“An individual then has choices,” Noam Chomsky wrote in these pages on the tenth anniversary of September 11. Consider, in this regard, the story of two remarkable women recently arrested in Britain.

In early July, Reverend Sue Parfitt, age eighty-three, was arrested in Parliament Square in London. A retired priest and former social worker and family therapist, she was sitting on a camping chair, holding a sign: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” For this quiet act of peaceful protest, Parfitt was arrested under powers granted to the British police under the 2000 Terrorism Act, following a vote by Parliament in early July to add Palestine Action to a list of proscribed terrorist organizations. In reality, the group is no more than a political protest network, founded in 2020 to engage in acts of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action.

One suspects that Parfitt will take this encounter in her stride, given that she has been arrested over two dozen times for similar acts of protest and civil disobedience. She is driven by a deep Christian faith that puts her fundamentally at odds with the standards for restricting political protest and political speech that the British state, under the current Labour government, would hope to impose on her. “Life is about radical obedience to the will of God,” she has said, and her prayer and reflection have brought her to the view that God’s will is that people should do what they can to protect the lives of their fellow human beings and to protect the planet for future generations. “I acted out of love,” she stated after a previous arrest for protesting inaction on climate change. She did so again in July, even though that choice puts her directly at odds with the power of the state. As she said moments before her arrest, “I know that we are in the right place doing the right thing.”

Audrey White comes from a different tradition than Parfitt, but the depth and clarity of their moral commitments have something in common. White first came to prominence in the 1980s when she led a union campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace. The manager of a local branch of a clothing store in Liverpool, she was told by four of her staff that an area manager had been making unwanted sexual advances toward them. She complained on their behalf and was fired. When White refused to accept this outcome and turned up at work anyway, her superiors threatened to call the police to have her removed. Her response was to start a picket of the store. Given that—as White herself puts it—“no one crosses a picket-line in Liverpool,” this turned out to be an effective tactic. She was supported by “dockers, car workers, staff from unemployed centres, union members, local activists.” Further pickets were organized for the firm’s London and Manchester stores. Management ultimately relented, and White was reinstated.

By engaging in this kind of political action, White and her comrades were breaching the ban on secondary picketing that had been brought in by the Thatcher government’s 1980 Employment Act. But they were also doing what they believed to be right, on a point of fundamental principle. Their actions changed the climate on sexual harassment at work, striking a blow for workers’ rights and gender equality. Today White is held up by the Trades Union Congress as one of 150 standout examples of campaigners who have changed things for the better for working people over the past 150 years in the United Kingdom. Her story was made into a 1987 film, Business as Usual, starring Glenda Jackson in Audrey’s role.

White’s formidable capacity to stand up to bullies, and to be guided by doing what is right rather than taking the easy road in the face of injustice, has not faded. Just two weeks after Parfitt’s arrest, White was again in Liverpool’s city center, holding up a sign, and standing up for simple truths. Her sign, like Parfitt’s, proclaimed a simple message, “I oppose genocide and occupation. I support Palestine Action.” Unlike Parfitt, though, when the Merseyside Police came to arrest her for this “terrorist offense,” she did not allow herself to be led away. Instead, she just stayed put and had to be dragged off by four police officers. Onlookers shouted at the police, “Shame on you!” White has a heart condition and low bone density, but she put herself on the line because she saw the simple truth of the moral horror being perpetrated by the government of Israel against the people of Gaza.

As Robin D. G. Kelley notes, Chomsky’s 1967 essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” was inspired by Dwight Macdonald’s reflection under the same title, originally published in 1945. Macdonald ended with the simple conclusion, “It is a great thing to be able to see what is right under your nose.” Sue Parfitt and Audrey White both see something that is right under our noses. And like the men and women whom Kelley spotlights for standing up to fascism, they have both made their choices.

