Table of contents for 8/26/2024 in The Big Issue

Still travelling in the wrong direction There is an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine that has haunted me since toddler days. “Once an engine attached to a train was afraid of a few drops of rain. It went into a tunnel and squeaked through its funnel and wouldn’t come out again.” So begins The Sad Story of Henry, narrated nonchalantly by Ringo Starr, who I will always associate more with toy trains than The Beatles. “The rain will spoil my lovely green paint and red stripes,” reasons the haughty Henry, and despite protestations from his driver, fireman and eventually the Fat Controller himself, Henry won’t budge. And so, they decide to brick up the tunnel with him trapped inside. The end. “But I think he deserved his punishment, don’t…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue A taxing debate I was astonished that Dan Alliband wrote in [Issue 1628, 12-18 August] that he loves the magazine but is not a Labour voter, even though he is a pensioner. Also going on to bemoan Rachel Reeves even though she has only been in the job a few weeks. But how could you not be a Labour voter Dan! I am one of those high earners you mention – but you won’t catch me moaning about my huge tax bills or voting for the Tories. I want Labour to succeed in the quest to improve people’s lives, not have the Tories make the rich richer. The way forward is…

Matt Staniek cannot stop thinking about sewage. The director of the Save Windermere campaign has been working for three years to prevent waste flooding into England’s largest lake. In July 2023, the company with responsibility for managing the water quality in the lake, United Utilities, set up an information centre in the town of Windermere. To Staniek, that was a red flag. For the last year he has been holding a Greta Thunberg-style sewage strike, spending an hour every Monday protesting outside the centre. Big Issue joined him for week 39. Just moments into the strike, a local man comes up to Staniek and greets him with a fist bump. He talks about how he remembers growing up 40 years ago and “you could see everything in the lake”. Now?…

Imagine you had a time machine. But this one works in a very particular way. You can only travel back to the Hollywood premiere of an existing film, its birthday, if you like. So where are you headed? A long time ago to experience the birth of Star Wars mania in 1977? Perhaps a trip to 1960 to see how Hitchcock’s Psycho freaked out the squares? Or how about 2011 so you can track down Ryan Reynolds on the red carpet for imminent superhero megaflop Green Lantern and whisper in his ear: “Hang in there dude, things are gonna get better.” That sort of time machine does not exist. But if seeing older movies on a big screen in a dark room brings you joy – as it should –…

CULTUREMusicCLASSICAL The teenagers could barely contain their sniggering. In fairness, I’m not sure the adults snapping photos were focused entirely on the artistic merits of the pencil drawings. Detailed explanation might be described as NSFW – not suitable for work – so let’s vaguely describe them as phallic, with experimental scale. Some might even suggest they are instructive. There is more than meets the eye with Jean Cocteau’s confident sketches. This batch, curated by the Peggy Guggenheim collection to coincide with this year’s Venice Biennale, are representative of the way the artist explored his sexuality throughout the late 1920s and ’30s; a period when same-sex relationships were not widely accepted. Cocteau identified with Orpheus, the Greek hero who served as his avatar throughout a long career. (When designing the traditional…

UKRAINE WAR ‘This war broke our whole life’: Children left stranded in Ukraine war zone without parents due to UK visa changes By Isabella McRae Big Issue Senior Reporter Ulyana Trapova, a 39-year-old mother from Drohobych, in the Lviv region of Ukraine, never imagined war would separate her from her children. She found sanctuary in Scotland shortly after the Russian invasion began and thought she could bring her children to safety – but they remain in a war zone and she is terrified for their lives. “This war broke our whole life,” she tells Big Issue in Ukrainian through a translator. “It separated me from my family. I can’t do without them. They are everything to me. We are one. I want us to be together and never be apart…

The two-child cap on benefits is one of the most significant drivers of poverty for families. Scrapping it is the most cost-effective way to lift the largest number of children out of poverty overnight. For these reasons and many more, there is widespread support across society and the political spectrum for Labour to scrap the cap as one of the first steps as a new government. After 14 years of Tory austerity, attacks on living standards and systematic dismantling of our public services, it is clear that Labour in government have inherited a mountain of problems that we now need to tackle. Since coming to power, we have seen the full brunt of 14 years of managed economic decline and a huge increase in people living in poverty. The recent…

