Table of contents for 01/12/2026 in The Big Issue

→ Words change the thing. Kingsley Amis said that. He’s an author of diminishing influence, a mid-century comic novelist who delivers much less potency and insight than his son Martin – something that would annoy him, by all accounts. The late Kingsley Amis was pretty intolerant of a lot of things, the misuse of words and language being one of them. But that succinct epithet of his still lands, and ironically for a man who liked the clarity of meaning in words, it is an adaptable phrase. I thought of it twice last week. The first was after 10 people were convicted of online harassment of Brigitte Macron, the French president’s wife, for posting malicious comments on social media, mostly claiming she was a man. There were also suggestions of…

If Paddington Bear was lost, homeless and roaming around Paddington Station today with nowhere else to go, he wouldn’t be the only one. “After the trains stop running, the underground closes and there’s a whole back section no one’s walking through, people set up camp there. They’re refugees literally living in Paddington Station,” says Thomas Delap, chief executive of the North Paddington Foodbank. He estimates there can be 20 people on an average night, including families, left with nowhere else to go. The majority are refugees who have been given leave to remain but find themselves trapped. They are allowed to stay in the UK and therefore no longer qualify for asylum accommodation but it takes between six to eight weeks for documentation to process that allows them to claim…

Nearly a quarter of Venezuela’s population – close to eight million people – have fled their homes since 2015. It is the largest migratory exodus in the western hemisphere in recent history. Now, as far-right political parties rise across Latin America – fuelled in part by backlash against these very migrants – the region faces a dangerous inflection point. Enter Donald Trump. After months of explicit threats, which included the seizure of oil tankers and air strikes on alleged drug boats, on 3 January the United States abducted Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, to be charged with drug trafficking offences. Yet, instead of heralding a new democratic era for the country, Trump’s actions led to a shift in leader that appears to have kept the complete structure of the previous…

It’s reasonable to assume that no one these days, apart perhaps from the most pig-headed fans of hack jokes and received wisdom, regards Ringo Starr as anything less than a great drummer with an instinctive knack for enhancing a song. A characterful player and unique stylist who never knowingly drew attention to himself, he was the perfect drummer for The Beatles, and therefore the perfect drummer. QED. But as Tom Doyle observes in Ringo: A Fab Life, his engrossing, affectionate and well-researched biography of Sir Richard Starkey, maybe we’re still guilty of treating him as a two-dimensional caricature. Good old Ringo, the jovial, lovable, unpretentious, easy-going clown. The happy-go-lucky everyman Beatle. And while that persona is certainly true to an extent – Doyle rarely refers to his subject as “Starr”,…

In 2022’s harrowing character study The Whale, Brendan Fraser plays a reclusive and morbidly obese college professor obsessed with meatball sub sandwiches, gay pornography and the symbolism of Moby-Dick. Despite being larded in heavy physical prosthetics, Fraser’s tortured but affecting performance saw The Mummy star harpoon his own career white whale: a Best Actor Oscar. It felt like a heartwarming comeback story for a strapping yet acutely sensitive screen presence who had been exploited and then squandered by an indifferent Hollywood machine. Surely such a big win would trigger a true Brenaissance? A brief cameo as a blowhard lawyer for Martin Scorsese in Killers of the Flower Moon felt like a promising amuse-bouche. Sadly we’ll never know if Fraser was any good as a pyromaniac supervillain in Batgirl as that…

Over the Christmas holidays, there was only one place to go. No, not to the department store to sit on Santa’s knee (I’ve been cautioned by the police about that before). Instead, it was much safer to stay at home and watch my favourite channel – the channel hardly anybody else but me watches, somewhere in the Siberian wastelands of Freeview, next to GREAT! and That’s 80s. I’m talking, of course, about Food Network. I mean, yes, essentially Food Network is just a bunch of repeats of ancient cooking programmes, and I should probably get a life. But in these stressful times, I’m not sure what would I do without this reliably endless stream of blurry old cookery shows. Here, you can see every part of the Jamie Oliver lifecycle,…

For me, as a veteran and a minister, the top priority is tackling veterans’ homelessness. Because, in my view, if you have served this country, then it is a national shame to have even one veteran sleeping rough on the streets. This will not be easy. This government inherited a homelessness crisis. Among the population as a whole, rough sleeping and households in temporary accommodation have more than doubled since 2010. It is difficult to know for sure how many veterans are sleeping rough and while measures we do have suggest veteran homelessness is very low, probably less than 1% of the total number of homeless, nonetheless we can be sure that the wider crisis is affecting veterans too. While local authorities already have a duty to house veterans who…

