Westminster beware – Wales is watching

Recently, Big Issue was in Cardiff. Obviously, we’re in Wales all the time. Our vendors sell the magazine across the country and have done for years.

But we were there with our Big Community Roadshow. We kicked the roadshow initiative off in Newcastle last autumn. The idea behind it is straightforward. We know there are great cities and areas across the UK that can sometimes feel neglected and far from London-based decision-making. These areas are teeming with great ideas, with community projects that deliver solutions, frequently in some left-behind parts. We want to hear from the people there, learn from them and report their stories. They have ideas that deserve a spotlight, and opinions that should be heard. And you only really get deep into realities by being embedded in a place. 

• Reform or Plaid Cymru? Labour could lose Wales for the first time in over 100 years, voters say
• Starmer not doing enough to tackle child poverty, Welsh minister says at Big Issue debate
• Should tenants get two-months’ rent compensation from their landlord when they’re evicted?

We seek to always reinforce that Big Issue is an organisation that can harness great grassroots thinking and help deliver positive change. So we created Big Community Roadshow. 

Over the course of a week we moved an editorial office to Cardiff city centre with an open door for anybody to walk in with their story. And walk in they did. We had stalls and staff from our frontline teams explaining the benefits of working as a Big Issue seller. We also had some of the Big Issue Recruit (BIR) team, explaining the benefits of that aspect of Big Issue Group, how it can create long-term employment opportunities for people facing poverty, inequality and barriers to work. During the week we were there, BIR announced a new partnership with Bute Energy in which they’ll deliver some transformational employment opportunities in the renewable energy industry in South Wales, particularly for those in Caerphilly and Rhondda Cynon Taf.

We will have much more on all this next week, but one thing kept popping up when Big Issue editorial team was speaking to the people of Cardiff. It was a sense of real frustration at the Labour government in Westminster. A recurring message that they weren’t doing enough, particularly on poverty and on benefits for the disabled, kept surfacing.

Our push for support for a Poverty Zero law – requesting governments to mandate binding poverty reduction – resonated. It’s not a surprise. At the beginning of May, we had YouGov carry out some polling for us. We discovered that, of those we spoke to in Wales, 75% said they felt the government should do more to help people in poverty.

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The people of Wales are also feeling the cost of living hard. More than half (54%) of people in Wales said they’d find it difficult to afford basic necessities within a single month of losing their income. That is 10% higher than Britain as a whole, and 13% higher than Scotland.

During the same week the Scottish parliament voted to move to the next stage of the Assisted Dying Bill. This could really impact how Westminster acts in the future as they tangle with the same question. However, in the bright Cardiff sun, moods of those with disabilities when considering the bill were darker. Some people told our reporters that they feared for what might happen to them under an Assisted Dying Bill. They see a government shaping a society that views them as less important than others. And if that is the case in life, their fears are that they’ll be less important in death, and therefore shuffled off. 

You can argue that this simply won’t happen, but it doesn’t mean that people aren’t fearful. 

It all contributes to the wider picture. Keir Starmer’s government has a massive majority. He could deliver huge positive change quickly – a point we keep coming back to. If he got into the reeds of poverty, by dealing with that, much could flow. And yet in the week we were in Cardiff, his government was making pledges about limiting the number of people coming into Britain to work in the care system. It is the elderly, the sick and the infirm, frequently society’s poorest, who rely on care. Who will care if jobs go unfilled?

In that week, he was also talking darkly about Britain becoming an “island of strangers”, calling for more tightening around immigration. If his words were intended to land with disgruntled Labour voters who may move to Reform, they certainly weren’t connecting with the good people of Cardiff, many of whom told us they had voted Labour in the past.

The clock is ticking.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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