PREVIEW: Marvin Rees

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of Neither Gods Nor Mayors, the name of the show that this is.

Useful.

That's right.

This is for the sophisticates listening to the bonus feed.

Yes, exactly.

Gods nor mayors.

Nije ni ma.

It is Riley.

I am your mayor for this episode.

And I'm, of course, joined by my deputy mayors, Maddie, in November.

Oh, hey, hey, you get these cattle out of the ISF here.

Yeah.

And we have a guest mayor this show as well.

It is Isaac Nebone-Hopkins, friend of me,

resident of Bristol, and the host, and the host of...

Yeah,

I've got at least one friend and the host of the podcast about activism, People Just Do Something, which is hosted by the Bristol Cable, Bristol's only news source.

Isaac, how's it going?

I'm very good.

I'm glad you got my main CV point up top.

Friend of Riley, that opens the doors to me.

I'm ready to go.

Now, what we're going to do today is we are going to talk about a mayor, but a mayor in England, which is super, super different from mayors in the rest of the world, because England only invented having mayors who had the power to do more than just just like cut ribbons in like 2012.

Or rather, we had an interregnum where like outside of London, anyway.

Yes.

And there was this interregnum.

Well, yeah, throughout the medieval and early modern period, mayors of towns had actual power.

But then the problem is all of the power gets concentrated into parliament, and then

mayors become increasingly symbolic.

Yeah, I'm on the third side of the English Civil War, the mayors.

It's like cavaliers, roundheads, and then a bunch of guys wearing sashes.

And

so we're going to talk a little bit about one of, I would say, England's most

non-London England's most archetypical mayors, a guy who was so bad that his city voted to abolish the office of mayor after he was mayor.

It is, of course.

That's the dream.

The city that said, no gods, no mayors.

Yes.

And for that, we love them.

We are, of course, going to be talking about Bristol's Marvin Reese.

Yes.

Yes.

Bristol might actually have said no gods, no mayors.

I think if any city has said that.

Yeah, well.

I've been very fully waiting to do it since we started because it was such like an incredible story of as a mayor abolitionist myself.

I'm a mayor reformist.

You know, I don't think they need to be doing all the things that they're doing or taking up as much budget as they can.

If you get rid of the societal conditions that create mayors, we don't need

to.

The George Orwell quote where it's like, as as soon as i see an actual flesh and blood mayor uh

defrauding a worker i know instantly which side i'm on yeah uh local it's that look like local democracy is the worst system of local politics except all the others that have been locally tried in the locality local stalin

only a good guy with a mayor can stop a bad guy with a mayor that's what it always says

i'm gonna build on that i'm gonna say good guy with a sash that's right the good guy with a sash

Now, of course, before we get into talking about mostly Marvin Reese and a little bit George Ferguson,

his predecessor, the first mayor of Bristol and the second last, we have, of course, a section we like to call either municipal or mayoral roundup, depending on whether or not we remember the name.

And this time we remembered to put items in it.

Yes, that's right.

You can tell because the theme is like playing forwards instead of backwards, which it's like the flag being raised over Buckingham Palace.

It indicates that the municipal roundup items are in residence.

Let's hear that beautiful BR.