D.K. Renton: Diary

D.K. Renton

At the start of this decade, Labour held 37 of the 70 seats on Bristol City Council; all four of the city’s MPs were Labour. In the 2021 local elections there was a thirteen-seat swing from Labour to the Greens. Three years later, the Greens gained ten more seats and effectively took control of the council. At the general election held on the same day in 2024, Thangam Debbonaire stood for Labour in Bristol Central. Her old seat, Bristol West, where she had a majority of 28,000, had been abolished due to boundary changes, but much of it was included in the new seat. Although Labour won a huge overall majority at Westminster, the Green candidate Carla Denyer won Bristol Central by ten thousand votes, becoming one of the country’s four Green MPs (there are now five).

I spoke on Zoom to Tom Renhard, the leader of the Labour group on the city council and until 2024 the cabinet member responsible for housing under Bristol’s then mayor, Marvin Rees. Renhard is friendly and has an impressive memory of the many projects he has been involved in. He told me that when Labour ran Bristol, housing was its ‘outstanding achievement’. Between 2016/17 and 2022/23, fifteen thousand homes were built or begun, twice the annual rate between 2012 and 2016 when an independent, George Ferguson, was Bristol’s first elected mayor, after beating Rees in a contest with a low turnout. Renhard said that Labour had also reduced homelessness and carried out more repairs for tenants. I asked him why the Greens had done so well given these improvements, and he winced. ‘It is a frustration,’ he said. ‘There are things that get in your way when you have a mayoral system. It wasn’t easy for Marvin [Rees], who was the first elected Black mayor in any West European city. There are issues like moving the Arena out from Central Bristol – that wasn’t popular.’ Arena Island was a planned 10,000-seat venue beside Bristol Temple Meads station. It was announced by the city council in 2003 and more than £13 million was spent on the scheme, but in September 2018 Rees moved the development out of town. Legal and General proposes to build 520 homes on the original site.

Rees was criticised for his response when he was asked by a journalist, Alex Seabrook, if ‘he saw the irony’ in flying to Vancouver to deliver a talk on climate change. Seabrook was a Local Democracy Reporter, a role funded by the BBC to cover local councils. Rees opted to exclude LDRs from his press conferences. Some councillors were also unhappy: Jo Sergeant resigned from the Labour group claiming that Rees treated elected representatives as an ‘annoying inconvenience’. In a referendum in 2022, voters decided by a 3:2 majority to abolish the post of mayor when Rees had served his term.

Two historic factors have made it likely that the Greens, not Reform, would be Labour’s main challengers: Bristol is a university town and a port city. The founder of the dockers’ union, Ben Tillett, was born there in 1860. In 1908, he published a pamphlet called Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a Failure? The party’s MPs, he wrote, had ‘stumped the country, subservient to the Nonconformist-Temperance-Liberal Party, ignoring the great tragedy of starvation’. They should have been trying to end ‘the neglect of the millions of homes affected detrimentally by poverty’, but the Commons, with its capacity to absorb radicals, had overwhelmed them. Many of Tillett’s criticisms could have been made of Keir Starmer’s Labour government. It antagonised low-paid workers by freezing income tax thresholds, so that they pay more of their income to the state. It made an enemy of disabled people by putting forward cuts to disability benefits. For Tillett, Labour not only did too little for the poor but spent time on issues its voters actively opposed. It’s not yet clear how effectually Andy Burnham will improve the lot of the worst off, despite his warm words about tackling the cost of living.

I went to the Plough, one of the pubs in Easton, where Tillett grew up. It has a large painting of Martin Luther King, and a sign reading ‘More Queer Joy’. One in three people in the ward recorded an ethnicity other than white in the 2021 census, compared to the national average of one in five. The proportion of graduates, at one in two, is high. Tillett is celebrated on a plaque on Bannerman Road (as ‘a tireless and determined defender of Workers’ Rights’) and in a mural at Stapleton Road station. Accompanied by W.G. Grace and the Indian reformer Raja Ramohan Roy, who died on a visit to Bristol in 1833, Tillett sits on a suitcase, reading a newspaper. On its back page, a headline declares: ‘Former Easton Waif Unionises Nation’s Unskilled Workers’.

