The Big Issue

The Big Issue - A Hand Up, Not a Hand Out

The Big Issue1 min read
Scorched Earth
Another summer, another blistering heatwave in Greece causing wildfires that have put the whole country on high alert. Last week, an outbreak reached suburbs of Athens, such as Vrilissia (pictured left) in the Attica region in the north of the city.
The Big Issue10 min read
The Dispatch
• Big Issue stepped in when a disabled woman was left in “disbelief ” after her benefits were stopped and she was wrongly accused of owing £28,000 in overpayments to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). In July, Michelle Burns was told she sho
The Big Issue4 min read
Urgent Prison Reform Is Another Victim Of Riots
The spasm of violent disorder that gripped England and Northern Ireland in recent weeks has thrown the issue of prison capability back into the spotlight. Before the brutal murders of three children in Southport, it looked just about possible for our
The Big Issue1 min read
The Big Issue
FOUNDERS John Bird and Gordon Roddick GROUP CHAIR Nigel Kershaw GROUP CEO Paul Cheal MANAGING DIRECTOR Russell Blackman EDITORIAL & PRODUCTION Editor Paul McNameeArt director Mark NeilDeputy editor Steven MacKenzieDigital editor Ryan ButcherDeputy
The Big Issue2 min read
Editor’s Letter
I like the French. I like their food, I like their climate, particularly further south, and, at the risk of pushing a thin line that bumps into clichéd national characteristics, I like their attitude. You’ve got to hand it to the French – whatever ha
The Big Issue3 min read
Big Issue Invest Tackles Social Problems At The Source
I’ve been a refugee twice, I have to remind myself. I tend to forget the second time. I was a teenager then. “Leave the country, take early retirement, or die,” was what the chief martial law administrator, General Ershad, said to my father, who was
The Big Issue3 min read
Letters
The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue While naturally concerned with the current unrest and appalled by the remarks of people like Nigel Farage, Elon Mus
The Big Issue12 min read
Every Morning Nick Cave Jumps In A Lake...
“I’m one of those wacky wild swimmers,” he says. “Rain or shine, summer or winter, regardless of what country I’m in, I try and find someplace.” To justify the appeal, he draws on nature writer Roger Deakin’s description, that “you jump in with all y
The Big Issue2 min read
A Child’s Eye View Of The Two-child Benefit Cap
The new Labour government faces growing calls to scrap the two-child limit on benefits, which charities say is “one of the cruellest welfare rules of the past decade”. It means that low-income families are denied extra universal credit and tax credit
The Big Issue4 min read
Levelling The Field
Charlie Hyman was 16 when he realised that football could be about much more than worshipping multi-millionaire players and enslavement to expensive TV subscriptions. “I was volunteering for my younger brothers’ local park team,” he says. “And I reme
The Big Issue2 min read
More Than One Story 7/9
A new series of short films exploring why people become homeless has been made by Cardboard Citizens, a charity that uses drama and performance to transform the lives of those who have lived experienced of homelessness, in collaboration with Black Ap
The Big Issue6 min read
Ed Jackson
At 16, I was at Millfield boarding school. I’d been to school in Bath, where I was born, and ended up on a scholarship to Millfield as a swimmer. It took three weeks to realise they took swimming way too seriously for my liking. So I gave up swimming
The Big Issue1 min read
40 DOWN & RUBY TO GO
This artwork was created as part of Arthouse, a creative arts programme available to people accessing services offered by London charity Single Homeless Project. It recently featured in an Arthouse exhibition at University of Greenwich Galleries, exp
The Big Issue3 min read
Books
One of the great joys of speculative fiction is that it can tackle big themes without being as hamstrung by the minutiae of the everyday world as so-called realism. This week we have two cracking books that fall into this category, novels that create
The Big Issue3 min read
The Devastating Cost Of Doing The Right Thing
Before I became a writer I was a lawyer and then, a whistleblower. I could have added ‘criminal’ to my CV had I taken up my boss’s offer to break the law. Instead, I spoke out and that’s when the trouble really began. We are living in a golden age of
The Big Issue5 min read
Film
Controversy is the very DNA of Belfast, Irish-language hip-hop rapscallions Kneecap. There’s the time their debut song was banned from Irish-medium radio for “drug references and cursing”. The time they made headlines for chanting “Brits out” at a gi
The Big Issue3 min read
‘How Is Our Empathy Doing, Guys?’
Every generation has voiced the fear that technology desensitises us to real violence, but the social media age may have triggered a more mundane desensitisation we might all fall victim to. The number of stories, perspectives and desires we consume
The Big Issue3 min read
Robin Ince Is On The Road
A giant butterfly swoops behind me, an avocet parades in front, and a penguin tells me to “protect the poles at the polls”. I am walking in the most flamboyant march I have ever attended. As I walked from Marble Arch, I came across two hand-painted p
The Big Issue4 min read
Music
“This life as you now live and have lived it,” once wrote Nietzsche, “you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh.” As he philosophised ang
The Big Issue2 min read
Puzzles
3. Political policy made on the telephone? (5,4)7. Deputy holds nothing to speak of (5)8. Eyeglasses that are gentler to adjust (9)9. About to allow new tenancy (5)10. Bent over the way revolutionary poets do? (7)13. Crime for which 22 Across lost hi
The Big Issue2 min read
My Pitch
Homelessness: Reframed is an exhibition which shares pieces inspired by the artists’ or others experiences of life on the streets The exhibition Homelessness: Reframed is currently running at the Saatchi Gallery in London. It features work from reno

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