Table of contents for 3/3/2025 in The Big Issue

The appeal of the remote is strong. Any time an island, or place lost in the middle of nowhere, seeks new caretakers, there is a story. The most recent is Great Blasket, an island round the bend from Dingle, a part of Kerry, floating free, resting in the North Atlantic. It’s uninhabited, has been since 1953, aside from a lot of seals and puffins. But, from April to October, there are tourists, loads of them. They come to see the wildlife, on the land and in the sea. There are five holiday cottages and a coffee hatch, dispensing to those who make it to the island. This year, the coffee and the rest will be taken care of by Camille Rosenfeld and James Hayes, a newly married young couple. They’ll…

EMPLOYMENT Can a four-day working week boost Labour in the polls? Lottie EltonBig Issue reporter ● It’s been a bleak few weeks of polling for Labour – but a four-day working week policy could help them turn things around. So says Peter Dowd, Labour MP for Bootle and the originator of a new amendment to the government’s Employment Rights Bill. “[The four-day week is] a potential vote-winner,” the backbencher told Big Issue, “because it would discernibly improve people’s lives.” The next general election may be slated for 2029 – but Dowd’s party needs all the vote-winning policies it can drum up. Last month, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party overtook Labour in a national opinion survey for the first time, while a recent Ipsos poll shows that nearly half (48%) of…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Pay attention Paul McNamee’s Editor’s Letter [on the Omagh bombing inquiry, Issue 1653, 10-16 February] made me sit up, but for all the wrong reasons! I remember the news reports on that fateful Saturday but, more poignantly, I remember seeing the face of one of the 29 victims staring at me from the pages of my Sunday newspaper. I knew this person for a short time, and now their life had been brutally ended. Nearly 27 years on, I did not realise that a public inquiry into the bombing had finally opened. As far as I know, it was not a major news item. Even so, as McNamee points out,…

When I turned 16, I was living at home with my mum and dad in Neasden, north-west London. We lived in a happy suburban home, my sisters had moved out by then, so it was mum, dad and me. I was one of those weirdos who loved school. I’d passed my 11+ and gone to grammar school and was very happy. My dad was the constant in my life. He was a good, solid, northern man from Bolton – very sensible and loving. He was like my soulmate. My mum had mental health issues, but as a little girl, I always felt very protected. My sister Shirley was 15 years older than me, so she was like a second mum anyway. Mum could be fine for a long time, then…

It’s the day after the final date of the Strictly Come Dancing live tour but JB Gill has no time for downtime. “No days off. Come on, you know I’ve been in this industry way too long,” he tells Big Issue. But which industry? In a wildly varied career, JB Gill has gone from boyband stardom with JLS to award-winning farmer – with TV presenting and getting through to the Strictly final fitted around breeding prize-winning pigs and champion turkeys on his Kent farm. There’s also been time to begin a series of children’s books, Ace and the Animal Heroes, where a pair of magic wellies allows Ace (named after Gill’s son) to talk to the animals. The latest instalment, The Wacky Weather Mystery, feels timely in our age of…

As well as their musical legacies, some composers have left behind highly quotable aphorisms. Bartók is as famed for his observation that competitions are “for horses, not artists” as his string quartets, while Debussy’s “works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art” is a snappy phrase for the ages. Some of these attributed sayings relate to particular music styles: John Cage, the avant-gardist famous for 1952 installation piece 4’33” – in which performers do not play a single note – is claimed to have said “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” Like “let them eat cake”, several of these gobbets may well be mistranslated, or even mistranscribed by unreliable journalists (perish the thought!). But the real…

Keir Starmer is at a fork in the road. “The next year is really crucial,” says Harry Quilter-Pinner, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank. He sees Britain sitting between a decade of national renewal or just business as usual “You’ll see quite a lot of those plans solidify. A lot of policy will be set in the next six months. That will determine the direction of travel, but also it will reveal how ambitious or not this government is going to be.” The backdrop to this, of course, is the mess the UK is in. “The fact the economy is not delivering for most people is a huge problem,” Quilter-Pinner says, leading to a huge lack of trust in politicians. “I think the only way…

