Marvin Rees has never met Limerick’s new directly-elected mayor John Moran but his eight-year term as mayor of Bristol – one that ended with the death of the office after voters got rid of it in a referendum – holds lessons.
Rees, who has Irish roots, was in Dublin to take part in the opening debate of the 12th season of the Irish Architecture Foundation’s New Now Next series of talks, held in Technological University Dublin, Grangegorman.
Rees, a “love/hate” figure for many in Bristol, has reasons for pride: the beginning of the biggest council house building scheme in 35 years, the creation of a city-owned housing company and a half-billion-pound university campus behind the city’s train station.
His supporters believe he brought Bristol together in ways impossible before: “His going-away do was attended by people who would never have been there eight years before,” says Andy Street, former mayor of the West Midlands who is deeply involved in a number of the city’s charities.
Hugh Brady, formerly the president of UCD and now in charge of Imperial College in London, is equally impressed with the concept of a directly-elected mayor from his time in charge of the University of Bristol: “The concept worked beyond our expectations,” Brady says.
Rees’ idea to bring major stakeholders together in “a city office” to plan for the future was “a simple concept where the cost was very modest and shared”, which despite “initial scepticism” proved useful in pulling people together to find solutions, Brady adds.
However, in May 2022, just 27 per cent of voters turned out in a local referendum, with six-in-10 voting to abolish the office, and its replacement by committees occupied by elected councillors.
Rees’s term in office was also not enough to ensure an elected political life after the mayoralty, since he lost out to Irish-born Damien Egan in the race for selection to run for Labour for Bristol North East in the Westminster elections.
Rees was elected mayor in 2016 and re-elected in a race held a year late in May 2021 because of Covid-19. Throughout, he made clear that he would seek two terms, and no more.
Often, he was accused of being dictatorial, or being a one-man band, or believing that he had the authority to speak for Bristol, a rapidly-growing city of 350,000 people that is heading to be half-a-million strong in less than 20 years.
Rees believes he brought city government closer to the people: “I’m the first person of black African heritage to be elected mayor of any major European city. I come from a white working-class background. My great-grandmother came from Ireland, settled in Merthyr Tydfil.
“My grandfather was a son of a Welsh minor migrant worker who came to England. I’m a working class, black mixed-race kid, right? And yet I had a pretty much all-white middle-class council chamber saying that one person, me, doesn’t represent the city,” Rees says.
His term finished four months ago. Today, he believes Bristol voters ended the mayoralty in “a very superficial debate” dominated by “a disproportionate turnout of angry, motivated people just like Brexit”.
“We knew it was going to happen,” he says.
Unusually, Rees emphasises everything that he did not control – the city’s two hugely-important universities with 60,000 students between them, the police, the local National Health Service (NHS) operations, the list goes on.
“I had no power over those, right? One of the key points about directly-elected mayors is not about control, it is about the mayor’s power to convene, to gather people together. That’s where the sweet spot of moral leadership is,” Rees says.
Drawing on that, Rees created the One City Approach to bring together influential players – public, private and voluntary, including the NHS, the universities – to tackle problems together. The effect, says his supporters, was transformational.
For example, the lack of IT equipment for poorer children became evident during Covid, so One City saw businesses collecting spare, or unneeded devices; while others repaired and cleaned them, and others got them out to children.
“That’s power. That’s not me telling them, or anyone what to do. That’s about creating a space, identifying a collective challenge that everyone sees and then tackling it together, quickly and effectively,” says Rees. He reels off a list of other such outcomes.
Looking back, Rees says that he did not campaign to save the mayoralty in the referendum, believing that such interventions would have “become about me”. But, he believed then, and still does now, that the office should be kept
Turning from Bristol to the global stage, Rees says cities are the key to solving many of the world’s problems, yet they are governed by models that worked in the 1960s, not for the 2020s.
Recalling a visit to Dublin in 2005, Rees remembers being told that the city “wasn’t the same as 20 years” before. “If cities change, the way that they are governed should change. Maybe everyone should look at what they have and say, ‘Is it working?’” he says.
So, what advice would he have for John Moran in Limerick? Firstly, communication, “not cheap PR” is vital – strong social media engagement with the local population, press conferences, public events in city hall or elsewhere.
“Get out into the communities as much as possible. The challenge there is that’s it like you are still campaigning. But if you don’t do it, people say, ‘Oh, you got elected, and now we don’t see you’,” says the former mayor.
That highlights the tension between campaigning and governing. “Once you get elected, you actually have a job. You’ve got to get behind the desk and make decisions. There is a maturity needed amongst the electorate to understand that. Otherwise, you end up with the politics you deserve – performative and empty,” Rees says.
That shows the gulf that now exists between politics and a disconnected public, he says, recalling complaints he heard in his sister’s house from a man who said he did not know what Rees did.
“So, I said, ‘Alright, get your phone out.’ He did. ‘Open the browser’, I said. He did. ‘Type Marvin Rees’ blog’. He did. “So, what does it say?’, I said. It was about child hunger in the city, or housing delivery, a long list.
“I said if people can’t take 10 seconds to find out what’s going on, then you get the politics you deserve. That’s what I mean about the electorate taking some responsibility.
“Voters have got to realise that there’s a job to be done,” he adds, which brings Rees to one of his bugbears – the quality of journalism in Britain where, he argues, reporters are forced “to chase clicks”.
“Most people don’t interact with politicians. They interact with the journalistic interpretation of politicians, but if you just get a ping pong of [accusation and counteraccusation] then people just get caught up in rage,” he says.
The simplification of debate has real and negative consequences because it “robs people” of the nuanced debate necessary to tackle major challenges, such as housing and immigration, he says.
Growing rapidly within its 108sq km boundary, Bristol urgently needs more housing, so it can either spread beyond its boundaries, grow upwards, or develop more intensely in already-populated parts of the city. Some do not want high-rise, some do not want sprawl, some don’t want intensive development on brownfield land that might impact on property values. Often, the same people hold all of these opinions, Rees says.
“I think that we have to build houses, and you can’t build them in abstract. You have to build them somewhere. I think we should do it in the city’s brownfield sites,” Rees says. “Then, the challenge is that every home you do not put on those lands has to be built somewhere else, or not all, but in public it gets boiled down to ‘Marvin wants to build skyscrapers’.
“The public wants soap opera. Journalists in Britain serve it up because that’s what’s going to get the ‘clicks’, and politicians serve it up because that’s the only way they’re going to get any headlines.”
The controversy about the statue of slave owner, Edward Colston in Bristol, pushed into the harbour’s waters in 2020, highlighted issues of equality and immigration in Britain, sharply dividing opinion.
Today, the debate is more polarised: “It’s about whether globalisation has worked for you, or whether your job is precarious, or that you shouldn’t trust your politicians, or that you’ve lost a sense of your national narrative,” Rees says.
“I understand all that. But once people are in that mood, then they’re vulnerable to political predators who don’t actually care about them, who come up with easy slogans that solve nothing.”
The immigration challenge will become more difficult to manage in the years ahead in a world where climate change is driving people from parts of the world where temperatures are soaring. “Everyone is complicit in the deterioration in the quality of public discourse. That is one of our biggest threats because decisions that we have to take – on climate, housing, immigration – are being delayed,” he says.
“The more we push actions down the road, the bigger, the more intrusive and more costly they’re going to get, and the bigger the political price to be paid. We’re taking ourselves down a proper rabbit hole.”
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