Greater Manchester goes to the polls in its first ever mayoral election in less than a fortnight’s time - but who exactly are the candidates standing on behalf of the main parties?

We spoke to the Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour, Ukip and Green battling for glory on May 4 to find out about more about the people vying for the top job - and what drove them into politics in the first place.

Sean Anstee (Conservative): The council house Tory who left school at 16 and went to work in his local bank

(Image: Joel Goodman)

As mayoral elections rage across the country, it has been Andy Street, the slick former John Lewis boss running in the West Midlands, who has so far attracted most attention for the Conservatives.

But Greater Manchester’s Tory candidate arguably has the more interesting story.

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Sean Anstee certainly ticks off a couple of Conservative caricatures: a former investment banker, a precocious high flier.

However his route was not via Eton or the City of London, but from a council house in Partington via the counter of his local bank.

Brought up by his mum Janet in a household fairly short on silver spoons, Anstee left Broadoak Comprehensive straight after his GCSEs.

At 16 – after deciding not to join the RAF – he was learning the ropes at the Timperley branch of Barclays.

Within six years he had gone from a £400-a-month apprenticeship to helping manage billions of pounds in investments at the Bank of New York Mellon.

In the interim he had done no formal qualifications other than an NVQ, although the bank then paid for him to do a degree at the same time.

By the age of 26, Anstee was running Trafford council as well.

He says that story tends to confound expectations.

“Often when I say to people that’s where I grew up, their instinctive reaction is ‘oh you’ve done well then, haven’t you’,” Anstee says.

“And that says a lot about what people think about different bits of Greater Manchester and the fact where you’re from defines where you’re going, which I don’t think is the case.

“I think it’s perfectly plausible to say ‘why would people expect someone of my background just to do the natural thing to do what you expect’.

“To give them something different, to challenge their perceptions, is quite an exciting thing to do.”

His upbringing did define one thing – his politics. Just not in the way some might expect.

Anstee joined the Conservative party at 15, in a Labour area when Labour were nationally on the upswing. It was Tory values of ‘determination, hard work, of making sure what you do is valued’ that attracted him, he says.

“My view of the Labour party – and it was a very Labour dominated area – was their solution to everything was to throw money at it.

“So they built a new health centre and expected everybody to be healthier as a result. But you wouldn’t be, actually, unless you do something quite profound about the life chances of the people there.

“I saw this dependency that was created from a welfare system that traps people into a cycle of being unable to do what independently they would want to do.

“And yet family life was one of the best upbringings I could ever have had – this idea that no matter how things are, you make good with what you have, try and make yourself better, work really hard.”

(Image: Sean Hansford)

Nevertheless a Conservative candidate running in such a predominantly Labour area is going to face an uphill battle. Can he really emerge victorious from the long shadows of the Thatcher years and austerity measures?

“It is true to say there is still much to be done,” Anstee admits.

“Many of the values I hold are values I think speak to many in Greater Manchester, but often when associated with Conservatism may cast a doubt.”

It is perhaps a tacit recognition that there remains a battle to detoxify the Tories here.

However this election, he believes, is an opportunity to do that.

In spite of wanting to see a Tory renaissance in Greater Manchester, Anstee is not shy of praising Labour where he feels praise is due.

Asked who his political hero is, he is stumped, before picking not a Tory MP – not Graham Brady or Northern Powerhouse architect George Osborne – but a Labour figure: Manchester council leader Sir Richard Leese.

“I don’t mind saying this,” he says.

“A local politician who I think has an insane ability to take an argument, and de-construct it and reconstruct it, is Richard.

“I don’t really care who I work with so long as we do the right thing and I think where party politics comes into this is – well, I don’t have a choice.

“The city-region is historically a Labour part of the world. I want to use the mayoral election for people to rediscover what they think Conservativism could mean for them, but that’s not going to happen overnight and so we have to make sure that I have the ability to relate to as many people as possible.

“You can’t always do the right thing on your own.”

Anstee is happily married to husband Thomas, a teacher, with whom he tied the knot in 2010. He came out at the age of around 16 and says if people are bothered about it, they’ve never made it apparent to him.

Ask him whether it has ever caused any problems and he pauses, before looking amazed at his own answer, as though he’s genuinely never considered it before.