In 2024, Henry Palmer, who grew up in Easton, stood for Labour in St George Central Ward. Its two council seats went to the Greens. ‘My campaign was overshadowed by Gaza,’ Palmer says. He felt ‘on the wrong side of history’. In 2013, a Palestinian museum and cultural centre opened in Bristol, the only one in Britain at the time. In 2024, activists launched a campaign to make the city an Apartheid-Free Zone, modelled on the campaign for disinvestment in South Africa in the 1980s, which targeted high-street banks and supermarkets. The new version asks residents to sign petitions promising that they will not buy Israeli goods; once a significant number of people have signed up, businesses are asked to remove the products from their shelves. So far nearly seven thousand households have signed. ‘A hundred shops support us,’ the campaign’s co-founder Matt Hollinshead told me. Denyer made a video encouraging people to get involved in this ‘brilliant grassroots community-organised campaign’. Alsayed Al-Maghrabi, a Labour councillor of Palestinian ancestry, backed the initiative. In October 2025, he quit the party for the Greens. He told me he had joined Labour only because of Jeremy Corbyn and began to doubt whether he was in the right party in 2023, after ‘seeing Starmer provide political cover for Israel’s genocide’. ‘I would talk about Palestine and [the other councillors] supported me.’ He connected Labour’s position on Palestine to its other shortcomings – its failure to introduce a wealth tax, its language on immigration.

I asked Al-Maghrabi how the Greens became the dominant political force in the city. He credited the election of Zack Polanski as party leader last September, but the Greens had broken through in Bristol years before that. If the decisions of Labour’s national leadership made the Greens’ advance easier, the initial problem was not Labour in government but Labour in opposition. Perhaps one of Starmer’s most distinctive errors, shared by the party in Bristol, was his support for authoritarian policing.

In his early twenties, Tillett moved to London, where he got a job at the Monument Tea Warehouse near London Bridge. He became the general secretary of a new union, the Tea Operatives and General Labourers’ Association. Two years later, as the leader of the renamed Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union, Tillett played a prominent part in the 1889 dock strike, which ended with the employers conceding a wage of 6d per hour (the ‘dockers’ tanner’). Three years later, he visited Bristol after members of his union were locked out by their employers, who wanted to end the closed shop. At one meeting, Tillett moved a motion saying that the employers’ attacks ‘teach the working classes the imperative necessity of forming themselves into a Labour Party for the purpose of securing direct labour representation upon all public bodies’. A week later, he gave a speech warning that if the bosses tried to jail all who opposed them, they would not be able to afford the prison cells. On 23 December 1892, known as Black Friday, police in Bristol charged a march of twenty thousand workers, injuring 57. Tillett was prosecuted for incitement, but a jury acquitted him. Ten months later, Conservative and Liberal politicians decided to fund a monument they hoped would project an image of Bristol as a port city made rich by international trade, whose citizens had been generous with their wealth. They decided to erect a statue of the 17th-century merchant, slave-trader and Tory MP Edward Colston. He had amassed a vast fortune and endowed charities, schools, hospitals and churches in Bristol. Several streets in the city and a prominent venue were also named after him.

During protests in June 2020 in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, the statue of Colston was toppled and thrown into the harbour. I talked to one of the people who took part. ‘Any discussion about slavery, anything at all, you couldn’t get past the statue in our city,’ Tim Nelson said. ‘We had a Black mayor at that point, and even with him there they couldn’t take it down.’ Two-thirds of local residents were glad the statue had gone, according to a poll in 2021. Labour was not in government at the time of the protests, or when four protesters were prosecuted for criminal damage when pulling the statue down. They were acquitted by a Bristol jury. But Starmer was asked about their actions. Just after Colston was toppled, he told an LBC interviewer that critics of the statue should have left the authorities to deal with it. ‘Nobody should condone lawlessness,’ he said. The protesters’ actions were ‘completely wrong’.

