The arrest of Audrey White starkly illustrates the bankruptcy of mainstream politics in Britain

~ punkacademic ~

Many people on Merseyside know Audrey White: a veteran left-wing activist of decades’ standing, she famously confronted a visiting Keir Starmer in 2022, lambasting him for expelling left-wing Labour members and writing for The Sun. White was already well-known at that point , her 1980s fight against sexual harassment leading to changes in the law, and immortalised in celluloid by Glenda Jackson. As the secretary of the Merseyside Pensioners’ Association in recent years, she has been a constant presence on picket lines and strike rallies, an indefatigable beacon of left-wing refusal to give in.

Last week she was arrested in Liverpool on suspicion of committing a terrorist offence.

Her arrest—for participation in a demonstration against the proscription of Palestine Action—met with uproar in Liverpool and beyond, with footage circulating widely on social media of the State’s hapless foot-soldiers dragging her into a police van. Once expelled by Starmer’s Labour, now arrested following an edict of Starmer’s government, White’s case starkly illustrates the bankruptcy of mainstream politics in Britain, where peacefully opposing a genocide can be a criminal act.

The HR-ification of British politics that Starmerism represents is the apotheosis of an unthinking, uncritical, middle-class technocratic centrism which sees those making accusations as worse than those accused. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t be a troublemaker. ‘Student union politics’. Such are the nostrums of the LinkedInariat that runs this country, that ‘disrupts’, ‘innovates’, and ‘delivers change’—all devoid of principle or feeling.

Scousers aren’t, in general, like middle-class English centrists, nor do they like them. ‘Scouse, not English’, is a common refrain in Liverpool. At sporting contests, the national anthem is regularly booed. Many of today’s Scousers (including this writer) know their ancestors were persecuted and driven from their homelands by the British state. In this lifetime, the city was demonised by Thatcher and the right-wing press for its opposition, followed by (and partly resulting in) the tragedy of Hillsborough. Scouse patience for English middle-class bullshit is limited.

Others can continue to lie to themselves about what Starmer represents, or what a government hell-bent on persecuting everyone from trans people to Deliveroo drivers ‘means’, but Scousers already know. They knew when Starmer pledged in the 2020 Labour leadership campaign that he wouldn’t speak to the Sun, before muttering under his breath ‘during this campaign’.

For Starmer’s centrist apologists, people like White never ‘grew up’—which is to say they never sold out. Audrey White would have had an easier life if she had never fought for marginalised groups at home and abroad, if her understanding of solidarity had ended at her front door. But then the law on sexual harassment would not have been changed when it was, and dispute after workplace dispute would have lost powerful support.

Of course, when it comes to the issue of Palestine specifically White does not stand alone. The majority of the British public opposes Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, along with the support it receives from the British State. Every weekend since Parliament proscribed Palestine Action, people have been arrested for defying the ban—but also on looser excuses, with a Ken activist being threatened with arrest by armed police simply for supporting Palestine. When confronted with the fact that even in dystopian Britain this wasn’t against the law, Kent Police just doubled down.

As anarchists, we have neither sympathy for the Labour Party nor any truck with a parliamentary route to socialism. But as fellow socialists we can’t but sympathise with those betrayed by that party and its apparatus, and our solidarity with those who oppose the evils of the state is steadfast.

British parliamentary politics is in its death-throes. Notwithstanding the announcement of a new left-wing party by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, and Zack Polanski’s campaign for the leadership of the Green Party, the ‘system’ continues to fail. The old promise of post-war capitalism—that in return for selling out you might get a house and a stable income—is no longer available.

For many people, a moral compass is all they have left. Audrey White and those like her have never lost sight of their moral compass, or of what solidarity means. For younger people who have long been fed the false promises of parliamentary politics, this may be an opportunity to consider new horizons beyond the death machine of the state. They are all too familiar with its casual inhumanity, that denies them a fair income, somewhere to live, mental health support, the gender affirming care they need to be who they are—and much more. The time for ‘sensible politics’ is over. It’s time to never grow up.