Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/19/2025 i The Big Issue

Recently, Big Issue was in Cardiff. Obviously, we’re in Wales all the time. Our vendors sell the magazine across the country and have done for years. But we were there with our Big Community Roadshow. We kicked the Roadshow initiative off in Newcastle last autumn. The idea behind it is straightforward. We know there are great cities and areas across the UK that can sometimes feel neglected and far from London-based decision-making. These areas are teeming with great ideas, with community projects that deliver solutions, frequently in some left-behind parts. We want to hear from the people there, learn from them and report their stories. They have ideas that deserve a spotlight, and opinions that should be heard. And you only really get deep into realities by being embedded in…

His words were ignored by police officers in Minneapolis, but the world heard them. On 25 May 2020, 46-year-old George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his neck after responding to a store clerk who suspected him of using a counterfeit $20 banknote. Video footage of the killing went viral around the world – a world in stasis due to pandemic lockdowns – and change felt like it was going to come. Thousands marched, toppled statues and expressed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. A moment of reckoning seemed palpable. But five years on, any progress has been overshadowed by renewed attacks on civil liberties and equalities and the return of Donald Trump to the White House. As part of an anticipated sea change…

BIG ISSUE: What part did music play in your upbringing? KADIATU KANNEH-MASON: I was born in Sierra Leone and then came to the UK. I moved to Wales when I was eight. There were four of us children, but my father was one of 45 children, so we had lots of cousins and aunties and uncles. Music was really important for us in Sierra Leone, everything there is about music and dance. Every occasion is about singing. And music is very important in Wales of course. So music was just a very natural part of my life. My father got us piano lessons. I grew up thinking music was part of everybody’s life, it was just what you did. Did you always want a big family? I wanted four children…

1 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie One of the novels that hooked me into crime fiction. If you’ve never read Agatha Christie, start here. She is a sensational writer – full of wit, slyness, great characterisation and fabulous twists and turns. The ending is a corker. 2 The Dry by Jane Harper Atmospheric and page-turning, set in a drought-ravaged small community in rural Australia. Evocative, packed with great characters, beautifully plotted and full of sharp writing, it’s a treat. 3 The Outsider by Stephen King Stephen King’s genre-bending crime hybrid introduces one of his most memorable creations: Holly Gibney. King is one of the world’s great storytellers, and here he takes you on a journey into the strangest and darkest corners. 4 Black Water Lilies by Michel…

Recently crowned Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Photography Awards, Zed Nelson has spent the last six years exploring and documenting the world. Not our world exactly, but one that he describes as The Anthropocene Illusion. “Geologists were arguing that we should call the current age that we’re living in a new epoch called the Anthropocene,” Nelson explains. “They’re normally measured in these huge events like an ice age or a meteor strike. The impact of humans on Earth in the last 200 years has been so huge and so devastating that it will be measurable in the rock that’s being created under our feet in the geological layer. While we are creating so much of an impact on the world and divorcing ourselves from nature and devastating…

What music was the biggest for you growing up? Pixies, Monkey Gone to Heaven. I love everything about it, from the contrast between Black Francis and Kim Deal’s vocals to the guitar riffs and extraordinary lyrics. It got me into indie music. What was the defining event of your youth? When I was eight years old, I watched the unwrapping of a mummy at Bristol Museum – on a video link to a lab in the university. That sparked a fascination with the ancient past for me – and I think, the potential of science to add to history. What was the moment where it felt you’d hit the big time? When I was asked to play a cameo role as myself in the Detectorists Christmas special! A big film…

MONEY UK risks ‘sleepwalking into crisis’ as cashless society shuts out more and more vulnerable people By Isabella McRaeBig Issue senior reporter “CARD ONLY. NO CASH ACCEPTED,” a sign reads on the shop door. Most of us walk in without a second thought – we don’t carry cash anyway. But for some people, particularly vulnerable people, this cashless space shuts them out. It is another place they are made to feel unwelcome. People facing homelessness and poverty, people with learning disabilities, domestic violence survivors, young people and the elderly are among those most at risk of being left behind in this increasingly cashless society, according to a recent report from MPs in the Treasury Committee. It warns that the UK is in danger of “sleepwalking into a situation where cash…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue RESPONSES TO OUR ARTICLE, ‘WOULD REVERSING WINTER FUEL PAYMENT CUTS BE ENOUGH TO RESTORE TRUST IN LABOUR?’ [on bigissue.com] I think the cut was the right thing. I know many pensioners who don’t need it at all, and to suddenly bottle it and hand them hundreds of pounds would be stupid at this point. What they could do, is look into edge-cases, make sure those that need it are getting it. A fairly small study of those people who did not get it last year could probably be done in a few months and would let us know what percentage did suffer hardship. Then they can course-correct without backing down.…

Five years ago, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests erupted across the US and globe following the horrific murder of George Floyd. ‘I can’t breathe’ became a rallying cry of the protests and wider movement. So what happened to the movement that captured the world’s attention and led to a ‘racial reckoning’? The years since have not only seen a decline in attention and momentum, but a backlash in which the far-right is in power, anti-racism is seen as a threat and DEI is under attack. In order to understand what happened, it is necessary to go back to 2020, if not earlier. While Floyd’s murder led to the protests, it was sadly the latest in a long history of racist police, as well as vigilante violence and wider systemic racism…

