Table of contents for 9/29/2025 in The Big Issue

A retrospective of pioneering US photographer Lee Miller will open at Tate Britain, London, this week. It will feature 250 prints spanning Miller’s career, from French surrealism to fashion and war photography. This image of model Elizabeth Cowell wearing a Digby Morton suit, a vision of poise and defiance amid the detritus of war, was commissioned by the UK government’s Ministry of Information to promote ‘Utility Clothing’, a state-regulated scheme for the production, pricing, and rationing of clothes. Lee Miller at Tate Britain runs from 2 October 2025 to 15 February 2026…

GET IN TOUCH The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK thebigissue ISSUE 1685 Strong cover @samanthalouiselouise BIGLY ISSUE After we vox popped asking what Britain would be like with Donald Trump as prime minister, many of you then shared your thoughts I don’t even want to think about it Paranoidandroid1967, Instagram Even shitter than it currently is... hard as that is to believe, shitter than this is possible (as we will find out if Deform manage to get in). Expatscot, Instagram 10 Downing Street would get a white-and-gold front door. Spicksspecks, Instagram Would be great. Would knock some sense and fix education. While of course booming the economy. Mad respect. Damocles.4, Instagram People are brainwashed. Trump is the best president. Olaamoran,…

I guess my main preoccupations at 16 were just trying to stay out of trouble. I was incredibly unsuccessful with finding girlfriends and things like that. Really, very, very unsuccessful. I think I was aware of that. I wasn’t obsessed with it, but I was aware of it. I must say, I was obsessed with listening to music. I played it, but my main focus was listening to music. I was trying to escape the real world. Because I found the real world too confronting and too harsh, so I tended to lose myself in films and books and music. My relationship with my mother was complex, as it was for my brother. I don’t really know what was going on. She was abused by her mother. It was passed…

Her job, as the term begins, falls into the category of simple, but not easy: convince fresh students to trust each other with their lives. To demonstrate how this begins, Whitmore, head of acrobatics at circus school Circomedia, asks her colleague: “Are you willing to be a table for me?” She then invites me to sit on that colleague. Whitmore then calls Sophia Hall, Big Issue’s deputy digital editor, over from behind the tripod where she is filming the scene, and invites Sophia to stand on my knees, while I remain seated on her colleague. “You’re going to try and stand up, just like stepping upstairs,” Whitmore says. “Sure,” replies Sophia. “Step up nice and tall, and then once you’re up, you both lean out together,” says Whitmore. Nobody gets…

In a recent interview, artist and writer Victor Burgin was asked to reflect on the state of contemporary image production in relation to his seminal 1982 book Thinking Photography. The most fundamental change with the arrival of AI, Burgin said, is that photography is no longer just shaped by ideology, but has also become its vehicle. When we generate media using AI platforms, we are reproducing the worldviews embedded within its training data. The synthetic outputs of AI models are the result of aggregating billions of images scraped from all corners of the online sphere, converged as an average. Filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl calls these mean images, understanding the AI-generated image as an approximation of society’s views of itself. We might understand mean to refer to the average and…

Tasked with doing a personal ad for one of his sponsors, Adam Buxton could have just phoned it in like all the other podcasters. Instead, the comedian, actor and DIY musician penned web-building platform Squarespace a deliriously catchy 30-second pop jingle far funnier than a song about templates and signing up for a free trial has any right to be. It’s the cowbell that kills me. It only kicks in for the last five seconds, but something about how over-the-top it is makes me laugh. I suppose cowbells are just funny, aren’t they? (See the legendary Saturday Night Live Blue Öyster Cult “more cowbell” sketch with Christopher Walken and Will Ferrell). Mixed in among Buxton’s other equally entertaining self-made sonic skits and promotional ditties – including unpaid jingles for charities…