“No! It’s one of the things where you might think that it would, but it’s just been... I just try and get people to like who I am.

“People may have their view, but it’s never really been expressed. So I’m not a gay politician. I’m just a politician who happens to be gay.”

Whether Anstee can build the Conservative party’s credibility in the region – which is perhaps not quite as staunchly Labour as the electoral map suggests – at this election remains to be seen.

But he is determined to enjoy the ride and, along the way, disrupt a few preconceptions.

“I think people might have this stereotype of a silver-tongued Tory boy. I quite like not to be the stereotype, to challenge the stereotype,” Anstee says.

“Why would you want to conform to the norm? We don’t. We don’t do that here.”

Jane Brophy (Liberal Democrats): Jazz clarinet, breastfeeding in the council chamber, and a family history of Liberal politics

The roots of Jane Brophy’s Liberal Democrat mayoral candidacy go back decades.

Born and brought up in south Manchester – first in Baguley and later Chorlton – Liberal politics were the backdrop to her childhood.

“My parents stood for election as Liberals, so I grew up with my living room full of election leaflets,” she says.

“I do have a childhood memory where my parents just decided they were too busy to do the Liberals any more and I remember as a very young child, probably around 10, feeling very disappointed.

“So I guess then I’ve succeeded where they didn’t. Some of my treasured documents are of my parents standing as Liberal councillors, but I managed to get myself elected and have been for 17 years.”

Now a Trafford councillor, Brophy didn’t actually sign up as an activist until she was studying for her post-graduate degree in nutrition and dietetics at Leeds university in the 1980s, during the era of the SDP – one she says was an ‘exciting’ time for Liberal politics.

After winning a speaking prize at a political conference Brophy realised it was something she might be quite good at.

She was ‘hooked’ from then on, focusing particularly on green issues.

While today more and more people may be environmentally conscious - taking steps like Brophy herself, who drives an electric car and whose household was the first in Greater Manchester to install a wind turbine - talking to people about climate change back then was a tough sell, she admits.

But she remained devoted, campaigning on issues of the day from acid rain to CFC gases in fridges.

“I think because I was from a science background I understood the issue of climate chance and air pollution quite early on,” she says.

“I felt I had a mission to explain to people that these were really serious issues and spent a lot of my youth talking about that.

“My main focus has always been health and the environment. I feel politicians have got something they can actually do about that.”

Brophy’s early introduction to politics would later stand her in good stead.

In her late 20s she decided to run for the council in Timperley, Trafford, a ward she has now represented for the best part of two decades – coincidentally just down the road from the estate on which Tory rival Sean Anstee grew up.

Like Anstee, she has successfully managed to buck expectations, just in different ways.

In recent years she has clung onto her seat throughout the political winds that have buffeted the Lib Dems, ones that have swept away so many of her colleagues elsewhere.

Brophy admits that going out on the doorstep during the coalition years was a challenge, in which people told her exactly what they thought.

“Oh they did,” she says.

“But every time I’ve stood for election I’ve always won my seat, so I’m quite used to people telling me what they think on the doorstep.

“There were a lot of angry people and it gave me the opportunity to understand where they were coming from. I didn’t mind going out and having those challenging conversations.”

Equally, trying to juggle motherhood with politics was even more of a challenge in the 1980s and 1990s than it is today, including dealing with the expectations of others.

“I think there are still struggles, but I think the last couple of decades we’ve seen big changes to people’s attitudes to women in politics,” she says.

“People would say to me before I even had any children – which used to annoy me – ‘don’t you think you should have some children first before you get involved in politics?’

“I actually remained a councillor during two pregnancies and breastfed my baby in Trafford council’s chamber. The baby’s now 21 or 22 and the most political, so I think that must have rubbed off at some level.”

Even her musical past-times have an indirect link to the world of politics. Brophy’s love of jazz clarinet – which she plays at a group in the Cinnamon Club in Altrincham – has parallels, she admits.

“What I like about that is you have to improvise and perform live. I guess it’s a bit like public speaking – even though I’m out of my comfort zone I have to find the notes and play live.

“You do it in front of an audience and they make you do it. It’s probably worse than public speaking because you don’t actually know what notes are going to come out and sometimes it sounds good.”

