Trying to enforce a peace deal on warring European nations in a way that divvies up some of the world’s most crucial assets between them. And the trepidation the rest of us feel as they do this is heightened by the knowledge that the people leading those powers are deeply flawed individuals. It is, of course, not the first time such a thing has happened. From 1919 through to 1921 beginning at Versailles, the victorious allied nations met to decide on the harsh peace terms they would impose on Germany. And the UK representative, Liberal Party prime minister David Lloyd George, had psychological frailties that would have made…

On screen, a woman is talking about wearing a coat. It was beautiful, she said, yet she cried as she wrapped it around her; a companion quips that she wore hers inside on an almost-daily basis. On stage, soprano Abigail Kelly slips into a thick winter jacket, interpreting these memories through carefully crafted melodic lines. Shirley J Thompson’s opera Women of the Windrush mixes a simple staging for solo voice and piano (played here, at the Barbican’s Milton Court, by Melissa Morris) with real-life accounts projected on a large screen above the performers. The true stories are intertwined with the staged narrative: Kelly and Morris are clearing out the home of a late relative from the Windrush era, discovering pieces directly referenced in the footage. Some items inspire humorous anecdotes:…

GEMILIANA, 51 Jiddu Krishnamurti said: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” but most often the threat to not fitting in this kind of society is: “You’re gonna end up selling Big Issue!” Big Issue is something well-established that everybody knows, it’s something that helps homeless people or is the way out for anybody that reaches the bottom. And I’m one of them. But we all know that life is not about what happens to you, it’s how you react and how you decide to stand up again. For me, Big Issue is a big opportunity because it’s giving me the opportunity to earn some honest money while I’m relying on the social system for food and a roof on my head.…

DISABILITY BENEFITS Labour told to ‘listen to disabled people and think again’ after ‘biggest cuts to benefits on record’ Disabled people spent the last few months “terrified” that their benefits were going to be taken away as Labour ministers pledged to push people into work and off state support. The government then finally revealed its proposals for reform on 18 March, which include tightening the eligibility requirement for the personal independence payment (PIP), freezing the health element of universal credit for current claimants and reducing it for new claimants. This will equate to £5 billion of cuts by the end of the decade – “the biggest cuts to disability benefits on record” – which charities argue will undermine Labour’s broadly welcomed plans for the “biggest employment reforms in a generation”…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Credit to him Michael Sheen is an amazing human. One short paragraph in the article stood out: ‘Rachel Reeves...the new chancellor...refused to talk with Sheen when he tried to bring up the cost of credit.’ Why? And why is she allowed to get away with it? What an incredibly disappointing thing to read about a new Labour government. One that could have offered the country a new dialogue and new hope, but one that seems set on crushing that hope with every turn. Carol Crawford, North Devon Lord knows I am a tenant and a tenant organiser, and like Bryan Stevens [Letters, Issue 1656] I don’t think that landlords are…

There has been an incredible reaction to last week’s unique edition of Big Issue. From cover to cover, the magazine was taken over by prolific graffiti-writer 10Foot and his remarkable cast of contributors, including Kneecap, TOX, FUME and iconic street artist Banksy. The story hit headlines across the country and around the world. More than 300 news outlets ran with it, from pages of The Independent to the morning bulletins of ITV’s Good Morning Britain. A second tsunami of interest spread over social media, with news of the takeover creeping up from the cult street art communities of Reddit to the Instagram accounts of some of the UK’s biggest names in the world of art, including past Big Issue collaborator STIK. Just 24 hours after the special went on sale,…

I left school at 15 and was going into a YTS at Watford. So at 16, I was living in digs and this was my first full-time employment. There was also an opportunity to go into athletics doing the high jump – and the desire to break the English high-jump record was equal to my desire to play football. But the YTS scheme offered free food and athletics was amateur, so I would have had to work and pay for my own food. That’s why football won. I still didn’t feel like I was on the path to playing professional football. I’d come from Welwyn Garden City. It was one of the new towns in England and there wasn’t a great deal of culture going on. The cinema was knocked…

Back in 2011 the craggily imposing Michael Shannon starred in Take Shelter, a disquieting drama set in rural Ohio. He played a construction worker so haunted by visions of a looming cataclysm that he borrowed more than his young family could afford to convert their backyard tornado shelter into a proper survival bunker. This obsession alienated his wife and the wider community; as with a lot of stories preoccupied with doomsday, things did not end well. Shannon goes underground again for The End, another unsettling film that unfolds in the shadow of an apocalypse. But this time he’s no blue-collar underdog scrambling for canned goods. Instead he plays a puffed-up oilman who has leveraged his wealth to stay one step ahead of a climate change calamity that has scuttled the…

Mark Rylance is the ultimate actor activist. Just over two years ago, the Oscar-winning star of Wolf Hall and countless celebrated stage productions helped launch a campaign to raise funds to erect a statue of Brian Haw, which was finally unveiled this month opposite the Imperial War Museum. Haw was a constant throughout some of the most significant events in the early years of this century. In June 2001, he began a peace protest in Parliament Square to draw attention to the effect of British sanctions on Iraq and stayed there for nearly 10 years. His camp remained a constant reminder to politicians and the public about the consequences of war. He died in 2011 and Rylance, alongside other campaigners, has worked hard to ensure the tenacious campaigner’s message is…

REVIEWS Digging for deepest meaning If for nothing else, you should read Devin Jacobsen’s short story collection The Summer We Ate Off the China for its wonderful prose. The characters and plots of Jacobsen’s tales are often quite strange. From the first, Possum On the Roof, we know we are in a similar, slightly deranged world to the early stories of Will Self. The grains of the ordinary are inverted and perverted. Dagonet opens with an ingenious coarse parody of an Arthurian legend. The last one, Hitler In Love, is seriously troubling and thought-provoking. Yet often the stories are simply full of glorious vignettes. In The Elegance of Simplicity, for example, one character is described as “one of those solid Scottish women… built for long sunless winters and Nordic winds,…

I tried hitchhiking once. I stood in a lay-by near Bristol with a sign saying ‘London’ for an hour – and then gave up and took the bus, thus exhausting my paltry fee for the gig the night before. I am rich enough now to take the train. Having failed that hitchhiking test to get across the M4, I think it highly unlikely that I would manage to travel across M106, otherwise known as Messier 106, a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Canes Venatici. My first knowledge of the notion of hitchhiking came, as so many things did, from science fiction. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is undoubtedly one of the most influential books in my life, a natural progress from the joy of Doctor Who. The author,…