I recently watched new documentary The Divided Island. In fact, I saw it twice in one month. The highly acclaimed film has attracted a lot of interest from diverse media, including The Guardian, The Morning Star, and even The Church Times. Why has this film generated so much interest? One...
Rishi Sunak has sounded the klaxon for the General Election, which will take place on Thursday, 4 July 2024. Most political commentators see no way back for the Conservatives and their miserable period of government lasting 14 years is finally about to come to a crashing end.As much as I enjoy writi...
Conservative Party leadership contender Rishi Sunak said, in writing to the Conservative Friends of Cyprus, that the British Cypriot Community has “made a hugely positive contribution to the United Kingdom”. It is important this statement applies to the UK’s Turkish Cypriot community, equa...
The TUC has recently called for a mass mobilisation of trade unions to support the New Deal for Workers Campaign. This call coincides with many people in our own Turkish-speaking community feeling the pinch like never before, with the cost of living crisis sky-rocketing. Food, petrol, gas and e...
There aren’t many more emotive subjects in society today than to write about slavery and with the UN Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition coming up on 23 August, I wanted to share my thoughts on this with you. As a dedicated UK trade union activist and founding member of...
This year’s Eurovision again proved to be a mixed bag of songs, talents and weird costumes but then which year since the 1980s hasn’t. Despite the year off due to the COVID pandemic or maybe because of it, the return of Eurovision with live performers and an actual audience was greeted with jub...
Chocolate is produced from the beans of the cacao tree. It has been cultivated for at least three thousand years and is one of the most popular and indulgent sweets in Europe and the USA. Statistics show that the average person in Britain consumes 9.5 kilos of chocolate every year. Chocolate ha...
Taner Öngür has been the torch-bearer for Turkish pop rock for decades, even baptising the genre with the name ‘Anatolian Pop’. The bass guitarist cum multi-instrumentalist has played with many of Turkey’s seminal artists, including Barış Manço, Erkin Koray, Ersen Dinleten and Selda Bağcan, and feat...
Two photographs, two family tragedies. The first of these show a three-year-old girl, Ayşe, wiping tears off her grandmother’s face with a tissue, oblivious to the tragedy her family has just suffered. The grandmother, also called Ayşe, is shedding tears for her daughter, little Ayşe’s mum Sonya Kay...
Ten days ago, I highlighted the plight of some 120 British nationals, many of Turkish Cypriot descent, stranded in North Cyprus due to the coronavirus pandemic. Lots of affected individuals, their British MPs, and community groups have all been lobbying the UK Foreign Office to demand their return.&...
