Table of contents for 7/14/2025 in The Big Issue

This month has already seen two era-defining music events – and Big Issue was part of both. On 4 July in Cardiff, Noel and Liam Gallagher reunited Oasis for the first time in 16 years. Around 75,000 emotional fans packed into the Principality Stadium to be part of one of the most talked about reformations of this generation. Big Issue vendors, laden with our special dual-cover collector’s editions were posted around the venue on both concert dates – Oasis also played on 5 July. Sales were supersonic. Our vendor Donna led fans in frequent “selling the Big Issue” singalongs, and quizzed everyone on whether they were Team Liam or Noel. Team Donna got the most votes. A special range of Oasis-inspired Big Issue bucket hats have also been flying off…

Partick Thistle is the third team in Glasgow. They’re the team you support when you can’t really make up your mind. Thistle fans will be outraged by that. I’m joking, Thistle fans. Thistle is a great club. The ground, Firhill, is a tight, old-school, if oddly cold, place to watch football. The home kit, yellow and red stripes, also feels like a welcome throwback. Artist David Shrigley created Kingsley, Thistle’s star-shaped, slightly unsettling, mascot. And they’re fan-owned, as more clubs should be. But they’re still not Celtic or Rangers. Anyway, last week they came up with a curious idea. Being somewhat short of resources, they have invited fans to take in new signings and put them up in their homes. So far Partick have signed two new players during this…

When it comes to the Roma: is the word ‘gypsy’ a slur? There is no one answer to this, and that’s partly because there is no single Romani group. Romani history and identity is varied, and takes different shapes depending on the country they’ve settled in. Romani presence in Britain dates back to the 16th century. Waves of Romani migration followed in the 20th and 21st centuries: after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007. The Roma themselves are a people with many subgroups: the division goes by ‘nation’, or natsya, and then there are smaller subdivisions still, the vitsa, the community, the family. There are the Kalderash, spread across the Balkans, who make up a significant proportion of recent migrants…

Maryam Hashemi is a multidisciplinary artist whose style is rooted in the subconscious and her upbringing in Iran. Her latest exhibition, Making Myself at HOME, takes place as part of this year’s Refugee Week festival, celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. The show portrays her journey, and how her practice has developed over the years since she moved to the UK in 2002. It consists of paintings in acrylics and mixed media in various styles, including abstract dreamscapes. View more of Hashemi’s art on Instagram @marhashem ArtHouse, Crouch End, London, until 18 July; refugeeweek.org.uk/events The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art here. To see more and buy prints: bigissueshop.com. At least half of…

Before leaving the station, the announcements on a train warning you of how many ways you will be fined, mocked or made to buy another full-price ticket get longer and longer, as the service gets worse and worse – and more and more expensive. Ten minutes of every permutation of how you will be fleeced further is then followed by an apology that the train is cancelled due to a fault with the doors or delayed due to an unattended plimsoll being found in the buffet car. There was stiff competition for worst train company last week. Great Western Railway was its usual mix of delays and overcrowding, though at least this time I wasn’t also being dripped on by the loose tubing of the air-con which appeared to be…

DRUGS Pressure grows on police forces to equip officers with life-saving anti-overdose drug after Big Issue reporting Big Issue’s reporting has sparked calls for change after we revealed just two police forces refuse to give their officers naloxone – a life-saving drug which reverses opioid overdoses. Amid record-high drug deaths, and at least 400 deaths linked to nitazenes, a form of synthetic opioid, most police forces in the UK now give their officers the choice to carry naloxone, or have plans to. Some 20,000 officers now carry the drug, and it has been used more than 1,200 times from June 2019 to December 2024 by officers who are often first on the scene of potentially fatal overdoses. But Greater Manchester and Suffolk police forces have no plans to roll out…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Dying wishes Young people have been ignored in the debate on the Assisted Dying Bill. Children who are 14-year-olds now will be affected by the bill when it becomes operational in four years’ time. Terminally ill young people have very different ideas about death and dying from a very old person. The bill will eventually allow medical professionals to discuss assisted dying with young people approaching their 18th birthday. This legislation will have considerable impacts on young people as they grow into a world where assisted dying, sanctioned by the state, is available as an option. Young people’s views are routinely ignored in so many ways, yet these and other…

“We had just witnessed the murder of George Floyd. It could have been me. In many ways, I was photographing my own trauma,” says Misan Harriman of photographing the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London five years ago. “The world was coming out of lock-down and we witnessed one of the biggest civil rights movements of our time. I was proud of this country. We came out, all colours, all races, and we said: ‘We can do better.’” Harriman’s photographs caught the eye of then British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, who commissioned him to shoot the illustrious September cover of the magazine. It made Harriman, 47, a Nigerian-born British activist, the first black man to photograph the cover of British Vogue in its 104-year history. He has since become a…

At 16 I’d been at boarding school in Wolverhampton for nine years, and my main preoccupation was just getting the fuck out. Boarding school is pretty boring. You’re there a long, long time. And boys are not the best company all the time. We would go and look for beer and a good time. I think I was about 16 or 17 when I went to London and saw Beyond the Fringe, a fantastic show with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. That changed my life because I didn’t realise you could laugh at all the things I didn’t like – the army and royalty and authority. That was a breakthrough for me. I only wanted to be a comedian from then on. I did end up…

