Watch as Labour leader Keir Starmer is confronted by angry voter in Liverpool cafe

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was given a public dressing down by an angry voter in Liverpool on Monday as he returned to the city for the first time since writing an article for The S*n.

Starmer had promised during his leadership campaign that he would not give interviews to the newspaper, which is boycotted in the city over its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, during a visit to Liverpool in January 2020.

However, in October last year, Starmer wrote a column for paper and was widely slammed on Merseyside and beyond as a consequence.

MP for Wavertree Paula Barker put out a statement on social media saying the Labour party did not need to have a relationship “with the rag” in order to win an election and told LiverpoolWorld: “I’m absolutely furious. Don’t take my city and my community for granted.”

Starmer returned to Liverpool on Monday to lay out his plans for the future of the Labour and clarify the party’s stance on nationalisation during a conference at The Spine.

But during a visit to a local cafe, in the company of Liverpool’s Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram, the Labour leader was confronted by Audrey White, a member of the Merseyside Pensioners Association.

“I don’t know how you’ve got the guts to come to this city, after you’ve been interviewed and doing columns for The S*n newspaper, after the way we as a city were abused and the Hillsborough victims were abused by that paper,” she told Starmer.

“Secondly, you lied to us about uniting the party. I’m still a Labour Party member and you’ve expelled and witch hunted in the most vicious way I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. And I’ve been a member of the Labour Party for a long, long time.

“You have absolutely said you had ten pledges, you were going to carry on the Corbyn legacy, and ever since you’ve done nothing but distance yourself from the ideas which tens of thousands of people joined the Labour Party to support.

“All you’ve done is feed into the Tory ideology of not supporting strikes, of carrying on with the privatisation of our health service.”

The video, which was posted online by the Merseyside Pensioners Association and The Art of Resistance, a project claiming to support grassroots campaigns on social justice and human rights, has received almost 1 million views on Twitter.

Who is Audrey White?

The activist who confronted Kier Starmer is no stranger to speaking out.

Audrey White led a long campaign against sexual harassment to change employment law after she was sacked in the 1980s for complaining about the sexual harassment of women in her team at Lord John clothes store where she was a manager.

A film, Business as Usual, was released in 1988, where Audrey White was played by Glenda Jackson, an Oscar-winner, who was a Labour MP for 23 years.

In 2020 the Jewish Chronicle agreed to pay damages and issued a public apology to Ms White about articles published about her in 2019.