It’s been three years since Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine, but the Russian president has still not been able to capture the country or crush defiant efforts to help those made homeless by the war. Homelessness charity Depaul Ukraine, which was launched in 2007, had been working to support people living on the streets. When Russia invaded the country in 2022, Depaul immediately expanded its reach, offering help to people who had lost their homes or been displaced by the war. Approximately 3.6 million people in Ukraine have been internally displaced by the conflict, according to United Nations data. Depaul themselves say 22% of those people who are sleeping rough in the war-torn country have been directly displaced by the violence. The charity’s CEO Anka Skoryk, who is speaking to…

Flat-coated, four-year-old retriever Bear has saved 20 lives in the last two years. But he’s not a search-and-rescue dog, police dog or even a service dog. There were no headline-grabbing dramatic rescues, nor does Bear have an uncanny ability to sniff out illness. However, by donating blood, Bear has saved the lives of 20 dogs suffering from serious medical conditions, including kidney disease, severe anaemia and immune-mediated thrombocytopenia, a condition where the animal’s body destroys its own platelets. Bear donates through Pet Blood Bank, a charity that offers a blood bank service for dogs, operating in a similar way to human blood banks. “Just like people, sick and injured animals may need blood transfusions which, in many cases, can help save a pet’s life,” explains Nicole Osborne, marketing manager at…

REVIEWS Lessons of a painful past Adam Haslett is a rising American superstar, his short stories (shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize) and novels, including awards nominees 2010’s Union Atlantic and 2016’s Imagine Me Gone, garnering excitable praise from the likes of Ann Patchett and Andrew Sean Greer. His latest novel, the Turgenev-echoing Mothers and Sons, packs a powerful punch which will secure his reputation. Peter is an overworked 40-year-old asylum lawyer working for a small nonprofit in New York. His day-to-day is filled with desperate immigrants who see him as their one last hope for residential status; he is caught in a tide of the broken, the discarded, the tortured and abused. However, he generally manages to maintain a professional distance from his clients, adhering to the limitations of his…

If they made a movie of your life, it’d be pretty boring, right? You, like me, like most other people, live mundane and monotonous lives largely spent at work. You could have an incredibly exciting job, but it’s still the same kind of excitement on a loop. Which is why, even though it takes up a huge chunk of our time, it’s rarely the focus of a film. Writer and director Laura Carreira took that as motivation. “Cinema avoids looking at work,” she says, “and I think it usually comes from it being narratively not the most interesting, especially if it is repetitive. How much is a day in a job going to change this character’s life? You avoid looking at it because you don’t think it’s interesting enough as…

I’ve never been much of a thief. Not because of my morals, more because of my cowardice. Nicking takes balls and mine are too small. During my adolescence, there was a big craze in my milieu for shoplifting. Mostly, it would be sweeties or dirty mags from the local corner shop. Sometimes we would go on ambitious outings on the tube into Central London, thieving from high-end outlets like Hamleys or Harrods. I would always be on the sidelines, shitting myself, watching as the braver kids tried (and usually failed) to avoid the attention of intimidating security staff. One time, in a Covent Garden toy shop, I slipped a bouncy ball with a gargoyle’s face on it into my jacket pocket. The security guard apprehended me and threatened to call…

Florina was put forward for My Pitch by her customer Ann, who said: “Florina’s cheerful smile always greets us as she stands outside the M&S supermarket in Dunblane. She is always well wrapped up against the challenging Scottish weather.” FLORINA, 29 I think I’ve been in Dunblane for about two years but I used to sell the magazine in Alexandria before the pandemic. I started selling it because it helps me with money to survive, to buy food and my son’s school lunch. I don’t have another job at the moment and I’m looking for one. I keep going to the Jobcentre every week to search for a job. So if I go to sell Big Issue it helps me with money because I don’t have anywhere to go and…