Lord Rees of Stapleton Road Throws Community Punches From His London Corner.

Or: How a Delusional Mayor Became an Even More Delusional Lord.

Former mayor named honorary industrial professor at Bristol Uni. Although, of what particular industry is anyone’s guess!

Let me tell you about a beautiful piece of political performance art that just landed in letterboxes across East Bristol.

Marvin Rees - Lord Rees of Stapleton Road to those of us still stuck living with the consequences of his decisions, the Rev Marvin the Marvellous to those who’ve bought into the mythology - has given an interview to Up Our Street.

Up Our Street is a free community publication distributed to homes in Stapleton Road, Easton, St George, and the wider East Bristol area. It’s hyperlocal journalism for people who actually live here. It gets shoved through letterboxes every quarter so residents can read about their community.

Here’s the problem: Marvin doesn’t live here anymore. He lives in London.

And London living, it should be noted, becomes considerably more comfortable when you can claim £361 for each qualifying day of attendance at the House of Lords. That’s the daily allowance available to peers - tax-free - just for turning up. No salary, but attend the chamber, vote in a division, or sit on a committee, and you can claim that daily rate. Over an average of 145 sitting days, that’s potentially around £52,000 a year, tax-free, before you even factor in travel expenses and the subsidised restaurant facilities.

Not bad for someone concerned about families struggling to afford to stay in Bristol.

So we’ve got a politician who no longer lives in East Bristol giving an interview to an East Bristol community publication about the importance of the East Bristol community while sitting in the House of Lords 120 miles away.

You literally couldn’t write satire this good.

Three students from City Academy Bristol - the same school Marvin attended as a teenager - sat down with Lord Rees to ask about community, challenges, and what shaped him. Poor kids. What they got was a masterclass in political doublespeak. Every hollow platitude, every empty promise, every meaningless inspirational cliché that characterised his eight years as elected Mayor, now turbocharged with the unearned confidence that comes from being elevated to the Upper House.

Because nothing says “I understand your struggles” quite like a seat in the House of Lords and a London postcode.

Let’s go through this round by round, because if Marvin knows anything, it’s boxing. And this interview deserves a proper beating.

Round 1: Community Means Never Having to Actually Live There.

Rees says: “Community’s a network of relationships between people who care about one another. It’s not just about where we live. It stretches across the world.”

How convenient.

Community isn’t about where we live, says the man who moved to London. Community stretches across the world, says the man whose title is literally Lord Rees of Stapleton Road.

Let me translate this: “I don’t need to live in Bristol to talk about Bristol because I’ve redefined community as an abstract concept that conveniently allows me to champion places I no longer inhabit.”

This is the kind of philosophical gymnastics you can only pull off when you’ve been elevated to the House of Lords. When you’re an elected Mayor, you at least have to pretend geography matters. But once you’re Lord Rees? Community becomes whatever definition lets you keep the brand without the inconvenience of actually being there.

“In Bristol, many families have ties to the Caribbean, Pakistan, East Africa and beyond. When something happens there, it matters here too.”

You know what else matters here, Marvin? What happens here in Bristol? Where you don’t live anymore. Where families are struggling with a housing crisis that worsened during your tenure. Where residents are dealing with transport schemes implemented during your mayoralty. Where people are living with the consequences of eight years of your decisions while you sit in the House of Lords debating national policy.

Community stretches from Stapleton Road all the way to your London address, apparently. That’s not community - that’s a commute you no longer have to make.

Round 2: Housing Crisis Concern From the Man Who Caused It (And Now Profits From It).

Rees says: “Many people are struggling to afford to stay in the city. We need an economy and a housing system that works for everyone, not just a few.”

Let’s be absolutely clear about what we’re witnessing here.

This is the man - the actual human being - who spent eight years as Mayor of Bristol, presiding over policies that made housing increasingly unaffordable.

During his mayoralty, Bristol saw council housing sold while new affordable housing targets were missed. Market-driven development accelerated gentrification. Bristol transformed into a city where ordinary working people struggle to afford to live. And now, from his London base, having been rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords, he’s back to express his concerns about housing affordability.

But wait. It gets better.

According to the UK Parliament’s Register of Interests for Lord Rees of Easton, he lists “Two residential properties in Bristol from which rental income is received” under the land and property category.

Read that again slowly.

Marvin Rees owns two rental properties in Bristol. The man lamenting that “many people are struggling to afford to stay in the city” is a landlord collecting rental income from Bristol properties while living in London.

You cannot make this up. The political class doesn’t just fail upward - they accumulate assets along the way.

