This is why Big Issue is ripe for reinvention

Because the public who give money to Big Issue vendors are not taking the magazine, the public are once again demonstrating their enormous power – to change businesses. We bring our vendors to the marketplace to trade but unfortunately they are being turned back into beggars. So 2026 is going to be our toughest of years. 

The Nobel Prize-winner for economics Joseph Stiglitz gave a lecture once about modern capitalism and I made an observation to him to respond to. I said by the way he describes the big cat billionaires they sneak into our houses at night and rob our wallets and purses. Yet the billionaires largely get their enormous wealth because they give the public services and products that they want. 

It’s so interesting that most criticism of billionairism is never about how they have achieved the energy, the money, the endorsement of the public. Becoming awash with money and often foolish and insulting to the world in the way they spend the money the public has gifted to them.

But Mr Stiglitz’s reply to me was in fact to dismiss my observation that it’s people in massive numbers who build the behemoths of wealth. That they may avoid tax and do outrageous things once swimming in cash and distort the world to their own desires; but public money put them there. 

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I can see how difficult this may be for the many people who are outraged at billionairism to swallow. It’s not a pretty sight to reflect on: all that money and all those signs of poverty littered around the world. How does power arrive in the laps of so many people we do not like, and may even abhor?

Where does the energy come from, whence comes the oxygen of blistering growth? This is where we need to look for understanding. The public may bless the Apples and The Beatles and the Amazons, but quick as a flash the public can withdraw and go in another direction.

Two recent signs of this that I have noticed are the problems thrown up for the ever-expanding pizza industry. At one time it looked like a bottomless pit of expansionism. But alas for the pizza business, people are increasingly going to supermarkets to buy their pizzas and cooking them at home.

Also the ever-growing Primark has had a fall in sales. A faltering John Lewis has already slipped from its dominant position in the marketplace. By their absence the public was once again dimming the tinsel decorating the big players. Nearly a couple of decades ago the ubiquitous Woolworths fell into liquidation – they had been around the whole of my early life and then went up like a puff of smoke. 

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People’s capitalism does exist, and is backed by the big pension funds which are the main driver of the marketplace. Your pension, if you have one, is packaged up and squashed in with millions of others and then invested in the big players. Who then use your money to buy and create and determine everything from environmentalism to mental health; from more warehouses to more gadgets for us and our children to fuck with our minds. 

It is the movements of people, either in the marketplace or by geography, that determine our lives. Now the UK is experiencing (largely) poor people wanting to come to the UK, and so it is influencing our politics; right-wing political thinking has grown largely because of the movement of people away from their place of birth. And their arrival on our shores. 

Big Issue’s shifting fortunes are because of kindness. It is not poorly intended. It would seem that the public do love our vendors and if up to 20 people on average give money to the vendor, only one takes the magazine. Which, economically, does not add up for us. Or means putting up the price of Big Issue and cutting the size of the business.

But the public have chosen that and we have to adapt to it. Millions and millions, and millions more, get all their information and distractions on their phone nowadays; this did not exist when we first saw the light in 1991. You only have to sit in a cafe or travel on the train to see the absolute power of the mobile phone, it seems, to take over all the relationships we have with the external world.

How many people have their ears stuffed with little earphones? Big Issue’s future may well have to follow the public and become something you encounter on your phone – because that’s where you are at. 

So reinvention is in the Big Issue air. What I started as a traditional piece of production distributed in a revolutionary way may have to look more futuristic – and be more futuristic – in order to survive. And have to embrace whatever whirligigs of innovation are necessary to get the public back behind Big Issue. But overall, in the world that is changing, it is the power of the public that determines so much. And we should develop new thinking to incorporate that into our understanding. 

Trump is only big in the world and doing and threatening to do things because millions rallied to him. Sweeping away the decades of lawyers who dominated US politics, with their Ivy League university privilege. A class of people that a large part of the US public finally jettisoned.

Back here in the UK we will be doing our best to reinvent ourselves so that the public will want to take our magazine again, so that we can continue to support our vendors and be around for them in their need.

One thing is certain: there are four and a half million children, roughly a third of all children in the UK, who are suffering from poverty. That is a vast amount of children to be suffering. That needs to be addressed. Whatever has been done so far has not worked. Reinvention around the big issue of poverty, like Big Issue itself, needs our attention.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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