Table of contents for 3/10/2025 in The Big Issue

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Business brains I’m always keen to read Paul McNamee’s editorial letters, so often with wry, sharp, important insights. ‘Big business must step up to help us work rest and play’ [Issue 1655, 24 February-02 March] delivers on all fronts and the emphasis on climate change is very welcome. Cocoa farmers are certainly among many at the sharp end but there’s more to this important story: exploitative work practices abound. There are companies and organisations pushing back, including Tony’s Chocolonely (yum) and Divine (more yum), the Fairtrade Foundation and Freedom United. Must go now – time for another snack... Mary Robertson On the ball Barry Pierce asks why there are so…

As the UK’s largest provider of debt advice, we hear repeatedly how much pressure people are feeling. Wages are stagnating and housing costs spiralling. But our data bears out a grim truth: those on the lowest incomes are in the most precarious positions. For our debt advice clients on a negative budget, whose essential expenditure outstrips income, the depth of the deficit has increased by 15% in two years. One important driver of this is the ‘poverty premium’, where those who have the least are more likely to pay more for essential goods, such as food, where the poorest buy little and often as opposed to in bulk. And in access to financial products such as credit cards, those on the highest incomes can secure the best interest rates, while…

One of my favourite things is when authors push the boundaries of the genre they’re supposed to be writing in. This week we have two great examples of how much that can pay off. First up is Sara Gran with Little Mysteries. The American author has written across literary, horror, historical and erotic genres with huge amounts of skill and daring, but she is best known for her subversive and unique crime fiction. Her Claire DeWitt mystery novels are weird and wonderful existential marvels, as much concerned with the mystery of life as they are in solving crimes. And following in their footsteps is this hugely entertaining deconstructed and metafictional set of nine short stories that somehow manage to be deeply profound and beautifully playful at the same time. The…

How do you like your Rutger Hauer: playfully wicked or wickedly playful? The late Dutch actor was such an impressive physical presence – tall, blond, blue-eyed and strong-chinned – that he could command the screen without saying a word. But what made him magnetic was the inescapable feeling that something was bubbling away under that seraphic surface. Some actors are happy just to be gazed upon and admired. Hauer always seemed to be looking right back at the audience: sometimes hawk-like, often just self-amused. So what was this mercurial actor really like behind the scenes? Until recently you could have told me he was a practising warlock in his downtime and it would have seemed entirely plausible. The new documentary Like Tears in Rain – lifting its title from his…

For decades countless sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ booze-sodden memoirs have storied the rises and falls of noteworthy musicians – successful, influential, or somewhere in between. Those books represent only the tip of the iceberg of the music business: people who have, in one way or another, “made it”. Not the far more numerous musicians who slogged it out in tour vans and crummy venues for years, without ever capturing the public’s imagination. These complete unknowns’ stories have never really been meaningfully represented in a book before as far as I’m aware. Until now. You’re Doing It Wrong: My Life as a Failed International Rock Star is the memoir of Michael M. From 2005 to 2013, he led Glasgow sci-fi punk-rock four piece We Are the Physics on their righteous path…

HEALTH Student told she couldn’t have an autism assessment till 2043 – until Big Issue got involved Sophia Alexandra HallBig Issue deputy digital editor Waiting for a crucial doctor’s appointment can feel endless, but what if that wait stretches to nearly two decades? That was the reality for 21-year-old Chloe Pomfret, a student at the University of Oxford, who was told the next available autism assessment wouldn’t be until November 2043 – 18 years from now. “I think my initial reaction was, there’s no way this is true, right?” Pomfret told Big Issue. For two years, Pomfret had been doing everything she could to secure an autism assessment. She spoke to Big Issue about her disappointment after receiving the letter. “It feels like if you don’t have the money to…

Please don’t be put off by the diagrams below. I am trying to help us understand the dynamics of government’s poverty expenditure. To help the current government understand just where its money is going. In the top diagram I am trying to illustrate what kind of money the postwar Labour government was imagining would be spent over time on four categories of government expenditure: on prevention of poverty, the emergency of poverty, coping with poverty and the cure of poverty. This in essence is what government spends its money on when tackling poverty, although they call their budgets by other names. PECC is my shorthand for that expenditure, though bear in mind it’s just me trying to simplify and grasp the dynamics of what government is actually doing when it…

Regular Street Art contributor Oubaiche is an Algerian-French artist. This collage made using magazine cutouts was composed at 240Project, an activity centre in London supporting vulnerable adults. “In this piece I wanted to create a multi-dimensional interpretation of the world as I see it through art,” says Oubaiche. “This one represents the universe. You can see two planets – in one there is a house which represents us (planet Earth and humankind) ‘somewhere’ in the universe. “I made a frame with the same patterns and colours as the house to give the illusion of being a kitchen wallpaper with a hand adjusting the lightbulb. This hand to me is ‘God’ (the universe) adjusting our light to our needs. I guess this piece has a sense of humour but also a…

1 Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 by Linda Colley A masterpiece that shows how the empire, war and Protestantism helped to bind the four nations of Britain and Ireland into a union. 2 Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 by RF Foster The histories of Britain and Ireland are intertwined, as shown in this sophisticated volume. Quite simply one of the best modern national histories ever written. 3 A History of Wales by John Davies Originally written in Welsh, this translation traces the history of Wales and the Welsh from prehistoric times to the present. 4 Subverting Scotland’s Past by Colin Kidd This complex book shows that unlike many small nations, 19th-century Scotland did not develop a separatist nationalist movement because the intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment had reconciled Scottish and English history.…

