Marvin Rees has denied being a “bully” and an “egoist” after councillors – including from his own Labour group – accused him of sidelining them and shutting down debate.
Bristol’s mayor, who is standing for reelection against eight other candidates next week, said elected members were “absolutely vital” but then went on to criticise them for lacking ambition and being too “sensitive” when challenged.
He also took aim at the city council itself as a long-time “democratically broken organisation” and blamed the collapse of his former cross-party rainbow cabinet on opposition groups’ “cheap digs”.
Mr Rees said his One City approach to governing, which includes hand-picked boards and working in tandem with major Bristol institutions such as the police, NHS and universities, took the big issues much more seriously than local authority members.
Opposition councillors have long accused the mayor of having a “thin skin”, and Cllr Jo Sergeant defected from Labour to the Greens last month with a savage parting shot at her former party and Mr Rees.
She said the Bristol Labour group was “focused on power for power’s sake and beset with a culture of fear and bullying”.
Cllr Sergeant, who is standing in the Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston ward on Thursday, May 6, claimed the local party was dominated by Mr Rees and Cllr Marg Hickman who “through their allies… control the agenda and restrict opportunity for debate on issues they do not wish to be discussed”.
She said the mayor saw local councillors as an “annoying inconvenience” and that he set up the City Office and One City boards as an “alternative council” to make policy that “circumvents democratic process”.
The mayor’s office dismissed her comments as a “personal vendetta”.
But they were backed by Labour Cllr Nicola Bowden-Jones and echoed at a full council meeting by “demoralised” Labour Cllr Mike Davies who said that under the mayor, councillors were made to feel a “relic of the past” whose role had been made “hollow”.
That same day, Labour Cllr Olly Mead told member forum that councillors were treated “like a nuisance to be barely tolerated and left in a corner to do colouring-in like primary school children”.
Neither Cllr Mead nor Cllr Davies are standing at the local elections.
In response, Mr Rees insisted the mayor was the most democratic role in Bristol because it was the only one where every voter in the city had a say.
And he told full council in February there was a danger Bristol could “outgrow” the city council because of “bun-fights”, dysfunction and a lack of action and that there was a “gulf of difference” with the City Office.
Lib Dem Bristol mayoral candidate Caroline Gooch, has said the role, which she and the Conservatives wants to scrap, requires an “egoist”.
Speaking this week on The Cable’s Bristol Unpacked podcast, Mr Rees said: “I don’t think that’s the way people in the city have experienced me over the last 20 years.”
Asked if he was a bully, he replied: “No, I’m not a bully.
“If someone has said it, it’s worth cross-referencing with other people in the city.
“Pulling the city together in the way we have since I’ve been elected as mayor would not be possible in terms of opening up decision-making to our city partners if we approached it in a way that wasn’t okay.
“The youth work I have been involved with in the city over the years, the city leadership programme, I worked in the voluntary sector – I’ve got enough of a track record within the city, it’s not too hard to go out there and ask people if they think this is the truth.”
He said some of his accusers were playing political games and others were “sensitive when they’re asked a question back”.
“What I will do when I’m asked a silly question is I’ll ask people why they’ve asked a silly question. And I think that’s okay,” the mayor said.
“Dare I say the unwillingness to take questions is one of the problems with our political debate in that it becomes a turkey-shoot conversation rather than a genuine conversation.”
Mr Rees said his critics did not like the mayoral model but that their desire to revert to a council leader and cabinet would take the decision over who leads Bristol away from residents and hand it to a small group of members.
“We’re not saying get rid of councillors. Councillors play an absolutely vital role in the city. Councillors are critical in local politics,” he said.
“They are there to represent a ward and advocate for them and make sure their people are getting their needs from the council.
“If we get onto the City Office, the council in and of itself has been a democratically broken organisation in the city for a long time.
“I grew up in the city, I know lots of communities, I worked in the voluntary sector in Bristol for many years.
“The council is not an organisation we looked to for solutions and neither were the councillors.
“So what we’ve done with the City Office is say ‘Okay, we’ve got all these organisations in the city shaping life – ourselves, the health service, voluntary and community sector, the police, trade unions, schools – how do we begin to get those organisations to work together in a much more coherent way?
“What we’ve done is they’ve come together to write a One City Plan.”
He said any councillor who came up with a plan to do something good would be backed.
But Mr Rees said: “I visited all the political groups when I was first elected and said ‘What do you want to get done, what is your vision you want to deliver?’ and I got things like signage on bus stops.
“‘Okay, we can support you on that but we’ve got some major challenges, we’ve got Brexit, economic downturn, austerity, lingering child poverty’.
“Now I’m finding working with our city partners that there is much more tune-in to having those conversations than we do in the council chamber.
“So we will invest in the councillors but the councillors in turn need to invest in the city by actually coming up with real visionary stuff they want to deliver.”
Asked why he got rid of the rainbow cabinet – a pledge in his 2016 election campaign – after only 18 months, he said: “The first party to leave was the Liberal Democrats, and I said to the cabinet member at the time that you’re going to have to talk to your leader because we’ve given you genuine power within the cabinet but he keeps on having cheap digs.
“Having a cross-party cabinet doesn’t mean you can’t criticise across party lines, but something in the quality of your working relationship needs to change.
“I said ‘There is only so long I can keep holding my hand out to you where you keep chewing on my fingers’.
“That extended to the other parties as well.
“In the end I had to say this isn’t working, we’ve given out real power, a position in the cabinet, and I don’t think the spirit of that is being honoured so it’s not a journey we can continue on.”
Mr Rees, who has said he will not seek reelection as city mayor in 2024, said he did not know if he wanted to stand for Parliament.
“I don’t have a life plan, I didn’t have a life plan to become mayor of Bristol. There was no mayor,” he said.
“There is no plan to become an MP.
“City leadership is actually the most exciting place in politics at the moment.”
