Mayor’s fight to make his city a better place
WHEN Dionne Rees was growing up in Bristol, she remembers her mum saving up for a warm shirt for her brother Marvin.
“Marvin was friends with a homeless man called George,” she says. “He used to come home from school and make him a sandwich and take it out to him. Then one day, he came back without his warm shirt on. Mum was really upset he’d given it away, but I know she was also really proud.”
As a lone parent, their mum Janet was struggling to put food on the table, but never turned anyone away. Dionne remembers pretending to be full, so that her mum would eat.
“When we ran out of 50ps for the meter, Mum would turn into a game,” she says.
“She doesn’t give herself enough credit for how strong she is.”
Fast-forward 30 years, and Marvin Rees is the Labour Mayor of Bristol, who yesterday launched a campaign for a second term. The first directly elected black mayor in Europe, in a city which flourished from the spoils of the slave trade,
Marvin still lives in Easton, a part of the city where he grew up. “My ambition as Mayor,” he says, “has always been to make the city better for someone like my mum.”
COMPASSION
Five years into elected office, Marvin says he is proud of his record on building homes and addressing child hunger. “The world isn’t one where you write your wish list, and it happens. But we’ve held compassion and social justice at the forefront of everything we have done.”
The amateur boxer and passionate sportsman pauses. “In boxing, we say that you don’t leave anything in the ring. You might lose a rugby match, but you don’t leave anything on the pitch. I haven’t left anything on the pitch.”
The last 12 months have seen Marvin’s city grapple with its part in the slave trade, most strikingly when the statue of slaver Edward Colston was toppled into the harbour during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. Marvin’s father came to the UK from Jamaica at the age of 12. “As an elected official, I can’t condone criminal damage,” he says. “But I’m not sad to see it gone.”
He wants to see Bristol and the wider world address the injustices of the present as well as the past. “It’s not just about historic reparations, it’s about systemic racism now,” he says. “How do we address the structures that in an impersonal way affect our outcomes. People with black and
brown skin die earlier, are more likely to be in contact with the criminal justice system, and fail in education. This isn’t because of genetic differences.”
In the hours that followed Colston’s swim, protesters with “All Lives
Matter” banners gathered at the city’s Cenotaph monument. Marvin went to speak to them. “I said to them, ‘what are you worried about, so I can understand’. They said, ‘We’re worried about losing our city’. I said, ‘You are losing your city. But you’re losing it to house prices and gentrification’.” Marvin’s upbringing, mainly by a white single mum who had left school at 14 to become a hairdresser, and which included time in a women’s refuge, taught him that race and class are inextricable. “They are not the same thing, but they are inseparable,” he says. “It’s a complicated world. White privilege exists, but my white mum did not live a life of white privilege. We need to be able to hold difficult truths together.”
He laughs. “It angers me that the only people who are allowed to be anti-establishment are card-carrying members of the establishment. Boris, Farage, they are all the establishment. Picture me going on in the way they do, I’d be an angry class war black man with a chip on my shoulder. It’s fake debate passing off as real politics and offers no solutions for people like my mum or my grandad.”
As a mixed-race teenager, Marvin moved from a predominantly white estate in Lawrence Weston to multicultural Easton. “In the 80s, we’d had two riots,” he recalls. “One of my black friends said to me, ‘Marv, when the war between black and white people comes, which side will you be on?’ I was 13. That’s a big question. I was used to being told ‘get back to your own country’, but my mum and her family are white.” After missing out on joining the Marines because of an eye issue, he won a place at Swansea University, and studied in America, including at Yale. Marvin’s fight to become mayor began in 2012. After working as community organiser in America, he was an outsider. “When local TV news channels were interviewing the candidates, I waited until the end, and they said they didn’t have time to speak to me.”
ELECTED
But filmmaker Loraine Blumenthal began following him back then, through the 2012 election he lost, and the second in 2016, which he won. The result is a beautifully shot film, The Mayor’s Race, which airs on the community channel Together TV tomorrow.
It opens with a scene of him boxing, which he says, growing up, “gave me the comfort of not having to prove myself.”
A father of three, Marvin still remains passionate about sport, and is the President of the British Exploring Society, after a “transformative” time visiting the Arctic as a teenager.
“Environmental justice can’t be separated from racism and poverty. People who come from places like my dad and backgrounds like my mum will always be most affected,” he says.
Today he is proud his Deputy Mayor, Asher Craig, is a Rastafarian woman. But it also matters to him that his former white working-class boxing opponents are proud of him being Mayor.
“It’s not that we’re not different,” he says. “We are. It’s that difference is not a problem. Culture wars are the total opposite to what we need. We’ve got to find space to sit together.”
The Mayor’s Race, Sunday, 10pm on Together TV (Freeview 82, Sky 170, Virgin 269, Freesat 164)
‘‘ I can’t condone the damage but I’m not sad to see the Colston statue gone