We can all agree that summer movie season is not the optimal launchpad for experimental cinema. But when the 2025 blockbuster line-up includes a Superman, another Jurassic World, yet another Fantastic Four, the return of The Smurfs, a Naked Gun revival and even a Freakier Friday, you could be forgiven for thinking that there really are no original ideas left in Hollywood. As if to underline that sense of deja viewing, this week sees the release of I Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel-slash-reboot of the 1997 horror about a group of attractive youngsters who find themselves on a killer’s hitlist after colluding to cover up a hit-and-run. That first movie had a good hook (wielded by the fisherman-coded boogeyman) but wasn’t exactly a timeless classic. Until recently…

The garden is filled with dahlias – yellow, pink and lilac pompoms that cheerlead from the flowerbeds. They nod encouragingly in the breeze as I wrestle with the hosepipe, laughed at, silently, by little dogs. I continue dousing pots and rockeries as instructed, until I get to the final task: check the electric fence that borders the neighbouring field. My friend, for whom I am house-sitting, suggested that this particular chore was optional. The buzzing barrier is there to keep out badger, deer and anything else that fancies a nibble of these resource-sapping blooms. It also ensures the perimeter to the property is not compromised so that the dogs will not escape. The trouble is, this lovely house is slap-bang in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by woods, meadows…

BOB SHEPPARD, 65 I started treatment for prostate cancer last February/March time. I’ve been having radiotherapy that is much kinder to me and it looks like it’s gone. I haven’t had that news from the doctors yet but I think it’s gone anyway. I’m not having to go to the toilet every night. My own body says it’s gone, I do believe that if you’re in tune with your body then you’re usually dead-on. In terms of selling the magazine, it’s been hard. I’ve had to go back and forth to the hospital at different times, it was stressful. I didn’t get much help to get there but because I’ve been on PIP (personal independence payment) I’ve been able to get the odd taxi there. I’ve heard a bit about…

Is Mr Hackett there?” “Who is it?” “CRS [a debt collection agency].” “No, he’s not in.” Bam. Pressing an imaginary button on the handset, Jason mimes hanging up the phone. He owes CRS £80. But with no money spare, the dad-of-three has “no choice” but to lie to bailiffs. Welcome to Woldham. A pseudonym for a housing estate on the edge of a southern English town, it’s the setting for The Personal Life of Debt – a new ethnography by anthropologist Ryan Davey. Over seven years, Davey spent 18 months living in the community, where debt is an omnipresent feature of everyday life. The Cardiff University academic embedded himself in the lives of residents like Jason and his partner Becky, trying to understand the emotional ramifications of constant repayment demands.…

At the age of 31, I don’t truly believe I can start an article with “Back in my day…” but, when you think of it, my day was the late Nineties/early Noughties, which now feels far enough away that it’s the past: and the past, in all its forms, always seems more remote, romantic and quaint. Sure, nostalgia allows us to soften and rose tint the edges of memory, but I did love it: it was a time of lad culture, of Oasis having beef with Blur for no reason at all, of cutting-edge journalism where a Loaded employee did cocaine during a Sunday League football match just to see what that’s like. It was the heyday of the tabloid press, when The Sun used the headline ‘I’m A Mind…

On 2 July, all 264 female MPs donned purple, white and green sashes to mark 97 years of women’s suffrage – honouring a protest movement that had once bombed Westminster Abbey. That same day, the UK government proscribed Palestine Action (PA) under terrorism laws. The group’s crime? Among other charges, spraying paint on RAF planes to protest Britain’s arms role in Israel’s war on Gaza. Wearing a Palestine Action T-shirt could now land you six months in prison. This is just the latest sign of Britain’s growing hostility to protest. Since the Public Order Act 2023, international watchdogs have condemned the UK’s “increasingly authoritarian” crackdown on dissent. Two days later, on 4 July, Big Issue joins Green New Deal Rising (GNDR) for a National Day of Protest. The youth-led group,…

He was a major player in the global financial collapse of 2008, who cost the country billions of pounds after becoming a key player in the high-stakes banking cataclysm. Now Fred Goodwin is receiving a punishment many would say fits the crime – being haunted by Brian Cox. And a very angry Brian Cox at that. “He still has a £700,000 pension, which I think is appalling, and that’s it having been halved. He should have had it taken away from him and now he should be on his uppers, like a lot of people were. A lot of people lost everything because of his actions. They took away his knighthood, but so what? I’m not a great believer in them so that doesn’t make much difference to me, really.”…

Once you have read Philippa Snow’s It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me, it’s impossible not to see the markers of femininity and fame all around. Whether it’s Sydney Sweeney producing a limited-edition soap made from her bath water, or reality TV star Erika Jayne singing “It’s expensive to be me” on the Mighty Hoopla stage. In Snow’s latest work of nonfiction each chapter compares the lives of two famous women, from blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith to soul singers Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday. Some connections have been made before and even encouraged by the stars themselves, as is the case with Smith and her Hollywood inspiration. But others, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Lindsay Lohan, few would think to compare. Snow…

Folk culture is all around us. It is hiding in nooks and crannies across Britain waiting to be discovered. We just have to learn where and what to look for. It can be hard to define what folk is, it is such a vast world filled with such a variety of customs, objects and music that it can be tricky to understand what the defining thread is that connects them all. In order to try and offer a lead in for those getting interested in folk for the first time I would suggest that anyone considering whether something is ‘folk’ begins by asking a few questions of the object, custom or indeed song they are looking at: Is it made for and of the people of a particular place? Has…