Gumkart, an electronic money card, used at all customs locations throughout Turkey to pay duties has received the “Most Creative Solution to Pay Public Fees” award in London on Monday.
LONDON– The award, presented by Visa Europe, was given at a ceremony attended by officials from the Turkish Undersecretariat of Customs, Finance Ministry and Vakiflar Bank.
In a press conference held at the Turkish Embassy in London following the award ceremony, the Undersecretary of Turkish Customs, Ziya Altunyaldiz, said that there was no other electronic money card as “Gumkart” in any other European country. Turkey is the only country in Europe that collects customs duties by an electronic money card, “Gumkart”, Altunyaldiz said.
In 2010, 13 billion Turkish Liras (TL) of all customs duties out of a total of around 40 billion TL were paid by “Gumkart”. With the “Gumkart”, all cash payments and payments by checks for customs duties have ended, Altunyaldiz also said.
The cook sits by the charcoal pit at Mangal 1, a Turkish barbecue restaurant in London. (Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)
LONDON — The scent of grilled meat floods the bus when the doors open. The Hackney district’s Stoke Newington Road is filled with Turkish barbecue restaurants that in-the-know Londoners flock to almost as much as to their beloved curry restaurants.
Inside the door of the Mangal I, a man seated before a charcoal pit has somewhere near two dozen skewers of lamb, chicken, quail, and vegetables going at once, his calm face appearing and disappearing behind a wall of smoke. The man at the grill seems to prepare every bite guests at the large restaurant will consume (there must be a prep cook in a kitchen somewhere), even chopping salad vegetables to orderin that same peculiar seated position.
A two day event: Faith and the City: The mosque in the contemporary urban west, with a presentation of case studies of recent mosque building across Europe.
Wednesday 10 November 2010, 7pm
Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA
Thursday 11 November 2010, 2-6pm
The Architectural Foundation Project Space, Ground Floor East, 136-148 Tooley Street, London SE1 2TU
Keynote lecture:
Michel Abboud – architect and Principal SOMA, Architectural design consultants for New York’s Park51 Community Centre
Symposium contributors include:
Michel Abboud – architect and Principal SOMA
Ergün Erkoçu – architect and author
Foreign Architects Switzerland
Lukas Feireiss – curator, writer, artist and editor, Studio Lukas Feireiss
Alen Jasarevic – architect and founder, Jasarevic Architekten
Ali Mangera – architect and founder, Mangera Yvars Architects
Ziauddin Sardar – writer, broadcaster, cultural critic
Turkish Deputy PM Babacan said that Turkey’s rapid recovery from the global downturn was giving a new boost to the government’s plan on Istanbul.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister and State Minister for Economy Ali Babacan said that Turkey’s rapid recovery from the global downturn was giving a new boost to the government’s plan to turn Istanbul into an international financial center to rival Dubai or eventually even London.
Babacan said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal during the annual Global Economy Symposium in Istanbul, “the international financial downturn has only added to Istanbul’s attractiveness.”
“Especially after the global economic crisis, Turkey increasingly is perceived as an island of stability in a region that stretches from Ireland to India. Turkey has a financial sector that was ‘tested and proved’ during the global crisis,” he said.
“The government made no bailouts. That has helped keep the country’s budget deficit down and left room to cut taxes in the future, even as other countries with big financial centers raise taxes in a struggle to plug deficits,” he said.
Babacan recognized that Turkey was not China. But he said, “the government’s assertive foreign policy, a political atmosphere is becoming more open, and developments such as the dramatic expansion of Turkish Airlines is creating a commercial hinterland for Istanbul that is much wider than Turkey alone,” he said. He cited the Balkans, Romania, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Babacan said, without naming Dubai, that Istanbul was also better placed to win the Middle Eastern market in the long term.
He pointed to the growing number of Arabs who were buying real estate in Istanbul.
“Northern Africa, too, is becoming part of Turkey’s commercial sphere,” he said.
“I have spoken to a surprising number of bankers who were fed up with London’s income-tax increases. They told me that they were considering moving personnel.
But there has been no sudden rush of international bankers to take of advantage of Istanbul’s relatively low office-space and wage costs yet,” Babacan added.
