Kira Cochrane’s latest book is a collection of “Forty years of the feminist movement as reported in the Guardian“.

It includes:

“Lively, provocative, thoughtful and funny, this is the essential guide to the feminist thinking and writing of the past 40 years – the ultimate portrait of an ongoing revolution.”

The book is available on Amazon, or at the Guardian’s bookshop.

I was pleased to see someone had put my 1990 Arena documentary on the history of “Morning Star” onto Youtube. Here it is split into parts 1-6.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

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Feminism in London 09 took place recently at Conway Hall. Read the speeches, view photos and much more on the Feminism in London website.

There’s a full evaluation of the event over here.

I’m standing as the Green Party Parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, and the Green Party candidate for Camden Council’s Bllomsbury ward.

The Camden New Journal ran a piece covering my standing:

THE Green Party has further spiced up the battle over Glenda Jackson’s parliamentary future by fielding an award-winning author to fight the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency.

Keep reading at the Camden New Journal…

And the Green Party’s own site announces my selection over here:

The Green Party today proudly announced that Beatrix Campbell has been selected to contest the Hampstead and Kilburn constitutency in the upcoming general election.

Keep reading at the Green Party’s site…

Published one year ago today in The Independent.

Poor Baby P. His was a death foretold. We were warned. All those reforms of child protection systems, and we lost sight of the child in peril. Reports will be written that slap the usual suspects – professionals who failed to see the signs, or follow the guidelines, or communicate with each other, or get their files in order.

Read the full article on The Independent site.

Anthony Hunt had been a magistrate and justice of the peace, a pillar of society. And then he became an emblem for angry, accused men when he mounted a case that threatened to throw a legal tsunami at the already lamentable prosecution of sex crime…

Keep reading this piece over on The Guardian site

Here’s a piece first published in The Guardian in August 2004:

It would have been his idea of hell. When Greater Manchester’s former chief constable, James Anderton, accused the city’s gay population in 1987 of “swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making”, little did he know he would come to be regarded as one of the instigators of Britain’s gayest city, and perhaps the most successful gay village in Europe. The roll call would also have to include Margaret Thatcher, whose notorious Section 28 – a clause in the Local Government Act passed in 1988 – galvanised a spectacular coalition, ranging from theatre impresarios to librarians, to defend the right to a gay life. Neither could have anticipated how their crusades would conjure up a queer constituency. Back then, Canal Street in Manchester city centre was still a red-light district. Anderton, an evangelical Christian, encouraged his officers to stalk its dank alleys and expose anyone caught in a clinch, while police motorboats with spotlights cruised for gay men around the canal’s locks and bridges.

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In October 1989 I interviewed Peter Mandelson about activism, Europe, and his shirt. Here’s a copy of of the full text as printed in Marxism Today:

Peter Mandelson is Labour’s director of communications

Let’s start with you as machiavellian man. How do you feel about the way you’re represented: image-making but no substance?

We can dispose of me pretty quickly: I think I do have substance. What the Labour Party has undergone during the last three to four years has been complex, challenging. It could not possibly have been undertaken by people without substance. The more important question is whether what has happened in the Labour Party has been a triumph of style over substance. And I would refute that utterly. Style is a necessary but insufficient condition for success. Ultimately a political party needs to be saying things which are in tune with people’s mainstream concerns and aspirations.

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