Marvin Rees tells BBC Newsnight of 'disappointment' over not running for parliament

The former mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees has admitted he was disappointed not to be running for parliament right now, after being quizzed on Newsnight about why such ‘a star’ of the Labour Party wasn’t a General Election candidate.

Mr Rees appeared on the Newsnight pundit sofa last night (Tuesday) and sparked controversy amid accusations he was ‘victim-shaming’ Nigel Farage by saying the Reform UK leader had helped create the kind of anger that saw someone throw a stone at him on an open top bus.

He also warned the country would ‘become ungovernable’ if continued funding cuts lead to the collapse of local government. But the most awkward moment for the Mayor, who ended an eight-year term leading the city in May this year, came when Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark asked if there was an issue with General Election candidate selections in the Labour Party, because he hadn’t been chosen as a candidate to be an MP.

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Ms Wark said: “You were the two-times mayor of Bristol. What happened to you when you thought you would actually like to be a candidate? Two times mayor, a star of the party…” Mr Rees replied: “Well I wouldn’t call myself a star. Basically I didn’t get selected. There’s a process. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t disappointed. I’d know that wasn’t true if I was to say that. I’m here now as a pundit on your sofa instead of running for parliament.”

Ms Wark asked if Mr Rees had had a conversation with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer about running for parliament. “He must’ve known you wanted to stand, he must’ve seen the credentials that you have, by the fact that you’ve been running Bristol as it were?” she asked.

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Mr Rees replied that he didn’t ‘have a direct conversation about it, no’. “Look, I mean, there’s a process whereby the party selects its candidates and makes their decisions at a local level and at a national level and I’m sat here so self-evidently I’m not involved,” he added.

Mr Rees announced early he wanted to be Labour’s candidate in the new Bristol North East constituency, which covers an area from Lockleaze and Fishponds to Kingswood and Staple Hill. He was the front-runner and only declared candidate for months in the first half of 2023, but the then Labour mayor of Lewisham, Damien Egan, who grew up in Kingswood, announced he was going to apply too, and after a short campaign between the two men and local councillor Leigh Ingham, around 600 members of the Labour Party living in the new constituency overwhelmingly chose Mr Egan to be the candidate.

He was then voted in as Kingswood’s MP in February’s surprise by-election, and is now Labour’s candidate in the new Bristol North East constituency.

Kirsty Wark asked Mr Rees if there was ‘an issue with candidate selection?’ Mr Rees said he was focused on supporting Labour candidates in the Bristol area, name-checking Filton & Bradley Stoke’s Labour candidate Claire Hazelgrove, and Bristol East candidate Kerry McCarthy, but not Mr Egan.

“There’s a discussion,” said Mr Rees. “But there’s a fantastic team now out running for selection. I’ve been working very hard for an amazing candidate in Bristol, Claire Hazelgrove, and Kerry McCarthy, we’ve got some excellent people coming forward.

“But yeah I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a degree of disappointment, of course I do - I put myself forward. But listen, it’s not the first time I haven’t been selected by someone, it won’t be the last. I’m not going to get all bent out of shape about it,” he added.

Earlier in Mr Rees’ appearance on Newsnight, he and Rachel Johnson, Boris Johnson’s sister, clashed over a protest against Nigel Farage’s visit to Barnsley earlier on Tuesday. A man threw what happened to be a stone and what Mr Farage later described as a ‘cup of wet cement’ at him as he paraded through the town on an open-top bus. A 28-year-old man was later arrested and charged.

Mr Farage described the incident as ‘an attack on democracy’, and it was condemned by leaders of all political parties. Mr Rees said while the attack was ‘not acceptable’, he ‘couldn’t pretend’ Mr Farage hadn’t ‘fed into a culture’ that produced that kind of attack.

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“I’m going to say something carefully here,” Mr Rees said. “It’s not acceptable. Protest is a legitimate part of our political journey. The progress we’ve made in this country and around the world has often been ushered in by people making protest.

“But the protest needs to be intelligent, informed and properly targeted, and it needs to think about the way it lands in the public domain. So protest is important. What happened around Nigel Farage was not an acceptable and not an intelligent form of protest.

“What I can’t pretend though, is that he hasn’t fed into a culture of anger and hatred and othering that ends up manifesting in this kind of aggressive type of politics,” he added.

“When we talk about the culture and the framework created by national leaders - Farage is one of those people that have shaped it. Bristol is a city of 42 square miles, people from all different backgrounds live there.

“The number of times I’ve looked at the way national politicians have framed national debates and international debates in a way that does not help our ability to create a space in which people live together - this stuff does cut in a feedback loop. So what I’m not doing is justifying what happened, but I’m saying you have to take some responsibility,” he added.

Rachel Johnson challenged Mr Rees. “It sounded like you were licensing violent protest, which constitutes criminal assault” she said - which Mr Rees denied.

“For me the worry is every single day, about members of my family being attacked because they were in politics. I’m really sad to hear you talk like that,” she added.

“That’s why I said I wanted to say something very carefully. What I’m not doing is licensing what happened at all, what I am saying is if we want to understand what went on, we have to look at all the things that led up to it,” Mr Rees added.

Later on in the programme, Mr Rees highlighted the lack of mention of local government in the Conservative Party General Election manifesto.

“You would think from this manifesto that we were not in a situation where one in five council leaders and chief execs were not talking about going bankrupt in the next two years,” he said. “What we are facing at the moment, with the demise of local government, is a collapse in the way the nation’s run,” he added.

Former Conservative London mayor candidate Shaun Bailey was also on the panel, and he said: “Many local governments are run badly, and that’s why some of them are in this position. This is a national election.”

Mr Rees, whose Labour administration oversaw the collapse of the council-owned Bristol Energy company, which failed losing taxpayers in the city almost £50 million, and the troubled project to rebuild what is now the Bristol Beacon, which cost taxpayers more than £100 million, added: “I don’t think it always registers just how serious this crisis in local government is. Local government is not just a collection of disconnected services, it’s a convenor of place.

“One of the things I’ve pointed out directly to Michael Gove at the LGA conference a couple of years ago is that the financial hit to local government hasn’t just meant the underfunding of frontline services, it’s meant the loss of backroom capacity which we’ve talked about, which undermines the ability of places. If local government collapses, this country becomes virtually ungovernable,” he added.