Two years after losing the mayoralty to his nemesis Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone is campaigning to run London for a fourth time
Hugh Muir
Ken Livingstone is Labour's candidate for mayor of London. Again. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
It is Labour‘s curse to struggle for consensus. Scratch the surface, and it is hard to find senior figures agreeing on policy, or direction, or personnel. They muddle through, but uniformity of thought has never been one of the party’s abiding traits. At worst, it is a maelstrom. At best, they might argue, a broad church.
But on 2 May 2008, one opinion seemed to be shared by most of the leadership, particularly those accustomed to running London. The Day of Ken is done, they said. He has served us well, but if we are to renew ourselves and wrest the London mayoralty away from Boris Johnson, we must have another candidate. A green-skin. Someone who has not been bested at the polls. Someone who, unlike our wearied champion, has not put himself at odds with noisy, vigorous sections of the electorate. Someone untroubled by rumour and the appearance of scandal.
And so, two years later, after a long campaign, we give you the Labour candidate for the London mayoralty in 2012 . . . Ken Livingstone, thrust forward with the full backing of that same Labour establishment that had said he should go shuffling off into the sun. Restored to a status that also saw him top the poll in the party’s national executive committee (NEC) elections at the weekend. Ready to bask in the spotlight on Wednesday with his speech to Labour delegates from the conference platform. How has this happened? The journey tells us quite a lot about the state of Labour at the moment – but more than that, it tells you an awful lot about Livingstone.
In his dust blue suit and shimmering yellow tie, he is rounder than he was in 2008 (eating too many of his children’s leftovers). Certainly he is chipper. “I am looking forward to it,” he says. “It will be a much more serious, intensely political contest than last time. In the next two years, we are going to see severe cuts and people will want someone to protect them from those cuts. It won’t be about who tells the best jokes.”
Livingstone is sunny now, but there have been flashes of darkness in recent days, not prompted by the contest itself – “He loves the challenge,” a lieutenant told me – but, in part, by his opponent, Oona King. Livingstone now says her campaign, by forcing everyone to sharpen their arguments, was good for the party, and good for her too (she was runner-up in those NEC elections). But her best card was to portray him as the candidate whose sell-by date had expired – and Livingstone took exception to being portrayed as a spent force.
“It was pretty naked ageism,” a member of his campaign team told me. “If she had been saying don’t vote for this person because they are disabled or a woman, there would have been an outcry. He seems thick-skinned, but he does hurt quite easily.”
Livingstone has often been magnanimous with his opponents – Conservative candidate Steve Norris ended up on the board of Transport for London, as did the defeated Liberal Democrat Susan Kramer. An offer was floated to Frank Dobson in 2000. He may yet feel magnanimous again, but right now it’s sensitive. Might there be an offer to King if the Livingstone bandwagon rolls into City Hall in 2012? An aide furrows his brow. “I doubt it.”
If the mayoral election was held tomorrow, Livingstone would lose. For Boris Johnson’s honeymoon period has been a particularly long one. He has survived accusations of inactivity and personnel scandals, with one acolyte, a deputy mayor, convicted of fraud. Allegations of cronyism have been levelled, as have sexual claims in the tabloids. He has even had the humiliation of being caught on video falling into a muddy river. But Johnson has risen above it all with brio and self-deprecating humour. Which is a problem for Livingstone, for the way Boris shapes and guards his public persona seems unnervingly similar to the template created by a fully functioning Ken.
Labour’s candidate says he expected to lose last time round. Perhaps, having viewed the private polls, he did – but it didn’t look like that. His concession speech was graceful enough, but it soon became clear that he was shell-shocked, bereft. And he didn’t even bother to take himself away to grieve in private. Instead, he headed to City Hall, attending Mayor’s Question Time to watch Johnson bask in the sunshine to which he himself had been accustomed. Some say that even then he was making a statement and seeking fresh ammunition to use against Johnson in the future. But for the elected politicians who had supported him, and for the officers who rather liked him, it was a wretched sight – like a bereaved parent visiting the scene of the murder, hoping to be told it was all a mistake. “He would sit behind the Labour group and he always looked so awful,” said one official. Everyone was thinking, ‘Why don’t you go on holiday or something? Go deal with it in private.’”
