Table of contents for 9/8/2025 in The Big Issue

There you are, merrily believing you’ve finally got a big thick wedge to drive interest, to have you taken seriously and viewed as a rare thinker and BAM! – it’s dismissed and floats away on the wind. With you bobbing along beside it. There’s nobody quite like Kemi Badenoch. At every turn she is less and less listened to. Her plan to take as much oil and gas out of the North Sea as possible must have seemed like a good idea to somebody (Kemi, presumably) at some point. But it doesn’t stand up to even the slightest inspection. Even if Tory Party leader Badenoch somehow became prime minister, and if new drilling licences were to be granted, it wouldn’t solve a thing. It wouldn’t help energy security: around 40%…

A ‘broken’ asylum system and a growing anti-immigration backlash has been the defining hot topic of the summer and an ongoing headache for the government while MPs have been on recess. Immigration and asylum remain top of YouGov’s poll of the biggest issues facing the country, narrowly ahead of the economy. But has that really translated into numbers on the ground? Big Issue compared the number of people attending protests to the numbers attending Parkrun events over the August bank holiday weekend. Why? Because organising and mobilising people to take action on a Saturday takes a lot of effort, commitment and passion – just like Parkrun! And we found protesters lagging behind. Following the High Court ruling to allow asylum seekers to be removed from The Bell Hotel in Epping…

I’ve just written a book about my life so I have been looking back quite a bit lately. So let’s go back to when I was 16. I was spending all of my time playing guitar during the day, and then at night, I was causing trouble with my friends on the Lower East Side of Manhattan trying to sell little bags of pot. I was aiming for a certain kind of lifestyle anyway, and all the stuff that school was kind of prepping me for was just being a tax slave. And who wants to be a fucking tax slave, right? My father left my mother and me when I was about seven. He just left and never looked back. So it was just my mother with me growing…

Thanks to the record-breaking live return of Oasis, this has been a year heavy on Britpop nostalgia. But did anyone expect 2025 to include a rerun of the notorious Blur-versus-Oasis battle of August 1995, where the two bands dominated multiple media cycles by releasing head-to-head singles in a race to the top of the charts? History doesn’t repeat but, like a good chorus, sometimes it rhymes. So almost exactly three decades on from that Britpop ding-dong it is tempting to frame a similar rivalry between two cinematic bands vying for your eyeballs as well as your eardrums. The films they feature in could not be more different. One is a caffeinated animated movie aimed at tweens soundtracked by state-of-the-art synthetic pop. The other is the lugubrious sequel to an improvised…

When you’re a middle-aged woman, you’re constantly told to take supplements, get resistance bands, do weights, take up yoga, eat truckloads of protein, limit fatty foods, stay hydrated, exercise your pelvic floor, walk in nature, do Pilates, give up alcohol and meditate. In other words: BEHAVE YOURSELF. Perhaps that’s why Deborah Vance of Hacks has become my role model for the next part of my life. This character couldn’t behave herself if her life depended on it. In fact she’s awful: stinking rich, cravenly ambitious and so litigious she’d sue a squirrel for looking at her. In other words: she is AWESOME. Hacks came to prominence in 2021, just as I was anxiously rocking backwards and forwards and watching repeats of The Office. I have to confess to not having…

TONY FLYNN, 67 I’ve recently come out of hospital after a triple heart bypass so I haven’t been using my pitch. Somebody else is using it now but I do a bit part-time. We’ll see how my fitness goes, whether I take on more hours or I just do a Friday for a few hours. I had a bit of a setback in January with breathlessness and sensations in the chest. I’d thought it was severe indigestion because I used to have an ulcer years ago and I thought maybe it had flared up again. But the doctor said he thought it was my heart. I was like: “What?” So I went to the hospital for the triple heart bypass on 14 May and then I was in hospital for…

IMMIGRATION Adult social care has been pushed to the brink by the government’s overseas care worker ban Workers from outside the UK “hold up” the social care system in England – yet government immigration reforms will make it “all-but impossible” to recruit staff. As the government bans visas for overseas care workers, that’s the damning verdict issued by sector leaders. The end of overseas care recruitment will slash immigration numbers by 7,000 people a year, the Home Office predicts. For a government staking much political capital on “strong borders”, it’s a good figure for a press release. But the reduction will levy a “devastating cost”, experts have warned. “Our social care system has been saved by people who were prepared to up sticks – from their homes, from their families,…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Of all the vendors... One cold morning in October 2021, I walked towards the entrance of the BBC at New Broadcasting House. I said hi to George, the cheerful Scottish Big Issue seller and bought a copy. I later read a feature in the magazine entitled ‘Desert Storm’ about a book by Fiona Valpy, The Storyteller of Casablanca. I have spent a lot of time in Morocco, was a BBC correspondent there, wrote a book about storytelling in Marrakech and am also involved in a charity, the British Moroccan Society (BMS). I was fascinated by the article and the history of the spies and refugees who ended up in Casablanca…

