Can Bristol’s elected mayor unite a divided city?

Bristol was the only city to vote yes to having an elected mayor in the referendums held on 3 May.

This might have been because there were no local elections in Bristol this year, so councillors weren’t expressing their views on the doorsteps. It may be because of the dire lack of information on the referendum if you didn’t actively seek it out. The council’s information leaflet didn’t get delivered to 1,000s of households and no effort was made to rectify this.

The local paper was unabashed in its ‘yes’ campaign and made an effort to get debate going, but its comments pages show how few engaged. Live debates were hosted by Bristol University and the Bristol Festival of Ideas, but these were not events that your average Joe would have heard about, let alone attended.

There were some lively online debates, but you had to go looking for them. The reality is unless you’re interested in local politics you were unlikely to stumble across any information.

All of these things may have contributed to a low turnout (24% overall and as low as 9.9% in some wards) which would naturally favour a yes result (those with a positive reason to traipse up the polling station in the rain would be more incentivised to vote than those with a negative reason), or it could be because, even though we still don’t know what powers a mayor will receive, the council in Bristol is so consistently crap that we’ll vote for anything to change it.

The three major parties are now gearing themselves up for the November mayoral election. I say the three major parties but to be frank, apart from a very minor blip in 1983, the Conservatives have been untroubled by power in Bristol since 1925. Given the state of Lib Dem popularity across the country and the last-minute resignation of the Lib Dem leader of the council, there’s a strongly held assumption from Labour that it’s going to be a walkover. But I do wonder how much of the Bristol ‘yes’ vote came out of a disaffection with Bristol politics – an inspirational independent candidate could knock the others into a cocked hat.

Liverpool skipped the referendum and went straight ahead with its first mayoral election, so it was interesting to take a look at their results. Although Labour’s Joe Anderson won with a strong majority, his closest rival was an independent, Liam Fogerty. Disappointingly the candidates were largely politically nominated, middle-aged, white men (the youngest was 36, but most were in their 50s and 60s); a bland and narrow selection. In Bristol only one independent has put his name forward and, while not everyone’s cup of latte, he’s at least got the ball rolling. I’m hoping a few more outstanding individuals will step up to the mark to give us some real choice beyond mainstream politicians.

There are huge expectations on a Bristol mayor to sort out the city’s structural problems, but the position is only for the city itself, not the Greater Bristol area (roughly the county that used be Avon: Cuba as we like to call it), which would be a much more sensible area to administer if, for example, our appalling public transport is to be tackled. Cities minister Greg Clark has made some positive murmurings that the government might consider a wider ‘metro mayor’, though quite how that would get sorted is unclear when Bristol is unable to agree with its neighbours on just about anything. Although with a mayor it might at least be able to agree with itself for once.

The low turnout was no surprise and neither is it unusual that wealthier areas of the city voted in much higher numbers than areas of deprivation. But this may prove to be very significant in a mayoral election. The ‘presidential’ style of election means that it doesn’t matter where in the city a vote comes from. This could lead to candidates campaigning intensely in wealthy areas with a temptation to focus on issues that benefit the better off to the detriment of poorer areas. This needs to be guarded against as we don’t need even wider divisions in this already divided city.