There was compassion in that reaction. But it also said something about the norms in our politics. Livingstone had lost and the convention is that the loser in a high-profile election, particularly one as personality based as the mayoralty, heads for the scrapheap, or at least other pastures. And anyway, why would a politician in his 60s, father to two young children, who had thrice run London – first taking the reins back in 1987 – want to do it again?
Necessity perhaps. “I am not Tony Blair,” he says, as blunt as ever. “I didn’t go bombing Iraq, to be rewarded by nice posts by US banks. With my politics, most of the jobs that ‘respectable’ Labour types get offered don’t come my way.”
Gordon Brown did, though, make him a vague offer the morning after that 2008 loss. “It was something on the environment, but I said there is a problem because I don’t agree with the third runway at Heathrow. And he said: ‘That is a problem.’ There is a lot I could do if I would ignore my beliefs. But my framework of political beliefs is as important as religious beliefs are to Christians and Jews. They determine all I do. The strong mishmash of my parents’ views and socialist ideology is as important to me as religious faith. Without that, people are adrift.”
Livingstone is seen by the right as the ultimate lefty, but those who hold that view have to gloss over some fairly harsh views on law and order, and the fact that some of his fiercest critics reside on the left of the Labour party. Even so, he has a well-placed network of contacts within the constituencies and the unions – which, over the last two years, he has used to good effect. Always good value as a star speaker at functions, nearly always available, and always ready with a critique of Johnson’s administration, he has retained a grassroots following. But the trick of his success in the Labour mayoralty race was to garner support from those whose initial view was that he should walk off into the sunset.
By June, at the start of the nomination contest, they found his campaign well advanced, his arguments honed. Many who instinctively preferred King came to see him as the only heavy hitter capable of deposing Johnson (even King herself admits that, as time passed, Livingstone grew stronger). His triumph, however, is a defeat for those who wanted to mirror what the national party has done by electing Ed Miliband, and turn the page. “Alan Johnson could have done it [the London mayoral candidacy],” said one Labour source. “But he couldn’t reconcile what he would say to the people of Hull had he lost. Mandelson: people were talking to him. And Tessa Jowell.”
But Livingstone started his campaign early, creating the impression that he was unstoppable. This kept the biggest beasts out of the race, and thus made him unstoppable. Sometimes perception is reality.
The election of the London mayor in 2012 is important to Labour. At best, it will be a springboard – after Johnson, of course, came Cameron. So before Livingstone won the endorsement of his senior colleagues, there was some tough talking. Yes, Labour’s general malaise dragged you down last time, they said. But what about you? If we run with you again, how is it going to be different? What about your mistakes? This was thorny territory. Livingstone doesn’t easily admit to mistakes, certainly not in public and certainly not if those admissions give succour to his enemies. “He’s of that generation,” said a friend. “You concede you made mistakes, then people ask, ‘OK, what were they?’ Suddenly you look weak and are having to show contrition for all sorts of things.”
Colleagues hoped for an explicit sign that he had learned lessons, but it is not Livingstone’s way to be explicit about such things. “These are different times, things will be different” was the closest they got to introspection. Did you do anything wrong, he was asked last Friday in the afterglow of victory. “Perhaps we put the congestion-charging call centre in the wrong place,” he replied.
But mistakes there were. The haughty way in which he proceeded with the western extension of the congestion charge; his reluctance to confront the accusation that he was an inner-city “zone one mayor”. His ill-tempered contretemps with the Jewish Evening Standard reporter he likened to a “concentration-camp guard”. His quip that no one will find out what he got up to in City Hall because everything incriminating had been shredded; his cheap oil deal with Venezuela; and his failure to deal adequately with the toxic, largely unsubstantiated melange of allegations levelled by the Evening Standard against his then equalities adviser Lee Jasper. Livingstone still insists he got all the big decisions right. But by the end, he and his mayoralty seemed traumatised and weary.