When director Philip Barantini is asked why he and actor-of-the-moment Stephen Graham wanted to create four-part Netflix drama Adolescence, the answer is startling in its starkness. “We wanted to shine a light on why these young boys are picking up a knife and killing young girls.” The pair first collaborated on independent film Boiling Point, a high-octane study of a head chef on the verge of a nervous breakdown that was filmed in one chaotic take. They were keen to return to the one-shot format that made it so compelling. Jack Thorne came on board as writer, working with Graham to create a script taking viewers closer than anyone would want to be to this story. The result is four one-hour episodes, each shot in one continuous take, taking us…

You’ve seen Big Issue vendors on the street, selling the magazine to make a living. You are likely to be reading this in a copy you bought from a vendor. The magazine is just one part of our growing social business providing a wide range of earning, investment and employment solutions to fight poverty and inequality at its roots. We’re committed to delivering social impact and have been since 1991 when the Big Issue magazine was founded by Lord John Bird to give people experiencing homelessness a way to earn an immediate and legitimate income. Big Issue is rooted in business solutions to social problems. We’re a social enterprise not a charity. This is why becoming one of the original B Corps in the UK back in 2015 made so…

Northern Ireland 1 Madlug Lisburn In 2015, Dave Linton founded Madlug after feeling heartbroken that most children in care have their belongings moved in a bin bag. With £480, he started what would become an award-winning bag brand, coming up with the ‘buy one, wear one, help one’ approach. For each bag purchased, a pack-away travel bag goes to a child in care. 2 DELI LITES Warrenpoint Back in 1994, the first DELI LITES store opened in Newry, Co. Down with the aim of making artisan sandwiches for convenience stores. Jackie Reid, the founder, had recently returned from New York and wanted to bring the quality and flavours she discovered in the downtown delis of New Jersey to Ireland. The company has since expanded and is now Ireland’s leading food-to-go…

Yet another senior politician expresses buyer’s regret after his term in office is over. This time, it’s Rishi Sunak, the former PM. So, it’s pretty significant. He said that the ‘stop the boats’ message was “too stark”. He said he regrets ever saying it and conceded that it couldn’t be done anyway. He regrets ever saying it. Ever. That’s all very well, Rishi, but it was the phrase you attached your premiership to, that you felt would deliver you back into Number 10. The starkness of that message was all part of the point. And that can’t have been lost on you as you printed loads of the phrase to sit on the front of lecterns and stages and then repeated it ad infinitum and watched it darken the public…

South Wales has a million more reasons to be thankful for Michael Sheen’s willingness to put his money where his heart and his politics are. Because the superstar actor and proud son of Port Talbot is not just taking on payday lenders, loan sharks and the entire rigged banking industry in a new documentary that continues his campaigning work on the high cost of credit. He’s also using his own money to cancel people’s debts in his local community. Michael Sheen’s Secret One Million Pound Giveaway begins with the actor entering a post office. “I’d like to make a withdrawal please. One hundred thousand pounds. And a book of stamps.” It’s an audacious and expensive stunt to draw attention to rampant inequalities in the consumer debt market; Sheen used that…

I was completely lost at 16. In those days you could get into the pub at that age. I would go down the pub with my mates probably four, five nights a week. The big night was Friday, because I would see how much I could drink. I could drink eight pints of bitter but I never managed to drink nine. And that was my ambition. Oh yes, I was someone with ambition and aspirations. I hated school. I couldn’t wait to leave. I just hated being sat, stuck, not able to move. I felt like I was being strapped to something. Well, you are in a way, you can’t just get up and walk about. Now, if I’ve got to write something, I don’t have to sit in one…

The first time I learned about a group of women who created propaganda aimed at Germany and Japan during World War II, I was intrigued. These four women – Betty MacDonald, Zuzka Lauwers, Jane Smith-Hutton, and the actress Marlene Dietrich – worked for the Office of Strategic Services, which would morph into the CIA after the war. Americans are used to hearing ‘Rosie the Riveter’ stories; the women who took jobs in factories to build ships, planes and weapons for the war effort. Tens of thousands more worked as ‘government girls’ in Washington DC. But the work of Lauwers, MacDonald, Dietrich and Smith-Hutton caught my attention because they worked for Morale Operations, a secret division of the OSS, where they forged letters and military orders, published entire newspapers and produced…

Life has been a little grim of late, hasn’t it? We’re witnessing the creation of a new fascist, authoritarian world order. Apparently, everyone on earth has the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics in their brains (which explains a lot). And also, it’s still a bit chilly and I’m sick of wearing a scarf. So, what are we beleaguered humans meant to do? Well, if you need a boost, you could do worse than High Potential. It premiered last year but there are so many shows everywhere all at once that I can’t keep up. Also, the lifecycle of a TV series these days is just as confusing as everything else. It can hang around for years in the recesses of some streaming service you don’t have, then…

PAUL THOMPSON, 50 Before I started selling Big Issue I was working doing deliveries to restaurants and wholesale goods. It was quite a lot of physical work involved in it, and it was an awkward job to do. By the time I finished the day shift and got back from the areas we were going to – the Mumbles and places like that – it was getting on for half eight/nine at night. We’d have lunch on the go during the daytime and then I was getting up in the morning ready to go again. It was taking its toll on my body and mind. I checked with Tesco to see if it was OK to start advertising Big Issue outside their branch and they said: “We’ll give it a…