It is 1988 and students at the world’s only deaf university have risen in fierce protest. They burn effigies, barricade the gates, occupy buildings and make their voices heard in the press. Their demand is simple: they want a deaf president. Now. Gallaudet University, in Washington DC, had never had a deaf president in its 124-year history. So, when the board of trustees elected another hearing person, Elizabeth Zinser, over two deaf candidates, outraged students rallied alongside staff in a historic eight-day protest that culminated in her resignation in favour of a deaf president. The movement sparked change far beyond campus gates, with a wave of laws passed in the US in subsequent months and years to protect disabled people’s rights. Billed as the “greatest civil rights movement you have…

My preoccupation at 16 was boys, for sure. That was a preoccupation of all my girlfriends. It was about who you were gonna kiss down at the local disco. It was about whether they’d end up taking you to the cinema. It was about sitting by the telephone for hours to hope that they might call because, of course, we didn’t have mobile phones, we didn’t have the internet, and you just had to share the phone at home. It was about your parents giving you a hard time about picking you up late from a disco miles away. It was about all of that stuff. I absolutely loved music. And I was very lucky, because my dad [singer Marty Wilde] had an amazing record collection at home. So I…

It is well documented how lonely and miserable middle-aged men in the UK are. The most recent stats suggest that 15% of men aged between 45 and 64 have no close friends. Making new mates becomes harder as soon as you leave full-time education, but if you’re an excitable, people-pleasing over-sharer with loudmouth tendencies like me, you will keep trying. Only this morning, I was at the drive-through car wash when I tried to strike up a chat with the Albanian chap who’d just finished my wax dry. “Lovely job, pal,” I said. “You know they’re charging double for the same service round at the Pig and Whistle car park? Outrageous innit? Anyway, doing anything nice this weekend?” Before I could ask him if he fancied a drink, he shoved…

Daniel Jwanczuk took the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to court in 2022, two years after his wife Suzzi died. He sat through discussions of his late wife’s lifelong disabilities. At the end, the single High Court judge ruled in his favour. It looked like victory. Then, in 2023, the DWP appealed the High Court’s decision. Again, Daniel felt it was important to show up, to show the human side of what the government were fighting. This time, it was three judges in the Court of Appeal. He won – all three judges agreed with him and dismissed the government’s appeal. This March, Daniel found himself in the Supreme Court. The DWP had appealed again, not accepting the loss. Now he must wait months to discover if, finally, he…

A novel way to learn from history I am finally drawing to a close with the largest book I have read in decades. Nearly 700 pages. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is like a compendium of people who you see – before they do – what a wretched mistake they are about to make. How it will all end up, untangle itself, I have no idea. But by the time you read this I will have reached the end and will know the outcome. Written in 1869-71, it is so full of sharp observations about human thinking and doing that in some ways it’s a clumsy book. It strays off and then comes back, but remains riveting. Reading is supposed to be good for you. But reading Middlemarch depressed me while exciting…

Two years ago, as a lawyer at Liberty, I launched legal action to defend our right to protest and to ensure that governments past and present would not be able to sneak in legislation via the back door that weakens our rights. On 2 May, for the second time, the courts have agreed with us. Through this legal action, protests will be able to go ahead without limits being imposed by the police for no good reason, and protesters will not be at risk of arrest for simply walking on the wrong side of the road, blocking hotel entrances or lying down on the pavement outside weapons factories. That this is such a significant victory just demonstrates how much our rights have regressed in recent years. Hundreds of people who…

In the year of our Dame 1975, David Bowie was a sleepwalking cadaver in the blizzard-grip of cocaine addiction. Lost between New York and LA, and nowhere near reality, his psychotic, paranoid delusions were fuelled by a growing obsession with the Third Reich and all things occult. A coven of witches haunted his every move. Satan lived in his swimming pool. The fridge was stocked with bottles of his own urine, lest the forces of evil steal it (for reasons only known to himself ). This is the David Bowie we meet in Bowie Odyssey 75, the sixth volume of Simon Goddard’s monumental year-by-year account of our hero’s eventful golden decade. For those unfamiliar with the series, do not expect a conventional biography. Prepare yourselves instead for an utterly riveting…

There used to be a running joke about the Mission: Impossible movies (apart from Tom Cruise doing a big run in every instalment). This was the franchise most likely to one day kill its star. As the signature stunts kept getting bigger, and the hands-on Cruise crinkled into his 40s, 50s and now 60s, it seemed as if blockbuster one-upmanship, personal thrill-seeking and Hollywood hubris would collide in some horrible calamity. It was all too easy to imagine the tributes: “At least Tom left us doing what he loved… pretending to defuse an actual intercontinental ballistic missile in mid-air”. Good news, then. Unless something goes badly awry on the international red carpets for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Cruise has made it through his eighth and probably last mission…

It was one of those pleasing coincidences that are so convenient as to be imagined. I was at my desk, researching repertoire from the Second World War in anticipation of the VE Day 80th anniversary. Important British works from the period include Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No 5, Alan Rawsthorne’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, alongside wartime propaganda film soundtracks such as Walton’s The First of the Few. I selected Spitfire Prelude and Fugue adapted from the latter; a rousing brass melody furnished with snare drums tells the story of the iconic aircraft’s design and construction. It was premiered in 1943 in Liverpool and later performed in New York, its upbeat character perfectly judged to raise patriotic morale. A distinctive engine rumbled in the background.…

I’ve been doing Big Issue for years – I used to do it in London and then I came over to Salisbury. It’s alright here. The people here are kind enough – they buy you coffee and all that and give you chips every now and again. I have got quite a few regulars and they are there if I need it. It’s good enough. I’ve been on my pitch outside the library for a couple of years. I don’t really shout out “Big Issue” when I’m on my pitch. I got told you’re not really allowed to shout it out any more. I don’t do that. I keep my mouth shut and if people want to buy it then fair play to them. I’d like to say thank you…