Jenny Jones, a Green party member on the London Assembly, wasgenerally supportive, but she says: “It was difficult. He had very young kids at the time and I don’t think he had been getting much sleep. He is very committed, but it did look like arrogance.” She sees improvement, though. “I think he has learned lessons. He certainly looks a lot fresher now. He came to my birthday party in a field the other day with his wife and children. We camped out and had a lot of fun. He was up for everything.”
All but one of the eight Labour assembly members backed Livingstone, but Jennette Arnold says she needed some persuading. “During the last 18 months of his last term, there were issues raised. He went into defence mode and I don’t know that that was the right call. People were saying: ‘Is he there for us, or the people he employs?’ But he does have an innate sense of what London needs. I want him out there, showing his leadership.”
Livingstone says he will. Back will come the western extension of the congestion charge, a measure scrapped by Johnson, and an end to tube fare increases and police cuts. In will come a new victims commissioner, further measures to cut pollution, initiatives to protect the green belt.
His foes at City Hall say: bring it on. “We’ll run on Boris’s record,” says Johnson’s deputy, Richard Barnes. “We have held the council tax precept for two years. Ken put it up 152%.” It’s personal, says Barnes. “London has a smile on its face because of Boris. As for Ken, he just didn’t think he could lose. He is still very bitter.”
But if he is bitter, Livingstone insists that it’s because of Johnson’s “disastrous administration”. And so he will hit the road again, the candidate once more, ending a cherished period of extended time with his two youngest children, now six and seven. (Together, they have led a nomadic life in London, visiting zoos, cafes and museums.) He’ll hold off on the travel, advising mayors in Canberra and Bogota, the memoir writing, and the gardening. He will think of platforms to add to his Saturday morning talkshow on London’s LBC radio station, where after an uncertain start, his cheery banter and opinions on everything have doubled his audience over 12 months. Heady times to come, he says.
But there has been a change. Unlike 2008, politics is no longer an all-consuming passion. He has the family shopping to do. His skill, he says, is spotting bargains. After that, the battle proper can begin.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/sep/28/ken-livingstone-mayor-london, 28 September 2010
Hussein Chalayan in the Lisson Gallery this week, before the installation of his new show
You don’t have to be a regular at the Serpentine Gallery’s achingly cool annual summer party to know that the worlds of art and fashion collude in ever more explicit, and prosperous, ways. Galleries lead the urban regeneration of run-down neighbourhoods that become the new centres of bohemian mischief. Catwalks acquire the kind of audacious conceptual playfulness that would make Duchamp’s experiments look like Constable landscapes. London has led the way in the promiscuous flitting of designers whose chief imperatives are to be loved, to be new and to be seen.
Now at the Lisson gallery comes an exhibition from one of the most daring figures from this twilight world: Hussein Chalayan, purveyor of sci-fi fabrics, wooden skirts, the fashion designer for whom the phrase “ready-to-wear” has never seemed entirely appropriate.
Chalayan’s avant-garde credentials are impeccable, right from his justly famous 1993 graduation show from Central St Martin’s, featuring garments that he had buried in the ground to observe the chemical interaction between the ephemeral and the earthly-elemental (the collection was bought en masse by Browns), to his 1998 “Between” spring-summer display that showed models in various states of undress, covered successively by parts of a chador.
The video of that not uncontroversial show makes riveting viewing, and could easily have been part of a gallery installation, festooned with portentous labels over Chalayan’s genuine interest in east-west dialogues, rather than part of a simple fashion collection.
But then the words “simple” and “fashion” rarely come together in descriptions of the Turkish-Cypriot designer’s work. “I have always been ideas-led,” he tells me over coffee in Clerkenwell. “I have never thought of a garment differently from the way I think of, say, a film. I give them both the same attention. I used to think of fashion as an industrial process, whereas art is supposed not to be. But art is going that way too.”
Perhaps surprisingly, but not to those who follow his unpredictable ways, his new piece at the Lisson is not directly related to fashion. “I am Sad Leyla” is an installation that features a performance of a traditional Turkish folk composition by Sertab Erener, one of Turkey’s most successful female singers, accompanied by an Ottoman orchestra.