The simple truth is that the British government continues to be complicit in the genocidal crimes against humanity being perpetrated by Israeli armed forces in Gaza. The government continues to sell arms to Israel, and the Royal Air Force, from its Akrotiri base in Cyprus, continues to collaborate on intelligence gathering for the IDF. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that Israel “has the right” to cut off power and water to Gaza, and Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the House of Commons in September last year that “I am very comfortable with the support we give to Israel.” (He may yet have good reason to be less comfortable: as Conservative MP Kit Malthouse told Lammy in the House of Commons in late July, Lammy “may end up at The Hague” due to his “inaction—and frankly, cowardice.”) On August 9, the Metropolitan Police arrested 532 people at a protest event in London for holding the same kinds of signs held by Parfitt and White; half of those arrested were over the age of sixty.

In the face of these conditions, as the Israeli government’s genocidal actions continue in Gaza and notionally liberal democratic countries turn toward repression and authoritarianism, I share Kelley’s assessment that the terms of debate we inherit from Macdonald and Chomsky feel misplaced and anachronistic. Knowledge of both genocide abroad and repression at home has been democratized. Thanks to the internet, the facts are really under all our noses and available to everyone—accessible just as much to retired priests and retired shopworkers as they are to those who work in universities. And as Kelley observes, universities on both sides of the Atlantic are no longer sites of “privilege” when it comes to intellectual freedom and freedom from the pressures of the market and the state, the university system having come under systematic attack.

But the cases of Parfitt and White reveal still more. They show that we miss something essential when we frame our talk of responsibilities around “intellectuals,” as opposed to the responsibilities of all citizens. Political responsibility is a predominantly moral rather than intellectual affair. There is no need for abstruse theory, complex intellectual analysis, or insider information to know what is wrong with the murder of the innocent, to know what is wrong when the state represses its own people, to know what is wrong with the silencing of dissent. Politicians such as Starmer and Lammy—with postgraduate law degrees from Oxford and Harvard, respectively—have been trained in international law and human rights; their failings are not intellectual failings, a matter of imperfectly applied expertise, but grotesque, disfiguring moral failings. To critique their disgraceful actions, ordinary citizens only need to be able to speak the simple truth.

Allow me a further example. As Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper will go down in history for betraying British traditions of free speech and political contestation. She has used the power of legal sanctions and the blunt tool of physical force by police to restrict protest and dissent, undermining the most fundamental requirements of a liberal democratic society. But again this does not stem from ignorance, nor can it be traced to a chiefly intellectual defect. Cooper took a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford. During her studies, she would have read J. S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin on liberty, Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz on rights, John Rawls on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the place of civil disobedience in a democratic society. Cooper is at home in the world of ideas and knows what she is doing.

Authoritarian politicians such as Cooper, Lammy, and Starmer are, indeed, in many ways members of an intellectual elite. They act as they do because, although they understand the core values of freedom and democracy, and understand the significance of international law and human rights, they are quite content to exercise the power of their office in a way that dishonors those values. Their failings are not intellectual failings, but moral failings—that is the simple fact under our nose.

Those of us who live under governments like Britain’s today are faced with a world where many of our politicians are intellectually adept but cowardly, self-serving, and morally bankrupt. Yet a democratic public committed to the basic principles of freedom and equality will not be harried into docility and conformity by the crude tools of authoritarian repression. Hope lies in the ways that people from a huge variety of backgrounds and walks of life have realized that, whatever the politicians do, individuals have choices, including the choice to call things as they are, both in factual and in moral terms. Ordinary resistance and ordinary responsibility—including the responsibility “to speak the truth and to expose lies”—falls on all of us, whatever our jobs, positions, or roles in society.

Where I live in York, one of our local bakers, the Haxby Bakehouse, has been notably outspoken on social media in condemning the genocide in Gaza and expressing solidarity with Palestine. I wrote to say how much I appreciated their use of their voice and their platform. They replied, “We saw a social media post that said ‘if your favourite band aren’t saying free Palestine, then you need a new favourite band,’ maybe we should change band for bakery.” Their words contain an urgent lesson: whoever we are and whatever we do for a living, as democratic citizens we must always speak the truth to others as we see it and refuse to be silent in the face of inhumanity and injustice.

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