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…

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.

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.

You are associated with modernisation: being fast, competent. What do you feel about that famous 1987 ‘Kinnock’ party political broadcast, which harped nostalgically back to an era of labourism which is in fact now over?

I’m not sure that it did harken back to the past. It gave a complete picture of a man who has been grossly misrepresented by our political opponents. Neil Kinnock is a true embodiment of what the modern Labour Party stands for.

What does that mean?

He’s a man who has some true values; a working-class person who has been formed by the opportunities and the denial of opportunities which the mass of people in this country experience. That broadcast was not about projecting Neil Kinnock alone, it was using Neil to project the values that the Labour Party holds for our country.

I want to professionalise the way the Labour Party operates as a machine. I want it to use the most modern forms of communication. But I’m a party man to my fingertips. I’m a paradox: my upbringing was steeped in the Labour Party’s traditions, in the successes and failures of the party in the 60s and 70s; and my most recent political experience springs from the traumatic years – I use that word advisedly – that followed our defeat in 1979.

Our greatest successes took place a long time ago. The municipal socialism of the 1930s – certainly in London, which my own grandfather was largely responsible for – was the application of values and policies that met the times in which people lived, and used the most appropriate vehicle. After the war the socialisation of industry and the creation of the welfare state met the needs of people at that time. We’ve got to do the same in the 90s.

But don’t imagine for one moment that it is desirable to forsake our past. People don’t want to see a party just taking up anchor and manoeuvring in a listless, aimless way back and forward across the political spectrum in a search for votes. We are a left-of-centre political party, that is the philosophical and ideological appeal we have. For us to move away from that would be electorally suicidal.

You describe yourself in the same way you talk about the Labour Party: continuity with history, traditions, values, and a Labour-Party way of going about things…

And I do think that marks me out from others of my generation, whose socialist politics was discovered in campus class warfare at university.

You mean 1968 and all that?

Exactly. I don’t owe a great deal to those experiences. I didn’t need the demonstrations and the anti-war protests of the late-60s and the 70s to introduce me to politics. My introduction had come when I was bicycling up and down my street between the polling station and the committee rooms in the ‘64 election.

I was very active in the Labour Party Young Socialists. And after a year of living in the bush in rural Tanzania, and seeing socialism in practice, I didn’t really need to come up to university and discover my political soul. Frankly, I felt slightly superior to them. There is something about Oxford undergraduates providing the vanguard of the proletariat which is very disagreeable.

But it wasn’t just about discovering socialism. It was also the discovery of activism, of sexual politics, a rediscovery of feminism, the personal as political, and that we are subjects as well as agents of change. So it changed the terms of politics…

But not for me.

Why not?

Because I’ve always had an abiding view that change is brought about by government actions and parliamentary legislation.

You were a councillor in Lambeth, one of the councils associated with the most messy sectarianism, the worst leftism.

It was gesture politics at its worst, sectarian and self-seeking. I found it disillusioning. The leadership of the council used the people I represented rather than helped them. Now, in those circumstances I found very satisfying refuge in my weekly surgery, building up a huge load of casework, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

There was obviously a certain pressure to mouth the slogans, to embrace the political positions that would have enabled me to get on politically in Lambeth and London. I didn’t do so and for my sins was labelled as a rightwinger.

I wonder whether those passionate views about trotskyism and sectarianism in the Labour Party don’t also touch other kinds of activism? People in the Labour Party are often very wary of the word ‘activist’, and movements outside the party which are not in its control.

You have correctly diagnosed a feature of the Labour Party which has recoiled from the sectarianism of the early-80s. But sectarianism should not be confused with activism. The Labour Party is a campaigning party, in the sense that it is agitating public opinion, winning people’s minds, convincing them.

I have had a political existence outside the Labour Party. For three years I was chairman of the British Youth Council and in that capacity – I was nominated through the Labour Party – I represented all the national youth organisations in this country, from the Young Communist League to the Girl Guides, taking in Methodist youth and young farmers. Now that is a very broad constituency, and one I respect, but that doesn’t make me any less anti-Tory. It does mean though that when you organise among people, you’re not sectarian. That’s not my style.

Let’s talk about style. You’re wearing a rather lovely shirt, if I may say so. Did you iron it?

