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

Yip, 66, is best known for his work with disadvantaged children, but he is running for office to help scrub out corruption in the northern English city

Liverpool has to ‘regain our reputation’, he says, after the arrest of Mayor Joe Anderson and a series of high-profile development scandals involving Hong Kong investors

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Stephen Yip in the central Liverpool offices of KIND, the children’s charity he founded in 1975. Photo: Hilary Clarke

Published: 7:30pm, 15 Apr 2021Updated: 8:34pm, 15 Apr 2021

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.

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.

The Chinatown Arch on Liverpool’s Nelson Street. Photo: Shutterstock

“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.”