→ A former minister explained to me how difficult, in fact virtually impossible, it is to get new ideas accepted by government. If you go to see a minister they will have their aides around a large table and it looks impressive. Loads of notes are scribbled down. A seriousness in the pursuit of new open government is suggested. ‘Yes, we do admire and value and are inspired by your forthright determination to quell the rise of poverty’ etc is accepted; ‘And we shall do our best to implement your innovations!’ The next meeting is smaller and another meeting may follow. But what is accepted at the first meeting, that innovation is on the way, has shrunk into a ‘might happen’. By the second or third meeting the process is…

1 Fat Freddy’s Cat Omnibus by Gilbert Shelton Shelton was part of the American underground comics scene, and Fat Freddy’s Cat chronicles a cat’s viewpoint living in a hippy houseshare alongside an army of disgruntled cockroaches. Absolute comic dynamite. 2 Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo The spirit of a plucky bunch of village inhabitants vs occupying Roman legions is irresistible to any young mind. The drawings are beautiful, and depictions of characters so inspiring for any young comic artist or animator. 3 New York: The Big City by Will Eisner Highly respected US comic artist Eisner perfectly captures the spirit of the pre-gentrification Lower East Side. There’s a steely feel to his drawings and gritty tales of street life. An evocative must-buy for any fans of the big apple.…

January, the month of regrets. Did I actually need to eat that entire plate of pigs in blankets when, merely moments prior, I had eaten another one just like it? Was Zulu coming on telly again really sufficiently celebratory occasion for me to drink a whole bottle of red wine and eat a sharing-sized bag of crisps by myself in the middle of the afternoon, or did Michael Caine-based excitement get the better of me? Was walking around with a dressing gown pocket stuffed full of Cadbury Heroes “just in case” truly as ingenious as I believed, or simply weak? If you too are feeling the spiritual weight of consumption-based remorse early this New Year, to say nothing of the weight of, well, just weight, then you are not alone.…

↓ GET IN TOUCH The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK thebigissue ISSUE 1699 LOVE this cover. I just ate the last mince pie in the house which I will carbon offset by getting off my backside to look for my Big Issue vendor, Sid. Sam Carlisle MY WORLD AS I FIND IT Stream of hope Marc Burrows believed the public’s mass act of protest which propelled Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name to Christmas Number One in 2009 would be the last time that would ever happen [Issue 1694, 24-30 November]. He thought the algorithms were now too strong to allow anything new in to break the tradition of Christmas oldies at Number One. He did concede that…

I was pretty lost at 16. I left school. I got expelled, actually. I think they were just wanting to get rid of me, really, because I wasn’t very good. I got caught trying to pierce my friend’s ear in the toilet. They took us to the office and said, you just may as well go. You’re just useless. So that gives you an idea of the kind of school I was at. I think my main motivations were to find something, to feel like I was starting to belong to an adult world. I really didn’t know what to do. I got a job in a supermarket but I didn’t do any work. I just walked around looking at the shelves. I really didn’t take it in. I think,…

Taking on the telling of this beautiful story definitely came with a health warning – ‘don’t mess it up!’ The books and films are so beloved, I felt a huge responsibility to do justice to the original material, and keep enough of the Paddington ‘myth’, while also re-imagining it for a contemporary audience. Focusing on making the story work in the theatre was the key and where I found my groove. Knowing that we were making a show for a live audience, in a theatrical setting, would give our version its own voice. There’s nothing quite as exciting as a live performance. My job became telling the story in a way which embraced everything we, as theatre makers, have at our disposal – from Tom Pye’s innovative designs to dance,…

Toddlers love Paddington Bear. My two-and-a-half-year-old Nye is a big fan – he likes many bears, in fact. Winnie the Pooh is almost certainly his favourite and we’ve seen the 1977 Disney film approximately three thousand times (or is it three thousand and two?). We read and re-read old copies of the Berenstain Bears books when staying at my parents’ house and he can recite the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears by heart. There is something special about sharing stories you were told as a child with your own kids. Watching Winnie the Pooh with Nye I found myself remembering all the words to songs I must have committed to memory when I was about his age (“I am stout, round…”). The experience is a major parenting milestone…