Can Stephen Yip, the son of a Chinese sailor from Guangzhou, become Liverpool's first independent mayor?

The son of a Chinese sailor from Guangzhou is running to become Liverpool's first independent mayor in a bid to tackle municipal corruption that has plagued the northern English city for years.

Stephen Yip, 66, is best known locally for his charity work with disadvantaged children. But following the arrest last year of Liverpool's Mayor Joe Anderson as part of an ongoing police investigation into fraud, bribery and corruption, Yip decided to stand in the upcoming mayoral election on May 6.

Liverpool is historically a stronghold of the Labour Party. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party leader, is persona non grata in the city following a 2004 article printed in The Spectator magazine while he was editor that accused the city of victimhood over the Hillsborough football disaster.

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But after an inspectors' report found a serious breakdown of governance in the local council, the Johnson administration's decision to send in commissioners to run the city was greeted with a sigh of relief by many residents.

A poll by the local paper, the Liverpool Echo, found that 69 per cent of voters could now change their voting allegiances - and political pundits in the city say Yip has a good chance of winning. He meets This Week in Asia on a sunny day under the Chinese arch - one of the largest outside the mainland - that marks the entrance into Nelson Street, the main artery of the oldest Chinatown in Europe.

What's left of it, that is. On the day Britain came out of lockdown, the only business doing a brisk trade on Nelson Street was a trendy bagel cafe. The Nook, a pub and hostel once frequented by the Chinese seafaring community, appears boarded up and the half-dozen or so restaurants are all closed.

"We are missing a trick here for a start - people walk through this beautiful arch and say is this it?" Yip says. "We haven't even got a museum to celebrate the fact we are the second oldest Chinatown in the world."

The area was thriving, he recalls, when he grew up a few hundred metres away on Duke Street, one of 10 children in a crowded house with no bathroom or hot water. Yip says he had a happy childhood in the 1960s, and remembers that the family once heard The Beatles playing at a nearby club. "We had love, food and clothes, not new but clean," he says.

Yip's father left China to go to sea with the then Liverpool-based Blue Funnel Line. He sailed from Hong Kong at the age of 14 and never returned, marrying a Liverpudlian Englishwoman whose family shunned her after the marriage.

Despite the sad death of two of her children, the other eight went on to thrive. One of Yip's older brothers, David, was one of the first actors of Chinese heritage to make it big in Britain when he played the lead role in the 1980s television series The Chinese Detective. Another brother, Graham, became a real-life policeman in Merseyside.

As for Yip, he chose a path of social work, starting out as a volunteer helping women who were victims of domestic abuse before founding KIND, a charity for underprivileged children, in 1975. His achievements have won him the Freedom of the City of Liverpool as well as an Order of the British Empire, and now he feels he has a duty to act as a catalyst to root out corruption in the city.

"I've got kids, I've got grandchildren, I want a future for them. I want them to be proud of the city," he said. "We are a laughing stock internationally. We've got to regain our reputation."

Since Mayor Anderson was elected in 2012, Liverpool has been rocked by a number of high-profile development scandals, with close to 40 stalled development sites across the city. Some of the projects were heavily marketed in China; according to reports from 2018, an estimated 700 investors from Hong Kong lost an average of £45,000 (US$62,000) each in down payments for flats that were never built.

A stark example of this lies at the end of Nelson Street. In the shadow of the magnificent Liverpool Cathedral is a scrubby patch of land encased by a red-painted rusting metal wall, a far cry from the promised New Chinatown development with flats, shops and a cultural centre.

"Liverpool is like all those places where there is unlimited power and then comes unlimited corruption. There is no oversight, there is no accountability, there is no transparency," Yip says, adding that the unchallenged Labour politicians have an "entitlement complex".

One of the pledges in his manifesto is to set up a whistle-blowers commission for employees, "where they can feel 100 per cent confident if they have been asked to do something illegal or immoral they can come and report it". He also wants to put in place an independent and powerful standards oversight committee.

Yip also insists he is not standing for mayor for his own advantage - nor, he admits, is he a politician or a populist. As a young man, he was a member of the Labour Party, but resigned over his opposition to Britain joining the war in Iraq.

"This is not a career choice for me, this is not me wanting to be a politician, because I'm not a politician," he says. "I'll be a conduit. I'll work with a team of knowledgeable, talented, skilled individuals from across our city. We should become a city which other cities look at and say 'This is how we want to do things'."

He is planning to enlist the support of the anti-corruption group Transparency International UK to help Liverpool set up procedures and organisations that are accountable at every stage.

"I don't feel sorry for any of the political parties," Yip says. "Not one of the 90 councillors in our city have stood up and said publicly 'Sorry, we were asleep on the job'."

He also believes the Covid-19 pandemic could also be a unique chance to steer Liverpool in a fresh direction.

"Do we want more skyscrapers, or do we want family homes with gardens?" he asks. "This council was giving family homes away for free to developers. Those homes are still empty. The developers took the roofs off, so they would fall down, and then they could say we need to build a block of flats here."

Yip has already received a series of endorsements for his mayoral bid, including from former MP and BBC journalist Martin Bell, as well as the trade organisation for Liverpool's nightlife scene.

Walking round the Georgian Quarter - where Yip still lives, close to Chinatown - he stops and chats with people he knows. A Labour Party supporter tells him he has heard allegations of Yip also being close to developers.

"Dark forces," he says. "They are trying to smear me already."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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