For weeks this summer, firefighters have battled flames across Langdale Moor in the North York Moors National Park. The fire has scorched more than 2,000 acres – about 10 square miles – inland between Scarborough and Whitby, and at the time of writing is still alight. Smoke travelled more than 30 miles, drifting into York, where residents were told to keep windows closed. Buried Second World War munitions on the moors exploded in the heat. More than 46,000 hectares of land have burned across the UK so far this year – a national record, equivalent to an area the size of Nottingham. Across Europe, more than one million hectares have gone up in smoke; the worst wildfire season since records began. According to the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), fire…

As far back as he can remember, Dexys Midnight Runners lynchpin Kevin Rowland has struggled with anxiety and a deep-seated inferiority complex. Even while topping the early ’80s charts with irrefutable pop classics Geno and Come on Eileen, Rowland was beset by doubt, guilt, paranoia and self-destructive impulses. But he also pursued his singular creative vision with a burning and utterly dedicated intensity. He believed, quite rightly, that Dexys were something special. He just didn’t particularly like himself. In Bless Me Father: A Life Story, Rowland bares his sensitive soul with commendable – if sometimes alarming – honesty. An addict who’s been in recovery for over 30 years, his autobiography is full of touchingly sincere apologies to everyone he mistreated as an angry, difficult, insular young man. It’s also full…

A man in a bow tie is unpacking items from a small trolley. To the table set up on the manicured, now yellowing lawn he adds a white tablecloth and silver cutlery. His equally well-attired picnickers serve a sumptuous feast; around him, encircled by sculptures, similar formal tableware is arranged. Diners have brought flower arrangements: wicker baskets feature the unmistakable ‘F&M’ monogram; one blanket even boasts a candelabra. We are down a rabbit hole headed towards a nostalgic, English ideal of luxury and artistry. Glyndebourne is the pinnacle of country house opera, having burnished its stagings since 1934 when John Christie and Audrey Mildmay first opened up their Sussex pile. Today, world-class productions take place in a 1,200-seat opera house that opened in 1994. The summer season is the high…

Happy birthday, Big Issue. Our work continues Anniversary time comes round again, meaning this time 34 years ago I was deeply regretting ever having agreed to launch The Big Issue. By early September 1991, I risked losing the friendship of Gordon Roddick who, with his wife Anita, had started The Body Shop. I first met him in a pub in Edinburgh when I was 21 and on the run from the London police. He was an eternal optimist, though capable of saying, “If you screw this, Bird, don’t ever darken my door again.” He was like a boxing manager and I was being propelled into a kind of boxing ring against a large monster who had rippling muscles, with me little more than a street fighter not permitted to bring…

Regular Street Art contributor Oubaiche is an Algerian-French artist. This collage was composed at 240Project, an activity centre in London supporting vulnerable adults. I Got You she describes as one of her “favourite” artworks that she has made and “a piece to support our mental health”. “I found a collection of black and white photographs of hands in a magazine,” says Oubaiche. “I decided to create a visual story like a sculpture in a frame. I positioned the hands in a way that says, ‘I got you, I am here, I am holding you through fear and ready to let go of you when you are ready to spread your wings.’” 240project.org.uk The work on this page is created by people who are marginalised. Contact street.lights@bigissue.com to see your art…

I’m a scientist by nature and have been since the age of five when my dad bought a set of encyclopaedias that had a section on the stars and planets. From that point on I was hooked by the wonders of the universe and ended up doing a PhD in astronomy, before becoming a freelance science writer. But I’ve always had another passion, which I think came from my mum. She was a talented amateur soprano and used to sing these wonderful arias and other classical songs in full voice while doing jobs around the house. Later in life she developed Alzheimer’s as a result of which she forgot who her family was, didn’t recognise herself in the mirror, and would get lost in her own home. Yet if a…

Rowan McCabe was raised to appreciate art. His mum was a teacher who surrounded him with books, and his stepdad was a punk with a penchant for Swan Lake who encouraged him to broaden his cultural horizons. But – like many people – poetry was not a big part of his childhood, or even his early adulthood as an English student. He didn’t encounter it often, and when he did, it was about “country manors, deathly shrouds, serious lords and fluffy clouds” – not the kind of subject matter that resonated with a boy from “a rough estate”. He explains all this in the introductory poem he delivers on the doorsteps of strangers around the UK. In early 2019, he quit his job facilitating an after-school club to become the…