Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/26/2025 i The Big Issue

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Barron land Issue 1665 [05-11 May] was certainly food for thought, from 100-year-old veteran Dorothea Barron to the keep calm and open a canteen article. It’s a timely reminder that people, all of us, need connection. And what better way than the re-establishment of public canteens? Another aspect is the cost. A young family I spoke to in a basic cafe told me it was cheaper to go out for a meal than use the gas or electric at home. Yes, there is still a lot of poverty around – a continual battle, as Dorothea said about life. Lynn Brookes, Preston Thank you for your article on Dorothea Barron, a…

In 2022, Wales launched the UK’s first basic income pilot for care leavers – offering over 600 young people £1,600 a month (£1,290 after tax), with no conditions attached. The two-year scheme, available for those who turned 18 between 1 July 2022 and 30 June 2023, aimed to address the instability that often defines the transition from care system to adulthood. While basic income pilots are nothing new, the decision by the Welsh government to centre the pilot on care leavers was informed by years of concern within the Senedd about their life chances. Professor Sally Holland, who now leads the pilot’s independent evaluation at CASCADE, previously served as Children’s Commissioner for Wales. “It wasn’t a surprise to me that care leavers were chosen for the pilot,” she explained. “The…

As one of Wales’s largest social housing providers, we work hard to help our residents live well in their homes for as long as they like, and we build more affordable homes in response to the housing crisis. We manage over 12,500 homes across Wales. Our role is to provide homes, to look after them, to keep people safe in them, to make sure they are affordable and to be supportive to our residents and communities. We have a clear sense of social purpose. It means understanding that we are here to serve both our current residents and those of the future. We want to improve the wellbeing of our residents, communities and staff by delivering positive social value in everything we do. This year Wales & West Housing will…

By the time I was 16, I’d lost both my parents. My dad had died when I was four and mum was seriously ill from when I was 12. I was about 15 and a half when she died. So as a 16-year-old, I was probably more mature than my peers because I had to grow up quickly. When you’re looking after your mother – although other people were helping and my Nanna was incredible, on many evenings it was just me talking to my mum on her bed – you’ve got to show responsibility and maturity. And it leaves its imprint. But my mum was amazing in preparing me for what was going to happen. We weren’t very well off but there was never a question about having food…

“Spirit of Stalin, come and talk to me.” If you want to communicate through a medium with the Soviet Union’s feared dictator, Joseph Stalin, you can find a site on the internet via Russian Google. The occult has been in fashion with Russians since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, no doubt a reaction against the boring Soviet insistence on scientific rationality. It may be that those who seek to talk to the ghosts of Stalin and other famous historical and cultural figures are more interested in entertainment than politics. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from the end of the 1920s until his death in 1953, has been given a respected place in the history books, his achievements as a nation-builder outweighing the…

I am sitting on a bench outside a church in Steyning, talking to a man in a fetching corduroy hat. An elderly couple approach with their daughter and son-in-law. “Remember us? We lived in Chenies.” They introduce themselves and it comes flooding back. I have not seen them for 50 years. Their daughter Lois is the reason for my first scar. It is on my left hand. (A side note: when going to see a psychic medium, they’ll often say “I think he/you/they has a scar on their left hand” and the reaction may be “wow, how do they know?” The most common scar to have is on the left hand, as it is the one that reaches out as we fall when we are little.) We were playing kiss…

JOHN WILLIAMS, 57 There’s always light at the end of the tunnel. When I was 14 I became anorexic. Looking back, the reason I started losing weight was because my mum had a brain tumour at the time. Everybody was worried about Mum and no one was really worried about me. They were looking after me – looking back I know that. But at the time it didn’t feel like that. I went to college and I did catering. I became a chef. I became an alcoholic. I got through the alcoholism and I don’t want to go back there. I’d lose so much. Something I’m proud of is stopping the alcohol. Because without that I wouldn’t be here talking. I’d be dead. Proud that I stopped, and that my…

Our political map is changing. Starmer will have to get tough Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the end of the Victorian 19th century and the beginning of the 20th reputedly said that “whatever happens will be for the worse”. Hence “don’t do things”; and do your best to keep things as they are. Certainly Keir Starmer must recognise this condition as his 10 months in office has proved. Financial crisis, military crisis, and then the crisis that he swore blind to end: the crisis of people making their way across the English Channel from France. And the enormous cost to a stretched treasury, intent on cutting costs not increasing them. Starmer was certainly bold and forthright and critical of the last administration’s handling of the small boats crossing. The…

Ten years ago, Wales made a remarkable move. The nation installed a Future Generations Commissioner. The office’s intention was simple – to help/encourage public bodies, and government, to change behaviours, to join up thinking, to plan long-term and improve the wellbeing – cultural, economic, social, environmental – of Welsh people, now and in the future. Such was the wise thinking of the first commissioner, Sophie Howe, that it influenced Big Issue’s approach to poverty prevention and helped inform the preventative legislative plans that John Bird sought to introduce to parliament. Wales was the obvious choice for our second Big Community Roadshow. As well as smart, progressive thinking that has the ear of legislators in Cardiff Bay, there is also a huge swell of community and grassroots work that can be…

