Your say / Politics
‘Here’s to history in the making’
“This’ll be our last Dance Riot class for a while,” Cleo Lake told her dancers as we stretched down.
We were devastated. How could we survive without our Thursday evening tonic of Reggae and Afrofusion grooves, and Cleo’s quad-destroying choreography? Our knees might be better off, but our spirits? It was inconceivable.
“Just a bit busy,” she said enigmatically.
is needed now More than ever
Well the secret’s out now, Cleo, and your rag-tag team of dance rioters couldn’t be more proud. Bristol’s new Lord Mayor is getting sworn into her post on May 22 at City Hall.
As Lord Mayor, Cleo will be the official First Citizen of Bristol, with residence at Mansion House. She’ll open full council meetings in glamorous attire; and attend hundreds of civic events in the year.
The Lord Mayor is a ceremonial position rather than a political one; but it does give the post-holder scope to pursue some of her own cross-party projects. The outgoing Conservative Lord Mayor, Lesley Alexander, focused on the important job of tackling isolation amongst the elderly.
Green councillor Cleo Lake’s priority will be on social justice and on taking steps towards building an inclusive, fair and sustainable city, with a focus on South Bristol’s most deprived neighbourhoods.
Lake’s inauguration marks a promising moment of forward energy for a city that has struggled with entrenched inequalities. In 2011, Bristol ranked as the 7th most unequal out of 348 districts in England and Wales, according to Indexes of Multiple Inequality.
Cleo Lake (pictured here with her son Fitzroi) has only been a councillor since May 2016
Moreover, in 2017 a Runnymede report entitled ‘Bristol: A City Divided?’ showed that across England and Wales, Bristol has the 3rd worst level of educational inequality for people racialised as black.
The Runnymede report suggested that underpinning educational inequality in Bristol were social class, teachers’ expectations, poverty and deprivation, an unrepresentative curriculum, poor engagement with parents, and lack of diversity in teaching staff and school leadership.
Bristol’s profound inequalities can’t be allowed to continue, Lake tells me, arguing that a top priority for the city’s leadership in relation to social cohesion and justice must be the state of Bristol’s most deprived schools.
Lake has been an important voice calling for justice for the Windrush generation in recent weeks, following Home Office deportation of British citizens, who arrived decades ago from the Caribbean and Commonwealth countries.
She has also featured often in national and local press over the past two years, calling for changes to the city’s public memory of slavery, including challenging Colston’s role in the civic landscape, and, most recently, calling for Bristol to build a major memorial and museum to the history of slavery, resistance and abolition.
Lake is a widely recognised cultural leader in Bristol, standing amongst the many other great female artists contributing to Bristol’s cultural scene, and she also joins a tradition of formidable African-heritage women playing important civic roles in our city.
Of mixed Jamaican and Scottish heritage, her vision is one in which people of all backgrounds in Bristol to come together to celebrate diversity and heritage, to share resources, to acknowledge and learn from history, and to play a part in building a society that is good for people and planet.
Looking towards the role of the arts in promoting understanding across social groups, Cleo notes that we are well into the UN International Decade for People of African Descent, and that the time is ripe for Bristol to make a significant contribution to this global initiative.
She describes her vision for a Diaspora Festival of Arts and Understanding in Bristol next November, with programming designed for ‘everyone to take part in, enjoy and learn from’.
Sounds like bliss to me, Cleo. I miss those classes. I want to see Bristol out dancing in the streets, with the Lord Mayor leading us through the moves. Here’s to history in the making.
Joanna Burch-Brown is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bristol and is currently working on issues of contested heritage and public memory of slavery and colonialism. In June, she will be running a University of Bristol Fulbright Summer Institute on arts, activism and social justice’.
Read more: ‘Cohesion and social justice are at the heart of all I do’
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
