Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/2/2025 i The Big Issue

It’s never been completely clear whose interests Nick Clegg wanted to serve. In the coalition he was pitched as the tempering voice, supposedly saving the country from the worst excesses of a Conservative party desperate to cut, cut, cut. One word, Nick – austerity. Then came the university fees U-turn and his supplication. Do it then ask for forgiveness was the Clegg way, it seemed. Post-government, after a battering in the 2015 election, those Lib Dems with hands on the nation’s purse sailed off and did OK. Danny Alexander, formerly George Osborne’s number two at the treasury, took up a lucrative post as vice president for policy and strategy at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing. He only moved on last winter. Clegg went west and became one of…

As a self-appointed historian, never studying it but using it as a guide to action in my own life, you could say that often I am wide of the mark. That may well be the case. But there is the chance that sometimes – sometimes – my historical illiteracy may throw up points worth considering. If I look at the world at the moment, it seems to me as if it’s dedicated to disagreement. As if the most important activity is to disagree. Disagreeing has a long history and may well be the most constant part of human life. Athens, the source of much of philosophy and culture, contained the most disagreeing of men, Socrates. He spawned a school of disagreement because he thought that most humans were wrong. Out…

Five years ago, my eight-year-old grandson ran down the stairs yelling for me to come up to the bathroom. His mother, my daughter Francesca, 31, had fallen in the bath and he couldn’t get her out of the water. She wasn’t able to speak and was comatose – we didn’t know what was happening. I tried three times to get her out of the bath, and just couldn’t manage it. I told my grandson to run next door to ask the neighbour for help. The neighbour started doing CPR, and shortly after, the ambulance turned up. They tried to keep my daughter alive, but after an hour, they said they couldn’t bring her back. She died, leaving behind her two young children, then only eight and three, who witnessed the…

At 16 years old, I was fully focused on football. I was with Arsenal, playing for England in the youth set up, and living at the Arsenal Academy in Hertfordshire. My focus was on making the Arsenal women’s first team because they had so many amazing players. There was a lot of fear – if I didn’t make it into the team, what was my life going to be? I never wanted to be seen as a failure, so I clung on so no one could take being Alex Scott the footballer away from me. I struggled with school. I’m dyslexic and it’s not that I didn’t want to engage, I just found I couldn’t express myself. So it was easier to remove myself from an environment where I felt…

The more fins change, the more they stay the same. Intentionally or not, Steven Spielberg created the modern Hollywood blockbuster in June 1975 when his stressful creature feature Jaws became a phenomenon. Five decades on and generations of cinemagoers have been conditioned to both fear sharks – the perfect dead-eyed symbol of a voracious horror lurking unseen below the surface – and to anticipate thrilling cinematic entertainment in the summer months. A 50th anniversary Jaws Ultra-HD 4K Blu-ray is out in July, a three-disc set laden with featurettes and making-of docs in which Spielberg repeatedly explains that making the film was an absolute nightmare because the mechanical shark kept breaking down. But those words of warning have long gone unheeded. Jaws has inspired dozens, if not hundreds, of killer shark…

JOSH CLARKE, 33 I’ve been here seven, maybe eight years. It’s a lovely community and they don’t want to lose me. I’ve always been there for people. The Co-op are good to me, they appreciate everything I do for them. I help the older people to their cars with their shopping when needed, and also if they need a basket picked up to give to them in their hand then I also do that for them. I also keep an eye on the store for the manager who’s based there, because I’ve got a good pair of eyes. If I see a person about to shoplift or something like that, then I give them a heads-up for the safety of other customers that could be in the store. They appreciate…