I did, yes.

Do you cook?

Yes, I can cook. What I cook is edible, and as you’d expect, nicely presented, but it is not cordon bleu. I’m not a foodie, or a drinkie.

Do you do your own housework?

On many occasions I do, but I don’t do it exclusively, no.

You employ somebody?

Yes. Is it something to be ashamed of?

The reason I ask is some people don’t even know how the housework gets done! Are the people in your world primarily immersed in the Labour Party? Are you capable of having a conversation that’s not about the Labour Party?

I built up a department, co-ordinated an election campaign and I haven’t stopped since. But I feel self-critical. Because I feel I’ve lost out, socially and culturally. At the age of 35 I should be doing more things with my life. But I do tend to find that when I go out, something awful happens! For example, for the first two years in this job I never went out on a Saturday evening, because the first editions of the Sunday papers always held some appalling story which I’d be rung about by all the journalists on the Saturday evening.

You’re a European man. Do you feel thwarted that Labour’s slow journey towards Europe has interfered with its ability to take international initiatives within a European alliance?

The Labour Party allowed itself to be portrayed as isolationist. Our belief in socialism in one country was blinding us. Europe is bound to have become important for the Labour Party because it’s a way of getting socialism in through the back door. The Tories were absolutely right in warning the British people during the European elections that Labour saw the European Community as a way of bringing more socialism into Britain. Where the Tories were wrong was in their belief that the majority of the country didn’t want that. They did, they wanted socialism by any door or by any window.

The parties of the Left are being confronted by movements like the greens, which are changing the terms of the political conversation. What does that tell us about the ability of the Labour Party to shape the political agenda?

Our opponents have been fairly successful in corralling us on to political territory which is the least auspicious for us. As a result of the policy review some very difficult teeth have been extracted, as well as some necessary modernisation of policy.

The political terrain I would like to break into concerns the future industrial and regional bases of our economy, the way the relationship between work, the family and leisure is being transformed. Those areas constitute a new agenda which is taking shape in people’s minds.

What excited you about the 1980s?

The environmental movement. And the peace movement, not so much in Britain, but in Europe, brought about real change and a response from governments, even conservative governments. If I was to be candid, the Labour Party didn’t contribute enough to radical politics in the 80s.

‘The spinners of history are rarely the makers of history. The real story of Ireland’s journey to pace and justice is murkier, more treacherous and often moe inspirational than our political masters would have us believe. Bea Campbell is a great chronicler of our times: humans and politically astute, with a keen understanding of the double dealing, interplay and courage that underpinned the long peace process, which was really won by ordinary men and unsung women in Northern Ireland.’

Helena Kennedy

‘Outstanding … an impressive and insightful book. The story of international diplomacy and political deals has been told elsewhere, but this details another story, about the contribution of civil society, the women’s movement and a “coalition of the committed” to a unique constitutional moment, and to the means by which the state might reinterpret itself and be changed.’

Professor John Morison

The book is available to buy at Amazon

I recall a gathering of women at Lancaster House with the minister who got the equality legislation through a reluctant cabinet – the glinting Red Queen, Barbara Castle – being bewildered by all these women wearing badges saying “Director, Women’s Liberation Movement”. Could they all be the director? Oh yes.

That was the year when something truly historic happened: the state took the side of women. The equal pay act and the sex discrimination act converged with another epochal gesture: a Labour government and a labour movement, for the first time in their history, designed an economic strategy that didn’t do in women. The social contract awarded a national flat-rate pay rise. Low-paid women felt like they’d won the pools. That convergence did more than anything before or since to address discrimination and shrink the gender gap.

But it didn’t last. There was a counter-revolution. Within a couple of years the men resumed normal bargaining and we ended up with a Tory government.

The SDA’s impact on education and the professions, though slow, was exponential. Women are now the majority in professions from which half a century ago they were exiled. But instead of seeing women’s movements as natural allies, New Labour gave birth to itself as a project unencumbered by feminism, which it blamed (along with gays) for losing Labour elections.

That lack of rapport leaves us with the prospect that the gender revolution fizzles into an amended patriarchal settlement. So women are allowed to work, get into debt, get a PhD – but on condition that they do what they’ve always done: take care of men and children; pay a forfeit for motherhood; put up with porn in the office; and, over a lifetime, even if they’re as good as a bloke, get paid, promoted and pensioned less. It costs women millions to be women. And if they get a bit of power, they’re told to use it wisely – never make a scene.

