Voters must take more ‘than 10 seconds’ of interest in politics, says Marvin Rees, or live with the consequences
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.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
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. “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.
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. 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.
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.
“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”. “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’.
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