SPENDING REVIEW The country isn’t working. Is Rachel Reeves’s multi-year spending review going to fix it? By Lottie Elton Big Issue reporter On 11 June, chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver the Labour government’s first multi-year spending review. It’s a big deal. Laying out plans for everything from education and the NHS to prisons and housing, it will shape the political terrain until the end of the decade. In short: the government is about to show us what (and who) it really prioritises. “The spending review will set the trajectory for the rest of this parliament,” says Rachael Henry, head of advocacy at Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank. “And there will be winners and losers. There’ll be really difficult trade-offs.” Health, defence and growth-boosting infrastructure projects are in…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Hold the line I was interested in Isabella McRae’s article on the cashless society [Issue 1667, 19-25 May]. While I do not doubt that the most vulnerable are at the front line of the impact of this trend, they are not the only ones at risk. We all are. If I draw £50 from a cash machine, I can spend that where I like and the only record will be that I drew £50 from a cash machine. If I spend £50 via my digital wallet or with my card, every transaction is there for a hacker to see, to fake me and to scam me. If they can see…

The deputy leader of the Green Party arrives on his bike at a community cafe in Hackney Wick, and orders an English breakfast tea with oat milk. Zack Polanski has been zipping around London all day, combining his role as a London assembly member with his bid for the party’s leadership in September’s election. As Starmer’s government tacks right and Reform prove themselves an increasingly serious electoral force, Polanski thinks the Greens can offer a left-wing populist alternative to Nigel Farage’s party and a natural home for progressive voters. “The biggest job we have is to make sure that Keir Starmer is more scared of losing votes and seats to the Green Party than to Reform,” he says. After 2024, the Greens rocked up to parliament with a record four…

REVIEWS Peel good factor The best non-fiction is writing that makes you see things in a new light, very much the case for this week’s two books. First up is the wonderful Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh. The subtitle – A Personal History of the Orange – hints at the hybrid nature of this smart memoir, a book that deals with Goh’s own personal search for identity and meaning as much as the history of the world’s most popular citrus fruit. The two stories intertwine wonderfully, starting in China with the mythical origins of the orange tree, and switching to Goh visiting relatives of her own there, trying to get a sense of how she can relate to lives lived so differently to her own. Goh grew up as a…

One of the Labour government’s first actions was to appoint James Timpson as Prisons Minister, in a signal that they were taking the prisons crisis seriously. One of Timpson’s first actions was to establish a sentencing review led by former Conservative justice minister David Gauke, in a signal that he was looking for new thinking to end decades of failed prison policy. I think we can say that David Gauke has done his job. In his review, published last month, he has called out the hypocrisy of successive governments who, while ramping up rhetoric and legislation that they knew would lead to sharp increases in the prison population, simultaneously targeted the Ministry of Justice for cuts that ensured there would never be enough capacity, control or rehabilitation in our prisons.…

Pulp’s new album is arriving at a prescient time. It’s 30 years ago this month that we saw the coronation of Jarvis Cocker as a bona fide British star. In the wake of the success of Common People, Pulp were belatedly asked to headline Saturday night on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 1995 – after The Stone Roses pulled out because guitarist John Squire had broken his collarbone while out cycling. Pulp were by no means the organisers’ first choice: Blur, Primal Scream and Rod Stewart all reportedly turned down the prestigious slot. However, one of the biggest gambles in Glastonbury’s history ended up providing us with one of its most iconic, cherished moments. Jarvis’s performance even now is spoken of in reverential tones by those who were privileged to…

In case you hadn’t noticed, Channel 4 is Channel 4-ing again. Not content with Open House (orgies), Sex Box (sex in a box, with commentary) and of course Naked Attraction (where we are invited to forensically examine the foreskins of accountants from Skelmersdale) they’ve now come up with another doozy. Virgin Island. The pitch is like something Alan Partridge might have recorded on his dictaphone on his way back to the Travel Tavern – except it’s a lot more risqué than Monkey Tennis or Arm Wrestling with Chas & Dave. A group of 12 virgins go on a Mediterranean island intimacy retreat to learn how to overcome their sexual blocks. Nobody but Channel 4 would have commissioned it, apart from maybe ITV2, as part of their late-night Couples-In-Swimwear-Arguing-Around-A-Firepit-In-Majorca strand. Still,…