Inside the Big Issue: Keir Starmer has a job on

No prime minister comes into power without a bulging in-tray of stuff that needs sorting, but Keir Starmer’s is overflowing. The new PM told Big Issue on the campaign trail he’ll “be as bold as Attlee” in avoiding austerity and tackling the “moral stain” of poverty.

Now he must live up to those words.

There was barely time to toast Labour’s landslide victory before Starmer announced his cabinet, drawing heavily on the experience of his existing shadow ministers. Other appointments came out of left-field, tapping into Covid-era chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance as science minister and Timpson boss James Timpson as prisons minister.

Inside the early days of power, Keir Starmer has killed the wasteful Rwanda scheme – it was “dead before it started”, he quipped – and chancellor Rachel Reeves laid out the plan for growth, targeting the need to change the planning system to unlock 1.5 million homes.

Health secretary Wes Streeting offered striking junior doctors an olive branch and said his department’s default position is that the NHS is broken. Housing counterpart Angela Rayner killed off the Tories’ flagship levelling up policy. Reeves was emphatic in her speech that things would take time and there is plenty to come, setting up Great British Railways and Great British Energy to nationalise railways and an energy firm chief among them.

In this week’s issue, we dive into what Keir Starmer and Labour need to focus on to bring the promised ‘national reset’ to light.

What else is in this week’s Big Issue?

Political cartoons of the past could alter a party’s fortunes. Their threads of influence still remain

The recent general election happened to be the first to be held in July since 1945. Taking a cartoonist’s perspective, the 1945 and 2024 elections had other similarities. Both ended with crashing Tory defeats and a consequent Labour landslide. However, thanks to polling, today’s cartoonists were already expecting Labour’s gargantuan victory. In 1945 it came as a complete surprise to virtually all the cartoonists.

As Paris gears up for the Olympics, young migrants are being made homeless and booted out of the city

If you had taken a walk down the banks of the Seine in central Paris a few months ago you would have seen hundreds of encampments lining the riverbank and pitched under bridges. These encampments were made up of young migrants predominantly from former French colonies in West Africa. Today they have all disappeared. Their sudden disappearance is connected to a scheme launched – just in time for the Olympics – with ‘regional relief hubs’ taking people from the greater Paris region.

Fighting a system rigged against women

“In December ’85 I was convicted of murdering my boyfriend, Trevor Armitage, who was 33. I met him six months earlier when I was 16 and a prostitute. He was a client. I was 17 at the time of the offence and now I am 24.” So began a letter that arrived at Harriet Wistrich’s home in North London in September 1992 with an HMP Drake Hall prison stamp.

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