So, what are we celebrating? It should be a source of national shame that we suffer a law that was past its sell-by date when it was enacted. While our government restlessly improvises new legislation by the minute to deal with purported enemies within, it seems oblivious to the large and small humiliations that smite the average woman as she journeys through an average life.

This is not to say the SDA was a waste of time. But it forced an individual woman to take an individual action to prove conscious discrimination, in a culture that is unconsciously, as well as knowingly, saturated with sexism. What to a woman is an affront is still, to our culture, normal, just a laugh.

When this law was enacted, it was legal to discriminate against women. All institutions did it. To place the burden of proof on a woman to show that there was something wrong demanded the impossible. We don’t have a national sensibility that has assimilated what gender discrimination means: harm, humiliation, poverty; it saps the will to live, it makes people ill.

The effect is that despite every statistic showing that discrimination is endemic and the pay gap is growing, our equality legal system is stuck. It conjures up Jarndyce and Jarndyce; it is interminable, extravagant, weird and useless. Charles Dickens’s exposure in Bleak House, currently a gorgeous BBC serialisation, changed the law.

So can we. We know our equality laws have not enlightened and changed our society. But there are alternatives.

The institutions should have a duty to be no-discrimination zones, safe from sexism. We will help them. Unison lawyer Peter Hunter points us to the Health and Safety Act, implemented 31 years ago and says: “that law should have been an incubator”. It generated a universal system of safety practice, inspection and prosecution. Employers have no excuses. The government sponsors monumental compensation schemes.

The same principle should apply to women’s wellbeing. “Why do we see a falling object as worse than the male brain?” asks Hunter. “You can’t recover from a lifetime of discrimination and poverty. Why shouldn’t a woman be able to say: that man is a health hazard in my workplace, I want him out?”

The government says it is sorted: public authorities must promote equality. But it is a tick-box duty, sequestered in administration. And then they spend fortunes resisting women’s cases.

By contrast, in Northern Ireland the Good Friday agreement made equality – on grounds of religion, race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation and caring responsibility – a constitutional duty. All public bodies must promote it, measure it, monitor it. More than that, they must enlist those with a stake in it – the disadvantaged – to participate in producing equality as an outcome of the policy-making process. Civil society has the opportunity to be not merely an audience but a partner.

This approach transforms how you do equality, and what it might mean to be a citizen. If the most brutalised place in these islands can do it, why can’t we?

That’s what What’s Left? brought to mind: the use of abuse as argument. It is written with something of those bad manners: intemperate, petulant, abusive. It is a painful text, simultaneously victimised and grandiose; it is personal without self-awareness, polemical without coherence.

It starts from Cohen’s support for the Bush-Blair new imperialism and all the trouble that caused. Cohen’s book isn’t interested in why he and a few influential political commentators hailing from the left landed up isolated from the majority progressive resistance to the invasion of Iraq. Instead of asking why his coterie was estranged from the rest of the left, he rants, he explodes, he hyperventilates.

The text begins with Iraq and then callously evades the sponsorship of militarism, sectarianism and sexism and corruption no one knows how to fix. It ends with Israel instead. Yes, he admits, Palestine suffers racism and collective punishment. Yes, that’s worth fighting. ‘Yes, until you ask the question I’ve delayed asking: what is anti-semitism?’ What is this conditional ‘until’? What makes ending collective punishment and the occupation of Palestine so unthinkable?

After the end of the Cold War, he says, the left embraced fascist fundamentalism as its expression of anti-Westernism. Cohen responds to the anti-semitism swirling around Islamic fundamentalism with an alarming hypothesis: after the Cold War ‘radical intellectuals fled from universal values’ into cultural relativism; gay, black and feminist cultures became separatist, they ‘couldn’t be criticised’ and nor ‘by extension could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife-burning or suicide bombing’. Ergo, the liberal left has become fascist.

Do you recognise yourself here, dear reader? We’re used to this sort of stuff, of course: Melanie Phillips has been a prolific exponent of apostasy. It’s mad.