In the background, personal family struggles have coloured her view of what politics could and should be doing, particularly around health, which is also her professional background.

One of her sons has both special educational needs and significant medical problems, resulting in prolonged spells in hospital.

Watch: Tim Farron rules out ANY coalition deal with Labour or Tories

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“He’s been in hospital recently for four months with mental health issues and also has high functioning autism and has had it all the way through school life. We had all the struggles with sorting out his SEN and getting the right education.

“I’ve seen from the frontline what it is like having somebody hospitalised who needs to come home with a significant amount of care and how important that is.

“I think it’s very hard to get good social care in the current climate - very, very hard. The care system is broken in many places.

“It’s up to us politicians to try and find a way through to fix that for people, because it’s people’s lives. And it’s one reason I’m motivated to be Greater Manchester mayor.”

The knowledge that she really is in a position to do something about it is what gets her out of bed in the morning, she adds.

Trying to cope with family hardship makes her more not less likely to be a political leader, in her view. But she admits it has been a struggle.

“Yes. Yeah it has. Some people make the choice that there are some things they can’t do because of that, but I think the opposite.

“I think the fact I do what I do means hopefully I’ll be a role model for people in similar situations who struggle with life.

“Having someone as mayor who has overcome personal struggles is a good thing.”

Andy Burnham (Labour): Hillsborough and Neil Kinnock's crushing defeat forged his identity - and he's 'a bit more Manchester than people might think'

Andy Burnham was living in a flatshare in south London, surrounded by Tories, when he decided on a career in politics.

At the time a 20-something working for a trades magazine in his first job after Cambridge university, he was writing articles ‘about cranes and container ships and rail engines’, a role he admits lacked the pizazz of Fleet Street.

He was already ‘highly politicised’, having campaigned for Labour throughout the 1992 general election, one he had ‘100 per cent’ expected the party to win. John Major’s victory came as a shock.

“It was truly like a bereavement,” he remembers.

“Where I was living and where I was working were all Tories and they were all skipping around the office the next day. It was one of the worst times of my life.”

A chance connection with the Labour MP Tessa Jowell would mark the beginnings of a political career. Within a couple of years of Neil Kinnock’s grinding defeat, Burnham had quit journalism and was working in Labour’s Millbank headquarters, just as Tony Blair was rising unstoppably to power.

It must have been a pretty energising time.

“It was, but if I’m absolutely honest I suppose I had my first glimpse of disillusionment. Millbank... was not a friendly place.

“It didn’t seem to be embodying my brand of Labour politics. I thought it was going to be like this big, happy family and so empowering, but it just wasn’t like that.

“Arrogant people. Everyone was sniffing the power. I found that quite hard. I thought it was going to be quite wonderful and all these decent, lovely people doing it for the right reasons.”

Two decades later, he is standing for the Labour party in the Greater Manchester mayoral election, having served as culture secretary, health secretary, shadow health secretary and shadow home secretary - as well as having twice run for party leader.

Why didn’t he quit back in 1994 when the disillusionment began?

“Well... I’m making it sound worse than it was. It wasn’t that bad. And you went out, and it was different.

“But I thought it would be euphoric and it wasn’t. You were just sat at your desk and they all went in and out and didn’t talk to you. So I’d begun to think this wasn’t quite what I thought it was.

“No, still, it was exciting.”

Those early years working on the frontbench would eventually lead to him running for parliament in 2001, in his back yard of Leigh.

Born and brought up just outside the town in Culcheth, between Manchester and Liverpool, Burnham says he has closer ties to Manchester than is commonly believed.

“I might be a bit more Manchester than people might think. I was born in Aintree, a year in Formby, but then my dad got a job in Manchester.

“He was at the post office at the time, he was a telephone engineer, so my mum and dad met at Maghull telephone exchange. She was an operator and he was an engineer and they thought they couldn’t go all the way to Manchester, so they thought they’d go halfway.

“I ended up growing up in the Leigh area, between Leigh and Warrington.

“And yeah, we kind of carried on leaning westwards for football affiliations but eastwards for music.

“My brother and I spent most of our time flitting between the two.”