Being evicted can cost tenants an estimated £2,000 – but a new proposal to compensate them has been rejected. The Welsh government published a feasibility study on tenants being given two months’ rent when they’re hit with a no-fault eviction. Generation Rent proposed the idea, but the government’s assessment rejected it over fears it would increase private rents, lead to higher costs for landlords and see low-income renters have their benefits stopped. For Cardiff renter Kate, the idea of receiving compensation for being evicted is a positive one. Speaking to Big Issue during our Community Roadshow, the 23-year-old, who shares £1,100 rent with a friend, said they received an eviction notice at the end of 2024. Kate, who is a member of the Acorn community union, said: “I think that…

Print Matters offers a range of limited-edition, exhibition-grade photographic prints, of which 20% from the sale of each will be donated to support charity Rethink Mental Illness. Among them is a collection of signed, limited-edition prints of Paul Weller by Lawrence Watson, with whom the Modfather has shared a career-long collaboration. “When he’s with us Lawrence becomes part of the band,” Weller has said of Watson. “He’s always thinking ahead, looking for ideas. He’s part of our crew.” Images include Watson’s work on the Stanley Road album, which turned 30 this month. To mark that, a limited-edition poster of Weller on a Stanley Road-inspired Lambretta, designed by Sir Peter Blake, is available to buy. Rethink Mental Illness is a cause chosen in memory of Watson’s late son Travis. printmatters.uk rethink.org…

Brighton-based label Phantom Limb has quietly built a reputation for doing things differently. Founded by James Vella in 2017, the label initially focused on releasing new experimental music across a broad and intentionally vague spectrum, from ambient to avant-folk, abstract electronics to jazz to drone. Over time, its reissue wing has become equally important, offering space for overlooked records to resurface with care and context. For Vella, the appeal lies in unearthing music that couldn’t have existed under any other circumstances. “We’re drawn to records that feel like they belong entirely to a specific time and group of people,” he says. “Not just sonically, but in the way they were made and shared.” Disk Musik is a masterstroke in that regard. The compilation was originally released in 1985 as the…

It’s not just wheat that has ears Frequently, the stories that will make you feel better are tucked away. So it is with the plants and the bees. Flowers can hear. This is great, if surprising news. They respond to the buzzing of nearby bees and produce more sugar in their nectar – by volume and concentration – making them more useful to the bees, and to the world. This remarkable news came through last week at the Acoustical Society of America and the International Congress on Acoustics’ joint meeting. It was held in New Orleans, which feels like the optimum place to have a conference on sound. The research, since you ask, centred on snapdragon flowers and snail-shell bees. It was carried out by scientists at the University of…

Wild goats perched on precarious crags that make up the impressive and imposing Valley of the Rocks on the northern edge of Exmoor National Park watch as their habitat becomes a film set for the day. Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are sharing a scene, crew rush back and forth between takes as scripts are passed around and cameras reset – all the drama that comes with moviemaking even if the main action of this scene is the making of a cup of tea. It’s an adaptation of bestselling book The Salt Path. Written by Raynor Winn, it recounts the epic trek she and her husband Moth took after they were made homeless and faced an unimaginably bleak future. Today the couple are visiting the set, along with Big Issue.…

With a 103-year winning streak, Welsh Labour might just be the most successful election-winning party in history. They have held the majority of Wales’s Westminster seats since 1922, and led every post-1999 devolution parliament in Cardiff Bay. But could the 2026 elections end this unbroken run? The party’s predicted vote share in Wales currently sits at 18%, a new YouGov poll suggests – far lower than the figures boasted by Plaid Cymru (30%) and Reform UK (25%). In Westminster, the first-past-the-post model prevents smaller parties from picking up large numbers of seats. From 2026 the Welsh parliament (the Senedd) will be elected on a wholly proportional basis, meaning the number of votes a party receives will correlate to the number of seats it secures. Current voting intention would see Plaid…

“I think that maybe it’s not two circles but one,” says Sebastian, the protagonist of Edward St Aubyn’s scintillating new novel, to his newly discovered sister, Olivia. They are looking at a Rembrandt self-portrait together, in one of the final passages of Parallel Lines. Behind the painter are circles, seemingly unconnected. Ostensibly, they are going “in opposite directions”, but to Sebastian’s eyes they meet together at the point where Rembrandt is standing. Only by going so far in those opposite directions, but being so apparently irreconcilable, do the circles converge. This is the perfect reconciling contradiction with which St Aubyn finishes a book that is full of them. On one level, Parallel Lines is a series of coincidences and awkward connections between the lives of its central characters: Martin, a…

According to Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player of all time, chess is “war in its purest form”. If he’s correct, then the grandmaster’s matches against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 were the first skirmishes in a war between humanity and artificial intelligence. As AI’s influence on our lives and culture becomes ever more hotly debated, timely new six-part Disney+ series Rematch rewinds to the first time man’s supremacy over man-made machines was challenged. Leeds-born actor-writer-director Christian Cooke gets on board to play the Russian chess champ. BIG ISSUE: This one took a little while to get to our screens. CHRISTIAN COOKE: It won an award at Series Mania then went out in France and Germany last year. We were supposed to be on Disney+ last November…