Your say / Politics
‘Beige is the new red’
After being in post for 100 days it appears that what the electorate of Bristol voted for in electing Marvin Rees was simply another well-paid, City Hall desk jockey, and to all intents and purposes a total waste of space and public funds this far into his tenure.
Like most party politicians, Marvin proved to be adept at delivering the carefully contrived, central party office pre-election sound bites as one of the two mayoral poster boys under Jeremy Corbyn’s administration.
However, since being elected, we’ve realistically heard absolutely nothing from him at all, which led me to question as to whether I’d somehow missed the headline that he had died, or that Tolpuddle had added another name to their existing deportation list; albeit a politician rather than a trade union member.
is needed now More than ever
At what point does the pre-mayoral vision of the incumbent become a robust and publicly known action plan?
Like others in the city I expected him to make very clear his plans for three months ahead, six months ahead, a year ahead; two years ahead even.
But no. The best we’ve seen so far are a few goodwill, sugar-coated community gestures to keep some of the electorate sweet and let the almost privileged few know that actually, he is still alive.
Other than this the myopic electorate was conned in a politically schmoozy way to elect a damp squib with less grit, even fewer teeth than the proverbial dog, and more profoundly a hapless ineffective somnambulist drifting through politics.
Basically a total failure of a former boxer with the punch of a wet rag.
This city needed a massive shake-up from inside City Hall. But instead, we’ve ended up with a solitary handbag at dawn on College Green.
Equally, there is nothing I can see in terms of meaningful engagement with the public – the very people who elected Marvin Rees into office.
No podcasts. No webinar type meetings where people are invited to engage with him online. A tick box effort here and there on Twitter admittedly, but is this really good enough? In his predecessor’s favour, the one thing you could say about George Ferguson was that positively or negatively we were kept in the loop.
Sadly, I fear that our newly elected mayor will be the problem rather than the solution.
Solutions which properly deal with the homeless, the traffic congestion and pollution; the appalling environmental problems suffered by the people of Avonmouth, which falls on deaf ears; spiraling private rents and the affordability of ordinary people to secure a place to live, and an overall council administration which is no longer fit for purpose.
It would appear that here in Bristol for the time being at least, beige is the new red.
John Langley is a political campaigner and former independent mayoral candidate
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