Despite being a lifelong Everton fan, Burnham says he was more into his cricket than his football while at school, playing for Lancashire schoolboys a few times and going to watch anything – ‘and I mean anything’ – at the club’s Old Trafford ground.

His upbringing, one of three brothers, was in a ‘normal, skilled working class household’, both parents working hard to make sure they didn’t go without.

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Neither had gone to university and when a teacher suggested he apply to Cambridge, opportunity knocked.

“The tutor says ‘Mr Burnham, would you like some sherry?’” he recalls of the interview.

“I was like ‘what?’ His first question was ‘tell me, to what extent to do you think Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is like a modern package holiday?’ I just looked at him.

“I was still pondering what the question meant when the rejection letter fell through the door.”

He did get in through on clearing, but says it took him ‘a good 18 months’ to feel relaxed.

“For a while I was absolutely waiting for the tap on the shoulder and to be told they’d made a mistake and I shouldn’t really be there.”

It was during a break from his first year at Cambridge that the Hillsborough tragedy would unfold. In the era before mobile phones, the next night he waited in the Cherry Tree pub in Culcheth as schoolfriends came back ‘in dribs and drabs’.

The disaster was a defining moment of his youth. When he was interviewed about it for Granada TV as culture secretary years later it prompted him to break down in tears.

“To their credit they didn’t use it,” he says, before trailing off. “The tension of it was like... anyway.”

Hillsborough – and the Moss Side and Toxteth riots, the miner’s strikes, the 1992 election – would all help pave Burnham’s path to Westminster. But now he is turning his back on London.

Critics – and that includes some within his own party – grumble that it’s a bit rich to appear back on the scene now, just as devolution kicks into gear.

“I think those who say that they’re making a political attack rather than actually being fair to what is my journey in politics,” he says.

“My commitment has always been to here, not elsewhere. I’ve always lived here, my family, everything is here.

“I feel I’ve been on this journey for 16 years and it’s very natural from my point of view because I don’t think Labour is going to re-invent itself by doing the same old Westminster thing. It just isn’t.”

The national party, he admits, has had a tough time ‘since 2010’. At the time of our interview Labour are 18 points behind in the polls and the general election has not yet been called.

He stops short – just about – of calling for Jeremy Corbyn to go, but adds: “The polls can’t stay where they are. If it was me in the lead position I would have said ‘hands up’.

(Image: Dominic Salter)

“I don’t think any leader can get closer to a general election without the polls making you competitive.”

Burnham now wants to make sure Labour in Greater Manchester ‘is its own voice’ rather than a ‘wholly-owned subsidiary’. Scottish Labour never embraced devolution to the extent it should have done, he says, describing greater powers to the north as a ‘life raft’.

For his part, he says he is completely certain of his decision to step away from Westminster, announcing a week after our interview that he will not be running again in Leigh.

“I’m pretty settled about where I’m going,” he adds. “Is it a convenient steeping zone? Absolutely not. I’m very invigorated by this whole thing now.

“I feel 100pc I’m doing the right thing.”

Will Patterson (Green): Trying to get by has been 'pretty turbulent' - but that's true for thousands of people in Greater Manchester

Like many of those standing in Greater Manchester’s first ever mayoral elections, Will Patterson’s politics were forged in the stormy era of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Brought up in Coppull, just over the border of Greater Manchester between Chorley and Wigan, life was not always easy.

There were times when trying to get by was ‘pretty turbulent’, he says, his dad – trained as a joiner – going through long periods of unemployment, his mum walking four miles to walk in a call centre.

But it would be his dad’s depression that would have the biggest impact. In the late 1990s he collapsed while at work, by this time for the brewers Scottish & Newcastle, and ongoing mental health problems would mean he struggled to find work through the mainstream jobs market ever again, eventually taking placements through the disability organisation Remploy – before being made redundant from that.

All that ‘unquestionably’ had a major impact on Patterson’s outlook, he admits.

“When he collapsed at work it was the week before I did my A Levels so it really influenced my growing up and politics,” he says.

“Seeing mental health up close and direct experience of caring for someone with a mental health problem, it’s really close to my heart,” he adds, before describing a woman his dad worked with at Remploy before the wave of redundancies hit it in 2011.

“She came up to him and said ‘do you like my new hair’? And she hadn’t had it cut or anything, she’d just washed it. That was a big deal for her.