→ Jobs, opportunity and the ongoing rise in the cost of living – the holy trinity, the intertwining parts of the big conundrum. If one of them is nudged to move in the right direction it means the others will follow, or they are already going there. But to nudge one in the right direction is to resolve the gordian knot. Every week, we’re bombarded by new figures. There are around 1.67 million people currently registered as unemployed. At the same time, according to the ONS, there are 728,000 open vacancies. This is a drop in the last year. As the number of unemployed rises, it neatly illustrates the problem. We know the challenges. To secure a new job, particularly if you’re entering the labour market for the first time,…

Our representative democracy is failing too many of our democratic representatives. While many of us are interested in political issues, fewer of us feel much loyalty to a political party. We can often feel better represented by the campaigning organisations that champion the particular causes that we care about. Unfortunately, as things stand, our democratic representatives in these campaigning organisations rarely get the influence that they deserve. Perhaps the most obvious example of this in recent years was the case of the subpostmasters. They had been the victims of gross injustice. They had right on their side. They had used all the existing political channels with dogged determination. And they were let down. Neither their hard work nor the force of their argument counted for much. Until ITV broadcast Mr…

Dazzling! Irreverent! Miraculous! Arundhati Roy’s spellbinding memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, lays out the cosmos of her life with the centripetal force of her mother, Mrs Mary Roy. With gracious wit, Roy mourns her mother in all her complexity – a woman who harmed and nurtured in tandem. Raising her children as a divorced single parent in 1960s India, Mrs Roy long chafed against social taboos. She became a trailblazer, making havoc of gendered expectation. She took her nearest and dearest to trial over unjust inheritance laws and built her own renowned school in Kerala. She carved her place in society as a beloved, legendary headmistress – deemed equal to a man in the eyes of her community. Though Mrs Roy inflicted enormous demands on her inner circle, she…

ALFIE BREW, 30 I like going fishing. It’s peaceful I’ve not long returned to selling the magazine. A car knocked me off my bike and I had to have three months off Big Issue. I had a fractured knee and a torn ligament in my leg. My recovery has been up and down. I have bipolar so I’m trying to keep my head and focus on one thing at the minute, and go forward from there. I can walk now, thankfully. I had to just lend money off people while I was off my pitch. I had help from Sue in the Big Issue office in Plymouth who sorted me out with food vouchers. The vouchers helped me a lot. If it wasn’t for Big Issue I’d be stuck. But…

The only way forward is to split the poverty atom → Oh yes, I am becoming more boring and repetitive. I cannot put this down to age. It is my increasing obsession with finding the way to end poverty. I used to be so fresh and entertaining. In bed with hundreds of vital thinkers who had come up with some magic solution to homelessness that would lift a handful, a hundred, a thousand out of homelessness and poverty. But as the cold decades oozing failure passed I had to admit that being part of a clever bunch of activists who had come up with some bright ideas lost its lustre. We were nothing more than some bright light in a sea of darkness. Whatever we did we never went mainstream.…

→ The UK’s politicians know they’re not trusted. Upon becoming prime minister, the first Labour leader in a generation to win a general election, Keir Starmer put it like this: “The fight for trust is the battle that defines our political era.” Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that, alongside this, The Traitors, TV’s biggest hit, has won hearts through a thrilling lack of trust. Its cultural allure is such that some of the country’s biggest names – Steven Fry, Jonathan Ross, and Clare Balding among them – have volunteered for the show’s first celebrity edition, eager to go to a Scottish castle and lie to each other in front of the public. What can be learned from these two parallel trust trajectories? Working with leading polling firm Ipsos,…

Sometimes you want caviar, sometimes you want Koka noodles. In television drama terms, caviar is Succession, The White Lotus, Slow Horses, Severance. You have to sit up straight and pay attention, put on the subtitles in case you miss a plot point and share your theories online. The rest of it is Koka noodles – a low-effort, half-digested affair best enjoyed privately. This kind of drama includes Harlan Coben adaptations, family sagas starring Nicole Kidman or anything with Suranne Jones in it. No real concentration is required, so you can go on your phone and just use the recaps to catch up. Nobody admits it, but noodle drama is secretly even more enjoyable than caviar drama, and most of us are sitting at home quietly mainlining preposterously tasty trashiness and…