Nelson introduced me to Rhian Graham, one of the four who stood trial. She used to work as a stage manager, which was the reason she had the ropes that were used to pull the statue down. ‘Lockdown turned everything on its head,’ she said. ‘I was living on a campsite at St Werburgh’s. We started talking about Bristol history. Our friend had been present for a lot of activism in the past. He’d mentioned there was a debate about the history of Colston. We cycled round town, looked at churches, roads which bear his name. As it happened, the first street I’d lived on in Bristol was Colston Road in Easton. When you looked up who he was, all you read was that he was a philanthropist.’ On the day of the protest, she felt elation. ‘I will always remember the feeling of the rope in my hands … you could feel the statue rock forward and back, and I just knew the next time I pulled, the statue was coming down. It came down with this almighty crash … I’m there thinking, “Oh my god, we actually did it.”’

The statue is now on display in the M Shed museum, an old granary on Bristol’s dockside. It lies on its back, Colston’s face illuminated by the red paint thrown on it during the protest. Instead of taking that moment to unify the city, the mayor wrote: ‘What we saw was an exercise in middle-class white privilege.’ Graham thinks this was petty: ‘He was pissed off because he did nothing about the statue and we did.’

In March 2021, there were protests across the country against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would give the police new powers to impose conditions on non-violent demonstrations (and included legislation to protect monuments like the Colston statue). The Bristol protest began with a vigil for Sarah Everard, raped and murdered by Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens. Many people went from the vigil to the Kill the Bill march, where they were attacked by riot police, with 62 demonstrators injured. The Crown Prosecution Service recommended prosecutions and 42 demonstrators were convicted. The decision to prosecute was an unpopular one, but Rees backed it, calling the protesters ‘selfish’ and accusing them of ‘living out their revolutionary fantasies’. There were other local grievances against Labour, not least the suspension of the chair of the Bristol West constituency party after it called for a vote on Corbyn’s future within Labour.

After the local elections in 2021, the party had to share power with the Greens. Renhard told me that ‘the 2021 election was the crucial one.’ But Labour had anticipated some of the problems. He said that ‘in Bristol we have to look two ways. In the inner area, there are progressive voters. Outer areas are the more right-wing part.’ Some of the outer districts are marked by economic hardship and there is a higher proportion of council estates. Labour had to consider ‘how we talk about who the housing was for’ and that meant discussions about new immigrants, and residents’ perception of ‘people just off the boats’. When he mentioned the threat from the right, Renhard’s voice rose. He felt Labour had tried to educate voters about the need for social housing. It had also introduced new lettings policies, he explained, with a certain amount of new social housing ring-fenced for local people – around 50 per cent, with the exact amount varying from ward to ward.

In 1888, the year before the dock strike, Tillett told a House of Lords committee that his members’ poverty was caused mainly by immigration. Weeks after the strike ended, he returned to the theme. ‘Foreigners come to London in large numbers’ and ‘herd together in habitations unfit for beasts’. Migrants worked for starvation wages, he claimed, destroying such trades as tailoring and shoemaking, and swelling the ‘number of starved faces who plead for work at our dock gates’. He described Jewish immigrants to East London as the ‘dregs and scum of the continent’. In 1955, bus workers in the TGWU, essentially Tillett’s old union, voted for Black workers to be banned. Eight years later, a boycott modelled on the US civil rights movement compelled the Bristol Omnibus Company to accept Black conductors.

Nelson told me, however, that ‘there’s been no organised right of any size in Bristol.’ When the English Defence League held a march through the city in July 2012, only three hundred people took part, one of the smallest of the group’s protests. Reform has no councillors in the city (there were no local elections there this year). In August and November 2025, a group calling themselves Bristol Patriots demonstrated outside the Mercure Hotel Brigstow, which was housing asylum seekers, but they were outnumbered at least four to one by supporters of the refugees. Nationalists put up the St George cross and painted flags on two roundabouts. In January around forty of their supporters marched through the city. Their message was ‘Get Labour Out’. A number of Green councillors participated in a counter-protest. Its poster, with text projected in red on the Labour leader’s face, was: ‘We hate Starmer more than you.’