The work mixes audio, film, sculpture and musical notation. Hussein says he is interested in picking apart the various cultural influences – Persian poetry, Greek orthodox chanting, central Asian motifs – at play in the work. A de-construction of his ethnic heritage? “That’s too obvious a word. I like the image of a piece of music as a body. And I am disembodying it. It is such a layered piece, you can detect 10 to 15 different cultural things going on.”
It is also a reminder that being Turkish “is a political, not a racial definition”, he says. “The piece comes from hundreds of years of migration, cross-breeding.”
Chalayan is more than familiar with the strife that ethnic cross-pollination can bring. He was born in Nicosia in Cyprus in 1970, moved to England with his parents, but returned in 1975, by which time the city had been divided in the wake of the previous year’s Turkish invasion of the island. “We only grew up with the smell of it,” he says of those clamorous events, “but it was very much in our lives.”
I ask if the Lisson installation refers back to some of those childhood memories. “They are innate,” he replies. “I was inspired by what I remember of Turkish culture back then – how everything was imbued with this institutional feel. It was to do with the Kemalist state, everything was geared towards this sense of nationalistic precision. There was something Soviet about it.”
He describes it as a “stripped-down show”, not overtly related to his fashion work, but not without its visual moments either: “It is almost as if each moment should be enjoyed like a piece of jewellery.” He leaps to another analogy: “It is a framing device, framing something that already exists. How you choose to frame something: that is what a lot of my work is about.”
London is both the perfect home from which to explore these issues, and the perfect venue for the show, he says. “Being here helps me dissect where I come from. It is like crossing to the other side of the road to see an amazing building.”
His adopted city also hosted Chalayan’s most important exhibition so far, last year’s expansive survey of his work at the Design Museum, which also toured to Tokyo and is currently on show at Istanbul Modern. He seems a little bit in love with the city that bestrides the Bosphorus (“it’s the best city”), and a little disenchanted with London (“it never seems to hang on to its own talent very strongly”).
I ask how he combines the worlds of art and fashion, and his rapid-fire response suggests it is a question that plays permanently on his mind. “Well, you have touse clothing. So something can be conceptual, or narrative, or visually charged, but it also has to be an item that you can use. But right from college, I didn’t just want to do nice tops. I wanted to work in a more monumental way.”
But the imperative to sell consistently surely made fashion a more challenging environment?
“The business side of fashion is super-difficult,” he confesses. “You have to rely on the loyalty of buyers. If you don’t sell one season, the next one is difficult. And the worst part of it is that fashion’s existence is based on the seasonal calendar, which is absolutely absurd.”
For someone like him, who loves to experiment with fabric technology (he is currently creative director of the sport and leisurewear company Puma), “you can’t keep coming up with entirely new things twice a year. There are techniques that you will use for a few years. If you want to take techniques further, you just can’t jump around that fast.
“I think our lives are a lot harder than [those of] artists. We have to constantly produce, we have financial restraints, we have to fund the production. It’s really tough.” Chalayan has already had to liquidate his company voluntarily once, when he split from a previous partner. “If you are asking me if I get a return, culturally speaking, the answer is ‘yes’, but as a business we are relatively small. It depends what you want from life.”
He is, in any case, perfectly happy with the blend of his activities. “I must be the only person who can sell a film to a collector, and then put the money into a new [fashion] collection” – both of which have brought him acclaim. He was British Designer of the Year in 1999 and 2000, and represented Turkey in the Venice Biennale of 2005. He attributes his cross-disciplinary approach to his education in London. “Central St Martin’s was a proper art institution, fashion just happened to be one of its departments. It was a fantastic place in which to understand the body in a cultural context. We were like body artists, but we also had to learn how to make our clothes sell. It’s like someone who wants to be a film-maker but has to go into advertising to survive.”
Of the worlds of art and fashion, he says they are “as cliquey as each other. I used to put the art world on a pedestal, but it is so market and money-driven now. You meet more interesting people in the art world, because fashion people tend not to question the world around them that much. But they are as power-driven.”
There is a rare pause as he considers his upcoming exhibition. “You know as far as my fashion business goes, if it can just run itself I am happy. But I do just love doing these projects.”
‘I Am Sad Leyla’ by Hussein Chalayan is at Lisson Gallery, London, September 8 – October 2.www.lissongallery.com