PARALYMPIC GAMES Wheelchair rugby is the high-octane sport that was officially named Murderball before its re-branding in the late 1980s. Not many sports require a team of court-side welders in case one of the explosive crashes results in a mangled chair, but the only full-contact Paralympic sport blends high-scoring, end-to-end action with noisy thrills and spills. It could be the TV hit of the Games. So what does a reigning Paralympic champion do ahead of taking to the wheelchair rugby court? Well, if you’re Team GB’s veteran speedster Aaron Phipps, you keep it simple. “I have a cup of tea, then go out to war,” says 41-year-old Phipps, whose trademark headband and bursts of speed made him one of the stars of the Tokyo gold medal-winning squad. “It’s a balancing…

Uncompromising. Devastating. Ever radical. Danez Smith’s latest poetry collection, Bluff, proliferates with defiant imaginaries. Their heady verse speaks to the ordinary horror of our times – through survival, rage and longing. These poems are a homecoming, constellating around Minneapolis, Smith’s home town, in the wake of the protests following the murder of George Floyd. Smith homes in on the brutal foundations of American society, entwined with the US government’s imperial wickedness, our environmental crisis and the violence continually meted upon Black people. They also interrogate their own responsibility as a poet, in the face of the establishment. The poem less hope indicts how: “they clapped at my eulogies. they said, encore, encore. / we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty / &, pitifully, i loved…

CULTUREINTERVIEW New film Sing Sing opens with recent Oscar nominee Colman Domingo reciting lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s the first clue that this is a prison movie like no other. Domingo plays John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, an inmate at the upstate New York maximum security prison that shares its name with the film. Everything about this story of brotherhood, creativity and survival feels real. The locations, many of the actors, and the story that follows wrongly imprisoned Divine G are as real and authentic as drama gets. Divine G is a mainstay of the theatre programme inside Sing Sing, and his friendship with Divine Eye – one of the prison’s most feared inmates who finds a new direction via performing – makes a compelling case for the arts…

HIGHER EDUCATION When the University of Lincoln (UoL) was established, pundits described it as “the best thing to happen to the city since the Romans”. It’s a big claim; the Romans, after all, left Britain in 409AD. But the university has undeniably transformed the city. Since it was founded in 1996, UoL has grown from 500 students to more than 15,000. The sprawling campus is a far cry from its initial site – two buildings constructed atop a derelict rail goods yard. One in six Lincoln residents are affiliated with the university, which generates £450 million for the local economy every year. “Lincoln really suffered from deindustrialisation,” said Owen Clayton, UoL lecturer and University and College Union (UCU) branch chair. “The city was on its knees, it was quite impoverished.…

I was telling my youngest daughter how artificial our world is even before we encountered AI. Our light, our heat, our food and our thinking is riddled with artificiality. And our transport: we have long, long ago given up on just our human feet. We have allowed ourselves to be swept up by bus, car and plane. The natural fear that causes us to protect our children and provide for them has created the artificial and exaggerated mountains of cash that make up the obese wealth of the billionaire. For every billionaire piles up untold wealth and the power that goes with it, hiding their vulnerability as just another human being. Just another foraging animal underneath it all. Our animal-human ingenuity eventually brings us to the life-and-soul-murdering mobile phone, where…

Being 16 was a crucial stage of my life. I was halfway through doing A levels, and it was the first time that I was aware that I was academically struggling. I’d always been quite a gifted kid academically and so, due to family pressures – my dad’s a doctor, my mum is a midwife – I was pushed into science A levels that I found really, really hard. So everything else seemed more interesting than academic work. I was very interested in politics. I’d been on a CND march the year before, and a big anti-apartheid march to Trafalgar Square. I was a very shy and nerdish kid, very bookish. Not someone people expected to make them laugh or offer insight or wit. I was just the general knowledge…

I have never quite seen the point of private education. Studies show that educational outcomes are shaped mostly by socioeconomic backgrounds. If you are from a stable home you are just as likely to get good grades from a state school as you are an independent one. So why would a middle-class family with an able child pay for a posh school when their kid could get the same academic outcomes for free? Hard to say. For some, you just can’t put a price on keeping your kids incubated from working-class people, I suppose. However, since my own kids started secondary school (at the same place I attended in the ’80s) I have come to see the state system’s own limitations. Most kids get on fine. But if your kid…

JOSH EARDLEY, 33 The reason why I like the job is the flexible hours. It allows me to engage with volunteering so I can do Big Issue around that. I did a BTEC in health and social care, so I’ve been spending a lot more time with elderly people just in a friendship capacity through meeting them, having drinks in the pub, time in the library, having coffee. It’s enabling me to make a friendship base that is allowing me to be able to use other parts of my CV, which ultimately might be a sustainable route forward for me. Through the Exeter CoLab wellbeing hub I’ve met quite a lot of people who are also affected by homelessness. I think it’s important that Big Issue is striving to mitigate…