This isn’t hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is too gentle a word. This is weapons-grade political gaslighting delivered with the confidence of a man who’s been promoted away from accountability while maintaining rental properties in the city he no longer lives in.

You want to know what “a housing system that works for everyone” looks like when Marvin’s in charge? It works for property developers. It works for investors. It works for landlords - including Marvin himself. It works for people who already own multiple properties. It works for politicians who get to put “addressed housing crisis” on their CV before moving to London while keeping their Bristol buy-to-lets. And it absolutely screws everyone else.

Then Marvin gets his peerage - because failing upward while maintaining rental properties is how the political class rolls - and returns to tell East Bristol how concerned he is about housing affordability.

It’s like a tobacco executive retiring on a full pension and then doing interviews about lung cancer prevention. “We really need to do something about this health crisis I spent my career contributing to.”

Here’s the thing: you can’t sell the council housing, watch the market price out ordinary families, own rental properties in the city, move to another city, accept a peerage, and then come back as an elder statesman lamenting housing affordability. Well, you can - Marvin just did - but it requires a level of cognitive dissonance that most people couldn’t maintain.

And the fact that he faced voters as Mayor - at least then there was some accountability - makes his current position even more absurd. Now there’s no election. No accountability. Just a title, a platform, two rental properties in the city he claims to champion, and an unshakeable belief in his own moral authority to diagnose problems he helped create.

Round 3: “Speak Up!” Says the Man Who Perfected Ignoring You.

Rees says: “Speak up! You can write a statement and deliver it at a full council meeting. Write to local leaders and ask how they are supporting your community.”

This is beautiful. Truly beautiful.

“Speak up!” says the man who spent eight years perfecting the art of consultation theatre. “Write to local leaders!” says the politician who helped establish the template for asking residents their opinion and then doing whatever you wanted anyway.

You want to know what happens when Bristol residents follow this advice?

Under the current Green administration - the one that learned every trick from Marvin’s playbook - councillors literally walk out of public forums when residents try to hold them accountable. But this didn’t start in May 2024. This performative consultation, this community engagement theatre where decisions are pre-cooked and public input is decorative wallpaper, was perfected during the Rees years.

The invitation to participate is hollow when the mechanisms for participation are designed to contain dissent rather than enable it. You can speak up all you want. You can write statements. You can deliver them at full council meetings. And the politicians will nod, say “thank you for your input,” and then do exactly what they were always going to do.

It’s a complaints box that empties directly into a bin.

But here’s the beautiful part: Marvin can give this advice with a straight face because he no longer has to deal with the consequences. He’s not at Bristol City Council meetings anymore. He’s in the House of Lords. Those angry residents writing statements? Not his problem. Those communities demanding accountability? Someone else’s headache now.

“Speak up!” is easy to say when you’re 120 miles away, and you’ve been elevated to a position where you never have to listen again.

Round 4: Feeding Bristol - A Food Bank Achievement in a Wealthy City.

Rees says: “Feeding Bristol. We brought together groups across the city to tackle food insecurity and holiday hunger. It helped make sure children and families could access healthy, dignified meals.”

This is his proudest achievement. Let that sink in for a moment.

His proudest achievement as Mayor of one of England’s wealthiest cities was creating a food bank initiative.

Working families needed food assistance under his watch, and he’s proud of it.

“Holiday hunger” - that’s what we call it when children in a prosperous city don’t have enough to eat during school breaks. And Marvin brought together groups to tackle it. How inspiring. How visionary. How completely backwards.

This isn’t an achievement - this is an admission that economic conditions during your tenure required working families in Bristol to need food banks. And rather than address the systemic issues - low wages, high housing costs, precarious employment, all the problems that persisted throughout your mayoralty - you create a charity program and call it success.

This is the neoliberal playbook in perfect miniature: create conditions of precarity through policy, then congratulate yourself for charity initiatives that paper over the worst effects of your own decisions.

“Dignified meals” for families who can’t afford to feed their kids isn’t dignity - it’s managed decline with better branding.

Here’s what should have happened: a Mayor looks at working families needing food assistance in a wealthy city and thinks, “What have we done wrong?” They look at the housing costs, the wage stagnation, the economic inequality, and they think, “We need to fundamentally change our approach.”

But that would require admitting failure. That would require questioning the market-first policies. That would require actual structural change rather than sticking-plaster solutions.

Much easier to bring together some community groups, call it Feeding Bristol, take credit for “tackling” food insecurity that persisted throughout your tenure, and move to London with a clear conscience and a seat in the Lords.

Round 5: The Five GCSEs to House of Lords Mythology.

