Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/16/2025 i The Big Issue

It’s expensive to be poor. The poverty premium sees the average low-income household pay out an extra £490 per year for essential goods and services. Access to credit can be difficult for people with a poor credit score. That drives them to high-cost credit and buy now, pay later agreements that come with eye-watering interest rates. Big Issue has been working to change this for years. Our founder Lord John Bird’s Creditworthiness Assessment Bill tried to right this wrong back in 2018. The crossbench peer introduced a private member’s bill to level the playing field for renters, who saw no boost to their credit score by paying rent. Like many Private Member’s Bills, the draft legislation didn’t make it into law, despite clearing the House of Lords. But it started…

Poverty always gets our prime ministers in the end For some years now I have had the habit of renaming pubs. Not for any reason other than the fun of it. In the 1980s, in order to revive a sagging pub market, the brewery and pub owners started the trend ahead of my renaming. The ‘Something and Firkin’ was the kind of renaming that took off almost overnight. I think my first renaming was ‘The Firkin Nuisance’, inspired by this attempt at making pubs sound modern and trendy. Soon I was producing such new names as ‘The Torn Chemise’, or ‘The Whingeing Liberal’. But working in Westminster, and seeing the flurry of pubs around parliament, I started to take reinvention to a new level. ‘The Misguided Member’ was down a…

On 30 April 1975 the city of Saigon fell, ending almost 20 years of war between the communist government of North Vietnam and its counterpart in the South (while being used as a proxy for Cold War aggression between the US and USSR). As Vietnam reunited under a communist regime, a new struggle began for citizens of the South who were still treated as enemies, suffered political persecution and endured severe economic hardships. In the following years, an estimated one million men, women and children took to ramshackle wooden crafts to cross dangerous waters. Around 200,000 are thought to have been lost at sea. The survivors became known as ‘boat people’ and after landing in China, Thailand and the Philippines, continued their journey towards a better life. Over 400,000 Vietnamese…

There’s a clip in Munroe Bergdorf ’s new documentary, Love & Rage, in which she is grilled by tabloid titan Piers Morgan. “When you say ‘all white people are racist’, as a white person, I find that offensive!” he thunders across the Good Morning Britain desk. “You’re playing your old trick of being the victim!” The nasty encounter is one of several Bergdorf endured in late summer, 2017. Enraged by a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, USA, she’d penned a Facebook post condemning the “racial violence of white people”. The backlash was rapid and brutal. The documentary captures some of it: Bergdorf cornered on live television; Bergdorf blinking back tears; Bergdorf struggling to interrupt a journalist’s tirade. They’re painful clips to revisit, she tells Big Issue. “I had a lot of…

When I think about being 16, I immediately think of exams. It was GCSE year and I didn’t know what was coming next. But I’d had a big growth spurt around 15 and that’s when it started to look like I could actually make a career in cricket. So, although I was still unsure what the future held, was becoming more and more hopeful that cricket could be a big part of my future. School was not great for me. I just didn’t really fit in. I was short and skinny and – I don’t know what the word is – unnoticeable or anonymous, maybe? So school was a real struggle. I didn’t make any close friends and I didn’t connect with anyone. I don’t have any friends from school…

At the movies, superheroes are generally in the business of rescuing people. But what can save superhero cinema itself? The once-dominant genre can still deliver a sporadic smash like Deadpool & Wolverine, an ultraviolent farce that bagged over a billion dollars last year. But when audiences are exposed to a constant stream of half-cocked yet still somehow overstuffed movies like The Flash, Kraven the Hunter and Captain America: Brave New World, the superhero fatigue becomes all too palpable. Surely it must be time for a fresh start? Warner Bros and Disney – respectively, the cinematic custodians of DC and Marvel’s vast rosters of colourful comic book characters – certainly seem to think so. Each of these studios is about to launch a supposedly bold new phase in their respective superhero…

Waves crash out of sight; the wind whips up shingle and stirs buried secrets. On stage, the storm brews between Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst. It’s 1953, and England’s eminent composer is writing Gloriana, an opera to mark the new Elizabethan age. Holst has been conscripted to help with the process, but her enthusiastic expertise is not welcomed. (“I never wanted you,” cuts Samuel Barnett’s Britten with icy honesty.) Holst (Victoria Yeates) is very jolly hockey sticks in the face of this unpleasantness, drawing on her experiences supporting her father, Gustav Holst, as she comforts another tortured genius. Barnett and Yeates are magnetic in Mark Ravenhill’s Ben and Imo, the two-hander play that recently moved from Stratford’s Swan Theatre to Richmond’s Orange Tree. We surround a piano, scattered manuscript, a…

HOMELESSNESS A rough sleeper’s rage struck a chord with Big Issue readers – and inspired offers of help • “I’m still in a state of shock,” Nikolas told us. A year ago, Nikolas was in a good job. But then he was laid off. “I couldn’t find anything else, so eventually I ran out of my savings. I was thinking that universal credit would sort me out, but it didn’t,” he says. By the time it got to December, his savings were gone and he was homeless. Now he’s sleeping rough on the streets of Cardiff. Nikolas, a Latvian with a master’s degree, has lived in the UK for more than five years, and in Ireland for 15 years before that. He’s been told he can’t get universal credit, despite…

Proving Elon’s AI prediction wrong is going to be a tough job Imagine being Elon Musk. Go on. As Elon Musk you can say anything, and mostly do anything, and the entire world reacts. It’s like being Ronaldo and the Pope and a Big Mac rolled into one. Not completely unrelated to this, in the recent Portugal vs Spain Nations League final, the camera kept cutting to a man in the crowd with a handmade sign that read ‘Cristiano, please let me touch you.’ Which is both terrifying and also rather polite stalker action. Pause for a second and consider that the fan decided to write that incredibly focused desire down and felt it would be OK to share it in a very public place. How Ronaldo’s mind must be…