Renhard tried again to explain why building new houses hadn’t made more people vote Labour. ‘It’s almost like delivery on its own isn’t enough,’ he said. Perhaps the problem is a different one: what voters wanted was cheaper homes. As a boy, Tillett worked from Tuesday to Saturday, from 5 a.m. until dusk, earning a shilling and sixpence per week, enough to pay for two pounds of mutton. In part because of his generation’s success in organising the unskilled, the price of labour is higher now: a worker employed full-time on the under-18 minimum wage of £8 per hour has a purchasing power around thirty times higher than Tillett did as a boy. But since 2008 costs, including housing costs, have been growing faster than wages.

Tillett lived with his father, Benjamin (his mother, Elizabeth, died when he was three), and his seven siblings. His family also rented out a room. A house on the street where Tillett was born now sells for between £300,000 and £500,000. In 2021, 55 per cent of households in Easton owned the accommodation they occupied (compared to 62.5 per cent nationally). Until recently, the single main factor in deciding how well a person lived was how much they earned. The average worker earns around £600,000 over a lifetime. The benefit to such a worker of trade union membership was 5.3 per cent in 2025, around £32,000 in increased earnings. The average graduate earns 24 per cent more than a non-graduate, about £144,000. These are large sums, but a person who inherits an average UK home (worth £272,800 in 2026) acquires a more valuable asset. The sooner someone becomes a property owner, the more money they can keep for themselves and the more they can pay into a pension. In her book Inheritocracy, Eliza Filby writes that parents in the UK lend or give their offspring £14 billion a year; two-thirds of UK first-time home purchases are made possible by contributions from the older generation.

Average house prices in Bristol have doubled since 2012, and rents have risen at a similar rate. Labour promised that 35 per cent of new developments would be affordable, with most of the homes let at social rents. In practice, ‘affordable’ is a weasel word. The only form of tenure that guarantees social rents is council housing. Eight years of large-scale housebuilding has left the council with the same number of homes it had in 2017: 27,000. Renters do not feel any reason to be grateful to Bristol Labour because they are having to spend a larger proportion of their wages on accommodation. It could be argued that the Labour council’s actions protected voters from an even worse situation: without all that construction the cost of housing might be higher still. But such counterfactuals aren’t likely to win over many voters.

Hollinshead, who co-founded the Apartheid-Free Zone campaign, joined the community union Acorn in 2014. The group leafleted in Easton, hoping to persuade landlords to sign up to an ethical housing charter. They chose the ward because it had one of the highest rates of private rentals in the city. ‘The conditions were shocking – damp, vermin. There had been waves of gentrification but the quality of housing was still really bad.’ One of the first cases Acorn took up was that of Nimo Abdullahi, who had been told her family would be thrown out after she complained to her landlord about damp. Thirty neighbours, organised by Acorn, formed a human chain around her home, and press reports showed Abdullahi standing beside a huge patch of black mould. In 2016, Acorn organised protests against the sale of local council housing, after which the council agreed to stop auctioning it off; any money it gained from the Right to Buy and similar laws would be used for social housing in the area. In 2019, Renhard, then an Acorn activist, was asked to join Bristol Homes Board, and the council adopted the campaign’s housing charter.

Renhard became a councillor in 2021. Just three weeks later, he became the cabinet member responsible for housing. Local activists claimed to have an explanation for this: they said that Rees had agreed to set up a living rent commission, under pressure from Acorn, which was demanding rent controls. He gave Renhard the job to justify Acorn’s exclusion from the commission: Renhard could tell the press there was no need to consult Acorn because he represented its views. When Acorn members showed up at the living rent meeting, Labour called security to throw them out. Acorn then expelled Renhard. I asked him what had happened. He said the situation was ‘tricky’, but insisted that he had been able to influence policies, including Bristol’s ban on landlords encouraging bidding wars between tenants.

When I spoke to people in Bristol I raised the subject of the new Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force in May, removing the power of private landlords to evict without cause. No one gave Labour much credit for it. Of my interviewees, the kindest about the legislation was the councillor who left Labour for the Greens. ‘They’re stopping the greed of the landlords,’ Al-Maghrabi told me. ‘They have helped, but they haven’t helped enough.’ Even the Conservatives had promised in their last two general election manifestos to abolish section 21 notices – which allowed no-fault evictions – although the legislation had never gone through.

