Convinced that journalism and politics could change the world, Marvin Rees decided to both. Marc Wadsworth talks with him about the choices
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ormer journalist Marvin Rees came to national prominence when he was elected mayor in May this year. The success was particularly poignant because it happened in Bristol, one of the most important slave ports
in the UK at the time of that evil transatlantic trade. After beating the incumbent, gaining a whopping 63 per
cent of the vote, Rees told me: “I’m the descendant of people who were enslaved in Jamaica and now I’m mayor of Bristol.” Rees, 44, says his two passions are politics and journalism. And the former won out after he spent five years at the BBC. His father was a Jamaican who came to the UK aged 12 and
his white Bristol-born mother was a nursery nurse. Father Valentine worked on Bristol’s buses after black workers were given jobs after anti-racist campaigner Paul Stephenson led a famous boycott in 1963 against the bus company’s refusal to employ black or Asian drivers or conductors. When his parents split up, Rees’s mother raised him and his
younger sister, Dionne, on her own. He did well at secondary school and went to Swansea
University where he graduated in 1993 with an honours degree in economic history and politics. Rees stayed on for a couple of years to do a master’s degree – the first of two – in political theory and government. From 1996 to 1998, he was youth coordinator for Tearfund,
an international Christian aid and development agency working to end poverty and injustice in some of the world’s poorest communities. Then he went off to the US to do outreach work for
campaigning and community-organising groups – including the Sojourners, a Washington DC-based evangelical Christian social justice organisation that produces Sojourners magazine. In his late 20s, Rees did a six-week community radio
production course in the city’s poor, black St Paul’s neighbourhood where he grew up. He then returned to the US to do more voluntary work. This experience clearly shaped Rees’s politics. Rather than using the clichés of many UK lawmakers (“hardworking families” etc), he talks in inspirational terms that link specific issues to big causes like a US politician. He was active in the Jubilee 2000 international coalition,
which aimed to wipe out $90bn of debt owed by the world’s poorest nations. Rees said the experience convinced him that the power to begin to “change the world” lay within not just politics but also “good-quality journalism”. So he wanted to do both.
12 | theJournalist His break was at BBC Radio Bristol when he came back from
America in 2001. He won a BBC diversity scholarship, which he described as “a bit of a double-edged sword because it tagged me as a guy who came in on a diversity programme rather than a guy who came in with a brain”. Rees said he enjoyed the challenges of working as “a general, jobbing broadcast journalist”, some of the time as the only black one in the newsroom. He secured a six-month attachment to BBC world affairs, the highlight of which was presenting a half-hour programme on America’s religious right for BBC Radio 4’s award-winning Crossing Continents foreign affairs documentary series in 2004. He travelled to Philadelphia and Washington DC, looking at the “US cultural wars” over, for example, whether creationism should be taught in schools. “I enjoyed doing meaty journalism,” he said.
Throughout his time at the BBC, he was an NUJ member. After he left the corporation, he freelanced for several media outlets, including The Voice, supplying the black weekly paper with West Country community news. Rees travelled to London to do shifts on BBC Radio 5 Live
and at ITN. He said: “It was tough juggling all my commitments to do that. But in the end, with all the travel it wasn’t working,” Is that why he eventually gave up journalism to become a
People think ‘that’s not for someone from my background’ and therefore are not going for careers they could pursue
”
health service manager? Rees replied: “I haven’t really [given up journalism]. I still want to do it. But you just get to a point where you do politics or journalism.” Despite his new job, Rees still found time to present his
own Sunday evening magazine show on BBC Radio Bristol for a year.
As the Labour candidate, he was favourite to win the newly
created post of Bristol mayor in 2012 but lost to independent George Ferguson. Four years later, backed by a rainbow coalition, Rees defeated Ferguson – the turnout was over 60% higher than the previous one. He was helped by his campaign’s communications director Tim Lezard, a veteran NUJ activist. Rees says he would jump at the opportunity to do a radio
show again. “I’d really love to continue to do it … if the opportunity came along, provided I could square it with the family and the day job.” As a black ex-BBC employee, what are his views about the
diversity debate championed by celebrity Lenny Henry? He says: “I think there’s a problem. But it’s not unique to journalism. What about politics, the criminal justice system,
SIMON CHAPMAN
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