The statue of Colston “came down really easily,” said one of the topplers talking to the Tab newspaper on the day. “The general vibe was supportive but people didn’t think it could fall.” After he threw a rope up, however, “people kept chanting and holding onto the rope to pull.”
And that’s when the illusion of the statue no one could deal with fell apart. People, pulling together, were amazed at how easy it was.
One man, who supposedly had the power of the whole council behind him, the mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees, could not do it. It’s a bit like the sword in the stone. If the sword can only be lifted out by a group, then one person will never be the right leader.
The mayor likes to say that the city is too big to fit around the council’s processes so the council has to adjust to the city. He doesn’t mean the city’s people; he means the city’s rich people: the land owners and the millionaires and the billionaires who get to bypass procurement.
Ultimately, one person can easily be bypassed, and they are then left behind, trying to explain that what is happening is what they wanted to happen all along.
On June 7, 2020, the people showed him how wrong he was and that no one needs to stand alone.
A year and a half after Colston fell, councillors voted to ask the people whether the burden of decision-making should rest on 70 people’s shoulders or just one’s. We get to vote for that in May 2022 and it’s difficult to see why we would not want a stronger decision-making body.
We have seen how the system does no good to an individual person’s mental health, with an ever-increasing set of references to Bristol’s not-at-all-paranoid mayor in Private Eye. The first mayor of Bristol, before him, was physically assaulted in a bookshop.
You can't force people to pull together in the same direction when they don’t like the way you are heading. Leaders need to convince us that we are in this together; that when we face challenging, and seemingly insurmountable problems, we do it together.
But you can’t just tell them, they need to believe it.
Last week, the mayor was trying to correct a cllr’s language as he was asked a question about the high cost of services: “Remember, Councillor, one thing, just in your language, we are the council; everyone elected in this chamber is the council so, it's not… we're not external to it” (Members Forum, 7 December 2021).
Rees provided an uncanny echo of Margaret Thatcher’s increasing irritation of the BBC: “First, she regard much of the BBC's reporting of the Falklands War (particularly the use, on news broadcasts, of the term 'the British troops', rather than 'our troops') as almost treasonable” (Curran and Seaton, 2009, p.291).
As with Thatcher, so with Rees, when all the decision-making and power rests on your shoulders, and is used to serve power, you start to get annoyed with people who challenge how wide those shoulders really are.
We know that the council couldn’t do anything about Colston because nothing happened and no plans were in place other than avoidance; they didn’t even try: Council Officer John Finch took the stand on Day Two of the trial against the topplers. In the following exchange, he is being cross-examined by a defending barrister:
Ní Ghrálaigh went on: “The civic realm should be about generating community cohesion and positive relations, yes?”
“Yes,” Finch replied. And, Ní Ghrálaigh asked, did the statue do that?
“The statue clearly caused significant concerns in certain parts of the community,” Finch said.
“And despite recognising that, there were no moves by the council to remove the statue were there?” Ní Ghrálaigh asked.
“No, not that I’m aware of,” Finch said.
Guardian article, 14 December 2021
Rees had said, “when I first came in, myself and a number of black people in the creative sector said that the best thing to do is to keep that debate away from me.”
His group crowded around him for protection.
What if we could all band together to provide that kind of safety net for our decision-makers? What if instead of a select group of friends, our elected representatives knew that each decision that strengthened residents against the power of the capitalists would be taken together?
One man (and the men and women before him) couldn’t do it.
It doesn’t matter why the mayor refused to deal with the situation. It would mean the same thing whether the role of council leader is ultimately too weak to confront the capitalists running the city, or whether it was to avoid confrontation with far-right protestors.
Both are valid reasons.
The point is that we have many tough challenges ahead of us. There will be an economic restructuring that means less and less money for the city; there are decarbonisation issues to deal with, and the importance of building affordable and good housing, let alone trying to fund education for all our children.
"Democracy is an invention by the people of history to protect themselves against the power of wealth and that's the fight that's still going on to this very day, " said Michael Parenti in an interview.
You can’t protect yourself from wealth by joining forces with it. To stand against it, however, you can’t go alone.
In a fair and functioning system, we are meant to have mechanisms that handle our complaints and grievances. When all these lead to up to one individual who refuses to deal with a situation, then that’s not a system that works for the people.
Together, we need to realise that in the future, we won’t be facing unsolvable problems. When we pull in the same direction, we’ll realise they have always been easy to solve. Pull them down and they are hollow inside, stuffed with the words of the newspapers.
Today, four young people will be on trial for the third day after having pulled down a statue commemorating a slaver. Together they achieved a task that far from being impossible for one man, and the council leaders before him, was easy.
My solidarity goes to them. They’ve taught us an important lesson.
References
Curran and Seaton (2009) Power without Responsibility.
Colston "came down really easily" when people pulled together
"You can't force people to pull together in the same direction when they don’t like the way you are heading. Leaders need to convince us that we are in this together; that when we face challenging, and seemingly insurmountable problems, we do it together.
But you can’t just tell them, they need to believe it." - Never a truer word spoken.