“So how on earth would she cope without having support around her? Seeing all that happening had a big impression on my life.”

But he didn’t initially join the Green party. His dad was a shop steward and Labour was just what people did, he says.

“I did start off in Labour. I joined at 18, as you do. It’s almost the expected thing.

“On the other hand it was the height of New Labour and by the time tuition fees came up, I’d had enough and realised I’d signed up to a party I didn’t agree with on pretty much anything any more.

“It’s changed agendas since then but I was looking for a new political home.”

The Green Party was the ‘obvious’ place for him, he says, adding that he wasn’t tempted back to Labour by Jeremy Corbyn.

“Despite liking the idea of what Corbyn was standing for – more so than a lot of Labour MPs – I still thought this is still the same Labour Party. And the Labour Party and disappointment go pretty much hand in hand.”

It would be in 2014 that Patterson got really politically active, he says, after getting ‘tired of shouting at the telly’.

Seeing how the Scottish referendum had ‘electrified’ voters made him think the same could happen in Greater Manchester, where at around the same time the devolution deal was being signed with government.

Nevertheless he initially campaigned for a referendum on having a mayor, a stance that perhaps seems to contradict his decision to eventually run.

“I wanted a referendum because if people did think it was a good idea, we needed to have a sense of popular ownership to stop government tinkering with it.

“They scrapped the Greater Manchester Council in the 1980s when central politicians found it inconvenient and doing something in a similarly closed-door fashion risks the same thing happening again.”

There was no referendum, however, and ‘we have got what we have got’, he adds.

He would have preferred to see devolution mapped out on a north west level rather than a Greater Manchester one, but points out that where in the conurbation you live may dictate your perspective.

Patterson says he identifies with the sense many people have of being on the fringes of the devolution debate, and of politics in general, be it geographically or psychologically.

“For me, where I first grew up was on a council estate very close to the border. Whichever way you look at it we were on the fringe, of the borough and the county,” he says.

“It’s stuck with me this idea that if things are too centralised, that there are a lot of people who lose out very badly.

“In Wigan, right on edge of the authority, surrounded on three sides by other counties, the way we see Manchester is necessarily going to be different to the way someone in the city centre or Salford sees it.”

Now working as an IT contractor on a job in Wythenshawe, he has had long periods of unstable employment and says he worries about money even now.

Nevertheless he admits he is comparatively fortunate – but it is those fears and the knowledge that many others have them too that drives him politically.

“I don’t always know if I’ve got a job to go to. I’m lucky that it’s not a zero hours contract, but I’m still scared – how long am I going to have to have a job, how long am I going to be able to pay the rent.

“Knowing there are so many thousands of people like me in Greater Manchester – and that by a lot of standards I’m still doing ok because I’ve got guaranteed hours for so long – the fact I’m involved and can make a difference about that, meaning I can do something, is what keeps me going.

“It’s when I talk to my neighbour, who looks after her disabled husband full time. When I talks to her – and realise I could do something for her.”

Shneur Odze (Ukip): The Orthodox Jewish candidate who had no formal education in English - and says Ukip is not what you think

Ukip’s candidate is another mayoral hopeful used to confounding expectations.

Shneur Odze is a familiar face to those on the local political scene in Salford, having stood several times for the council in his home ward of Broughton.

But to many voters in Greater Manchester the sight of an Orthodox Jewish candidate will be an unusual one, particularly – as he freely admits – when the party is Ukip.

Odze says many people wrongly view Ukip as an anti-immigrant, racist party, making his appearance on their doorsteps a puzzling one.

Does it surprise people when he knocks on the door with a purple rosette?

“It does. In the Stoke by-election and in other places you’d go on the door with other ethnic minority Ukippers and you’d see puzzled faces – ‘this doesn’t reflect Ukip I’ve heard about’,” he says, adding that he has, on occasion, faced anti-Semitic ‘barbs’ from kids.

“But by and large people are very interested. The biggest complaint I have when campaigning is ‘we don’t have too many Jewish people involved in political life’.”

That Ukip are not what people think is a big theme for Odze. What policies would he point to that confound expectations?

He pauses. “We believe in fair immigration, a points-based system. We don’t believe in discriminating against anybody on the basis of race, colour, country of origin.