At the Green party conference last year, a motion called ‘Abolish Landlords’ was passed. Its first point was a commitment to introduce rent controls. Denyer insisted that the proposals were modest. ‘The title gets mixed reviews,’ she said. ‘It grabs attention, but a more accurate name would be “Shrink the Private Housing Sector.”’ It’s not clear exactly what the party means by rent control. Some forms, such as a rule preventing landlords from increasing rent by more than 5 per cent above inflation, wouldn’t have much effect on the housing market. But legislation modelled on the Rent Act 1977, which required rents to be ‘fair’, would bring house prices down. Around seventy thousand long-term tenants in Britain are still covered by this act.

Shona Jemphrey, who stood as a Labour candidate in 2021 before defecting to the Greens the next year, showed me the bust of Tony Benn opposite the council chamber in City Hall. She joined the Greens, she said, because Starmer discouraged his MPs from supporting picket lines. ‘I was going to rallies for the junior doctors and seeing Carla Denyer speak. I felt disappointment with Labour under Starmer. I believed the Greens stood for progressive values.’ Jemphrey wouldn’t be drawn on what form of rent controls her party backed, but told me her own preference was for maximum rents, tied to the minimum wage in some formula based on the number of rooms in a home.

Another Easton resident I spoke to, Toni Mayo, said she wouldn’t join the Greens, citing their ‘lack of links to the labour movement’. Jemphrey batted that criticism away, pointing to her own membership of Unison. ‘Swathes of the left have a historic, romanticised notion of what the links actually are between the unions and the Labour Party.’ Renhard doesn’t think the new Green Party will cohere for any length of time. ‘The Greens include old-school ecologists. You’ve got councillors who were Liberal Democrats. You’ve got a wave of Labour people who left after Corbyn, as well as social conservatives. People have campaigned on local issues, and if they don’t deliver, we’ll see how that goes. The Greens operate a lot like Liberal Democrats – pavement politics. Now they’re in office, we’ve seen library closures, lollipop people losing their jobs, bin collections being stretched to every four weeks, all things we’d have been criticised for if we introduced them.’

Jemphrey disagreed. ‘There’s a task and finish group looking at libraries. The Labour Party person sitting on this group didn’t attend, then put out a petition saying the Greens want to close half of the city’s libraries.’ The only position taken, she insisted, was to protect librarians’ jobs over the next financial year. As for bin collections: ‘We know from looking at other local authorities that if you reduce the frequency of black bin collections people make better use of recycling.’

‘If the Labour Party could select a king,’ Tillett said in 1918, ‘he would be a Feminist, a Temperance crank, a Nonconformist charlatan … an anti-sport, anti-jollity advocate.’ I asked Jemphrey if the Greens were the inheritors of that tradition. She said the people who had joined over the last year weren’t like that. ‘A lot of chat in our WhatsApp groups – it doesn’t matter if you fly a bit, if you still eat meat. The billionaires are the problem.’

Andy Burnham gives Labour a new chance. In a speech at the end of June, he promised to devolve key Whitehall budgets, including the Social and Affordable Homes Programme, a ten-year, £40 billion capital grant scheme. A Cabinet Office statement said that the new powers should go to mayors, not councillors. Mayors, it claimed, ‘provide a single point of accountability’, are more responsive to what local people need, and show stronger scrutiny and ‘transparency of decision-making’. Working out what that means for Bristol will be an administrative headache, as the office of city mayor has been abolished.

When Tillett complained about ‘Temperance cranks’, he was referring in part to Labour’s support for pub licensing, which he described as a class measure, the work of ‘Temperance-Labour men’, who ‘libel the workers as to thriftlessness and drink’. One of the first pieces of social media put out by Burnham’s team after he became prime minister showed him and the new chancellor, John Healey, chatting in a pub, ranking their favourite snacks – pork scratchings or scampi fries. Burnham knows that Labour needs to be seen as the friend of the boozer.

But many of the crucial issues are unresolved: Labour has now apologised for its support for Israel’s intervention in Gaza, but Palestine Action is still proscribed. Burnham seems likely to resume oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, despite a summer that recorded three of the ten warmest days in British history. Labour’s polling has crept up, but so far not enough has happened to make voters in Bristol regret switching to the Greens.

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