Rees says: “I only left school with five GCSEs, but with support and resilience, I became Mayor and now sit in the House of Lords. Your future is wide open.”

The personal brand. The origin story. The five GCSEs to the House of Lords arc that Marvin has polished to perfection.

And look, on the surface, social mobility is great. Someone from an ordinary background making it to the top - that’s supposed to be how the system works.

But let’s talk about what’s missing from this inspirational narrative: which communities did you serve to get there? Which power structures did you reinforce? What systemic inequalities did your policies perpetuate while you were climbing that ladder? Who got left behind?

Because here’s the thing about Marvin’s journey: he made it. He got the mayoralty. He got the peerage. He got the platform. And what did the communities that elected him get?

A housing crisis. Food banks. Consultation theatre. Transport schemes with majority resident opposition. Broken promises. And a former Mayor who moved to London.

“No one is self-made,” he correctly observes. “We all grow because someone sees our potential and encourages us.”

True. But some of us grow while pulling the ladder up behind us. Some of us extract credential value from communities and then lecture those communities from a comfortable distance about resilience and speaking up.

The inspirational personal narrative is designed to individualise success in a way that conveniently skips over collective responsibility for collective problems. It turns structural failures into personal inspiration. It makes people think “if Marvin can do it with five GCSEs, maybe I can too” rather than “why the hell does our system require superhuman resilience just to survive?”

And now that he’s in the House of Lords - unelected, unaccountable, unsackable - the delusion has reached its final form. He’s not just successful despite the system; he’s become part of the system that ensures most people with five GCSEs won’t make it. He’s the exception that proves the rule, now elevated to help write the rules.

Round 6: “Be Resilient” AKA “Deal With What We Created.”

Rees says to young people: “Be ambitious for yourself, even when it feels scary, and be resilient when things get tough.”

Translation: navigate the structural inequalities we’ve built, survive the precarity we’ve normalised, and don’t ask uncomfortable questions about why any of this is necessary.

And maybe one day, if you’re very lucky, you too can give interviews about community while collecting rental income from the place you no longer live.

The Knockout: Pattern Recognition.

Here’s what this Up Our Street interview reveals:

As Mayor, Marvin believed his approach to housing policy was working. He believed consultation theatre constituted democracy. He believed food banks in a wealthy city were achievements worth celebrating. He believed you could champion community while presiding over policies that failed to prevent its fracturing.

Then came the peerage.

Now there’s no election to lose. No voters to face. No accountability mechanism whatsoever. Just a title, a platform, a London address, a tax-free daily allowance, and the unshakeable conviction that he’s qualified to diagnose Bristol’s problems from 120 miles away.

The pattern is perfect:

1. Get elected championing community

2. Preside over policies that fail to address community concerns

3. Perform consultation while pursuing predetermined outcomes

4. Manage symptoms of problems rather than addressing root causes

5. Extract maximum credential value

6. Move to London

7. Get elevated to the Lords

8. Give interviews to community publications about the importance of community you no longer live in

9. Maintain absolute conviction in your own moral authority

This isn’t just political careerism - it’s clinical-grade delusion operating at scale.

The Scorecard.

This interview is legacy management from someone who doesn’t have to live with his legacy.

The irony: using a hyperlocal publication to pontificate about the importance of locality while living elsewhere.

It’s a politician who promised to fix Bristol’s housing crisis, presided over eight years in which it worsened, got a peerage, moved to London, and now tours as an inspirational speaker.

The title I award him says everything: Lord Rees of Stapleton Road.

He’s territorially branded without territorial accountability. He’s geographically embedded in his title but not in his reality. He’s got Stapleton Road in his name and London in his address.

And he’s giving advice to young people in East Bristol about community, resilience, and speaking up, all while demonstrating that the real path to success is to extract value from communities, fail upward into positions of power, and maintain unwavering belief in your own bullshit regardless of measurable outcomes.

The Final Bell.

Marvin Rees knows about boxing. The problem is he’s now throwing punches from his London corner, at opponents who can’t punch back, in a fight that ended when he left the ring.

Those three students deserved better than inspirational platitudes from someone who embodies a troubling pattern: performing community without presence, extracting credentials without continued accountability, ascending regardless of outcomes, maintaining unshakeable confidence in a system designed to reward exactly this trajectory.

And choosing Up Our Street - landing on East Bristol doorsteps quarterly - as the venue for these reflections isn’t community engagement. It’s making love to the corpse of your own legacy while the community deals with the rot.

Lord Rees of Stapleton Road can keep the title, the peerage, the daily allowance, and the two rental properties.

Bristol deserves leadership that actually lives here. That’s if you can call him a ‘leader.’