I arrived in the UK in 1995, aged 10. I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know I had undiagnosed dyslexia. And I certainly didn’t understand what it meant to be a “refugee”. But my first lesson in this country didn’t come from a classroom. It came from George – our neighbour – who knocked on our door each morning to make sure I got to school, handed over dinner money when we couldn’t afford it, and showed me, without words, what solidarity looks like. Today, I work from Oxford as a humanitarian aid worker. I’ve walked alongside communities in Yemen and Somalia – places where armed conflict has torn through families, institutions and trust. But even in the wreckage of war, I’ve seen how people rebuild connection: neighbours sharing what…

Marie Maubouche was born in Saigon in October 1971 and was left on the steps of an orphanage at two days old. It was during the Vietnam War, and she knows very little about her birth family or the first months of her life. Maubouche is one of thousands of Vietnamese children adopted by foreign families as war raged across the country. She came to the UK as part of Project Vietnamese Orphans, spearheaded by Reverend Pat Ashe in Leamington Spa. “I was picked, I suppose, because I was in good health. My adoptive parents were part of this organisation and wanted to adopt a Vietnamese baby. They were shown pictures of babies who were available for adoption, and they chose me,” Maubouche says. The adoption process took nearly two…

Of the hundreds of independent publishing presses making waves in the UK at the moment, one of the most intriguing is the memorably titled Lurid Editions, based out of Bristol. Founded in 2022, their raison d’etre is republishing overlooked and forgotten queer texts from the 20th century. So far, they’ve reissued David Rees’s 1982 gay novel The Milkman’s on His Way and Mary Louisa Gordon’s 1936 novel Chase of the Wild Goose, about the Ladies of Llangollen. Now, Lurid Editions has released its third reprint: Brigid Brophy’s postmodernist classic In Transit, originally published in 1969. Following Faber’s recent reissues of her early novels, Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) and The Snow Ball (1964), Brophy’s life and work have returned to the spotlight. A renowned critic and novelist in her day, Brophy’s writing…

In the 1870s, when inventor Alexander Graham Bell was hard at work developing the telephone, his research partner Thomas Watson was investigating whether this radical new technology could be used to contact the dead. He was unsuccessful – but the ability of the telephone to connect those who would otherwise remain forever disconnected survives. In the hands of Joe Bloom, creator of Instagram account A View, from a Bridge, a red, retro phone handset cuts through the impersonal noise of the internet as people share intimate meditations on their lives and the world. “I felt we were missing an internet show that really focused on an individual, rather than focusing on the person presenting the show,” says Bloom. “I remember amazing projects from the earlier internet – Humans of New…

DEAN PORTER, 50 I’ve been selling Big Issue for a while if I’m honest. I spent time away from doing it, doing other jobs intermittently like working in factories or delivery jobs. I’ve not always been constantly doing it but I’ve been doing it for a few years. I get to meet interesting people and that’s what brings me back. I’ve met people who were pilots. I met a guy who invented the cameras that you see in cricket stumps many, many years ago. My dog’s name is Yoda and he’s one year old. He’s sweet. He’s a bit of a gem really. He’s very shy with people. He’s a little softie. He comes to my pitch with me. Pretty much everybody knows me and him. He’s met quite a…

Tina Sellars, a single parent living in Sheffield, was working at a bakery when she got in trouble with store cards and buy now, pay later (BNPL) debt. “They just threw them at you in those days, I just got too many and in too deep,” she said. “You just got them too easy. There was no explanation of how things worked.” By the time she’d borrowed about £4,000, she had to go to court and was given an order to pay back her debts weekly. “It impacted my life very badly,” she said. “I’ll never, ever get in that position again.” So when Sellars’s cooker broke, she knew she needed an alternative. Scrolling online, she found a shopping card offered by the lender Fair For You. Unlike the store…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Redefining disability I’m a severely disabled single mum, and because of Labour’s planned changes to disability benefits, I’m facing the loss of over £6,000 a year – more than a third of my income. I am desperate to be able to work, and the implication that this is a choice is deeply insulting. The money doesn’t stretch to luxuries. It buys basic essentials and contributes to the extra costs of living with a disability. Without it, I don’t know how I’ll survive. I am unable to physically access a food bank. I am largely housebound with ME and rely on paid carers and my elderly parents to cook, clean, shop,…

The very first words spoken in the television series Adolescence take the form of a voice note sent to Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) from his son, Adam (Amari Bacchus), asking to stay home from school because of a stomach ache. Luke listens to the message, not buying Adam’s malingering for a second. Then he gets into his unmarked police car and, seemingly oblivious to the link, begins to complain to his sergeant about his own stomach problems, which are the result, he says, of his wife telling him to substitute eating apples for smoking cigarettes. It’s an effective opening scene: in very little dialogue, we learn plenty about Luke as a husband and father, while the quiet domesticity and humour contrast with the crescendo of the police raid…

Clare Ferguson-Walker and I arrive on the perfect day to perform at The Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop’s Castle. The Pharmacy is deservingly quite legendary. It is a beautiful shop selling prescriptions of poetry, some in book form, some rolled up tightly and placed inside pill casing, ready to be cracked open to cure your tattered soul. It would be a fine place to visit at any time, but we are staying over during the yard sale weekend. Once a year, houses across the town hold yard sales. My hunger is sated early. I buy three vast volumes of The Girl’s Own Annual from the early 20th century. I am hoping one of them may contain instructions for Suffrajitsu. Ju-jitsu was taught to suffragettes because it turns your opponent’s weight against…