Meet the Bristol mayor candidate: Caroline Gooch

Early this year, Dr Caroline Gooch was preparing to take a behind-the-scenes role in the upcoming mayoral elections.

A few months down the line and she has been thrust into the limelight as the Lib Dem candidate for the city’s top job – the only woman in the running.

“I just got it in under the wire,” says the medical science consultant with a smile, speaking about her entry into the mayoral race.

“Luckily, I have a good campaign manager who said I can do this. I, like a lot of women particularly, underestimate what I can do.”

Gooch was due to be the agent for Mary Page, who was running for mayor before standing down in November.

After eventually agreeing to stand on a platform of scrapping the mayoral system entirely, she has thrown herself into campaigning alongside working her day job.

Caroline Gooch is standing on a platform of scrapping the mayoral role – photo credit Bristol Lib Dems

It’s on a day off that she is talking to Bristol24/7 in the garden of her Westbury Park home, which she shares with three cats and some 250 bees.

She talks passionately about the need to urgently address the city’s special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) crisis between bouts of loud drilling taking place in an upstairs flat.

Later, settling two steaming mugs of tea on the table, she checks on the bee house mounted on the wall behind her before settling down at a seat in the corner of the garden. “I’m really worried they’ll die from the Glyphosate they spray locally,” she confides about the bees.

Although this is the first time she has stood as a candidate, Gooch is no stranger to politics and use to go out canvassing with her mother – a member of the Social Democratic Party – while growing up in Sheffield.

“It involved a lot of tea. They wouldn’t vote for you, but they would invite you in for tea,” quips Gooch, cradling her own mug of tea, wearing a thick winter coat to keep out the April chill.

Her mum was a lab technician and her dad was a Sellotape salesman. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, I was on free school meals,” says Gooch, who lived with her mum after her parent’s divorce when she was seven.

“But I got a place at a private girls school, which meant I got a boost in the system.”

She admits it was a strange paradox for someone from a working class area to be surrounded by the wealth and privilege of a public school education. It is also perhaps one that sits uneasily with her politics, which are firmly rooted in the principles of a free and fair education for all.

Studying human sciences at University College London, Gooch says she always felt she had a foot in both camps because of this early experience.

“I left the party over student loans thing because I know that if you tell someone from a working class background they are going to get into debt, they would have a huge aversion to it,” says the mayoral hopeful, adding: “It would be a lot better if we just had a free education system – I would increase taxes overall to do it.”

It was after the Brexit vote in 2016 that Gooch re-joined the Lib Dems because “I just felt like I wanted to do something about this”. She started straight away leafletting for Stephen Williams, the current Lib Dem WECA mayoral candidate who also stood in 2017.

Caroline Gooch left the Lib Dems over student loans but rejoined  after Brexit – photo courtesy of Bristol Lib Dems

Gooch has spoken strongly of her opposition to the mayoral system, arguing it is a democratic failure and saying: “The people of Bristol should be empowered to make decisions for the city.”

But she is far from a one policy candidate, arguing the case for liveable neighbourhoods, housing and better SEND provision. “Every child should get the chance to have a good education,” says Gooch, adding that if it was up to her, she’d scrap GCSEs entirely.

“Active travel is a huge thing,” continues Gooch. “There’s just not enough space for us all to have cars, or even to all have electric cars. To get to 2020 targets, we need to have 50 per cent of short car journeys cut and the whole idea of liveable neighbourhoods is all local shops should be in a ten-minute walk.

“Neighbourhoods have lost their local shops and it’s partly because of supermarkets.”

She argues Covid has made more people realise the value of shopping locally and thus presented an opportunity for change.

It’s not until late in the interview that the medical science consultant drops in her multiple medals for rowing. As a cox, she won a silver medal at the national championships among many other titles and jokes that if she can keep a boatful of rowers in line, she can run a city.

A love of Bristol’s harbourside, Gooch is passionate about opening up the world of rowing to people from different backgrounds.

“It’s all about taking the sport away from this elitist view,” she says. “We have got something other cities don’t have and that’s the water. If we are going to be doing any developments on the harbourside, let’s get a junior rowing programme down there.”

Main photo by Aphra Evans

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