“We were the first to call to rehabilitate refugees in the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict. Things like that, people don’t necessarily expect.

“The reality is whether or not we want to turn back the clock 60 years, we are where we are and there is no turning the clock back.

“So we need a vision. Multiculturalism has patently failed. We need a new vision that will allow people to play a full part in communal life. It’s hard to avoid the fact different communities have integrated differently.”

Odze grew up in Hackney, East London. He had not intended to go into politics as a long-term ambition and trained to be a Rabbi, a goal he has gone on to fulfil in his neighbourhood of Broughton, Salford.

As a child his school day was long, with literacy not taught formally but learned at home.

It is a method he says is not necessarily suitable for the entire state system, but which he believes did have its merits.

“We weren’t taught ABC in school, no formal English education, and we’re none the worse off for it, none of my classmates are.

Paul Nuttall: Who is Ukip's new leader?

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“But what we did do is we did advanced bookbinding, electronics, first aid, swimming, lifesaving, loads of skills-based learning, which I know in a number of examples was much more useful.

“I’m not advocating it as a mass system of education, but I do think sometimes in our education system we’re a bit over-schooled and tick-box rather than teaching talents.”

His advent into politics was thanks to local circumstance as much as anything else.

Odze says that in the late 1990s Hackney council was ‘bedlam’, an authority that ‘wasn’t functioning in any meaningful way’, so he stood in the local elections for the Conservative Party.

At the time it was the Tories that reflected his beliefs of individual identity and responsible capitalism, he says, making him ‘naturally inclined’ towards the party.

In 2004 – when he left Hackney under a cloud, after leaking electoral paperwork to the local press to demonstrate evidence of alleged fraud, a decision he says he stands by to this day – he got married and moved to Salford, where he again stood, to start with, for the Tories and nearly won.

But he became disillusioned with the ‘technocratic, managerial’ nature of the party, feeling it ‘didn’t believe anything’ and was simply ‘aping Gordon Brown’.

At that point, Ukip called.

“Instinctively it was a party of self belief, confidence, that believed in better, that believed in British values and wasn’t just having a policy set against someone else’s, it was their own identity.

“Britishness meant more than just warm beer, cricket and a flag.”

Ukip has not had the easiest few months. In the wake of the EU referendum Odze’s party faces an existential crisis, no longer needed to campaign for Brexit and beset by high profile departures such as Douglas Carswell and former leader Nigel Farage.

Odze says the bigger of those issues is the party’s ‘identity issue’, but insists they are the ‘ultimate comeback kids’.

Does he support the more eye-catching policies from Ukip’s new leader Paul Nuttall, such as referenda to bring back capital punishment?

Watch: What do Ukip members think about... ?

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“I personally wouldn’t bring back capital punishment. I understand why people would and I’m fully signed up to Ukip’s policy of having a referendum on things like that,” he says, adding that the Swiss model of policies being put directly out to public vote – often through referenda – is ‘absolutely wonderful’ and one he would like to see introduced here.

Odze also ran to be the Ukip candidate in London’s last mayoral election, describing himself to the website Breitbart in 2014 as a Londoner ‘born, bred and schooled’, so best equipped to represent the needs of the capital.

How can he now be best-placed to speak for Manchester?

He says there is an ‘implied hypocrisy’ in others, including fellow candidates, suggesting he can’t, adding: “People from across Great Britain, from across the world, built Manchester and it’s one of the things we’re proud of today.

“The people who created graphene weren’t from Manchester. So we need to carry on being and open inclusive city that welcomes the brightest and the best whether they’re born here or seek to make their life here.”

He says his candidacy on May 4 is not intended to make him an ‘honorary spokesman’ for his community.

But he does believe there is something about the way Jewish people have historically provided support and care for each other, including through a health and social care system that could be seen as the precursor to the NHS, that can now be emulated.

“That’s what we have lost in civic life. In the age of multi channel TV, where people don’t go to church, social clubs, we’ve lost a certain civic pride. I think maybe it’s beginning to come full circle, with food banks and so on. And I think the mayor has a big role in that.

“As somebody from an ethnic minority, if I am mayor that sends a message to anybody you can play a full part in communal life.”