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.

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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Here’s a piece first published in the Independent almost 15 years ago to the week.

DISNEY will earn more from The Lion King than from any other cartoon in history. That’s not just because Disney is the best marketing machine in popular entertainment, but because this movie offers a fantastical solution to that most vexing political problem of our time: the role of fatherhood.

This fantasy is far more important than the accuracy of the film’s detail. As it happens, The Lion King is an insult to lions, hyenas, Africa and children. My cinema was packed with children who were forgiving and enthusiastic; they quarried the cartoon for laughs and filled the place with the sound of their own pleasure. They forgave this cartoon its formulaic score and crass zoology. They rewarded Disney and their adult relatives with the goodwill of having a good time.

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No Means No and Rape Means Rape

Among the unexpected outcomes of Roman Polanski’s re-arrest on the charge of sexually abusing a girl in 1977 a new concept: rape that isn’t rape. The unseemly hypothesis was offered with gravitas by Whoopi Goldberg: that what he did was not ‘rape rape, ’ she said.
Rape rape is?
Rape.
This manoeuvre is revelatory. It says nothing useful about what Polanski did to the child. But it tells us something important about the distribution of respect and blame.
We know everything we need to know from the testimony given to the Grand Jury by the girl herself. We’ve known for long enough what went on: according to transcripts of the child’s evidence to a Grand Jury (transcripts unsealed, on the web), Polanski set her up, got her drunk, raped her and took the precaution of avoiding a possible pregnancy by anal rape. Her evidence is not challenged. Whoopi is wrong. Rape is ‘rape rape’. She didn’t consent. On the contrary she repeatedly withheld her consent. Her descripton of the mise en scene is flat, detailed, bare. According to her testimony, her commentary during Polanski’s apparently protracted rape was clear and simple: ‘No…no…no…’ She said No and meant No.
What else did this girl have to do to make her non-consent clear? And what else did he – and we – need to know to be persuaded that what he did was rape. As in rape rape.
She said she was afraid. Of whom, what? ‘Him.’
What did she want to do? ‘Go home’.
The semantic debate reprises an era when culpability lay not with the perpetrator but the victim. Above all it is a bid to reinterpret rape as always something else, particularly in a certain strata of society where anything goes, and everything is known.
This is a context where big men’s accountability is only accidental, a bit of bad luck. It is, therefore, a context that encourages complicity.
Now her expressed wish that the case be abandoned is mobilised in his favour. But she at least – unlike Polanski – is holding on to her pride and dignity in a context that hasn’t delivered justice.
She insists that she has not only survived the harm he did, she has ‘prevailed’. She doesn’t want her body to be available for public consumption.
She blames the criminal justice system for this mess. Not only did she not get justice – justice was seen to be not done. And now her testimony is being impugned.
Had Polanski done the right thing in 1977 she would not be in this position. She deserves to be released from this burden by Polanski doing, finally, the right thing: the right right thing.

© Beatrix Campbell
2 October 2009

My new book, Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland, is published in May 2008, with launches in London, Belfast and Dublin.

‘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

Comment on Coroner’s conclusions in Diana inquest: Royally Let Down

The Guardian, Tuesday January 23 2007

Now it’s official: the state sponsored death squads for years in Northern Ireland and this collusion prolonged the war.

Nuala O’Loan is a heroine. None of us should under-estimate the moral courage this fastidious lawyer has mobilised merely do her job as Northern Ireland’s police ombudsman: to tell the world that collusion describes the relationship between the British state and loyalist gunslingers.

Raymond McCord is a hero. When his own loyalist leaders and militias refused to acknowledge his quest for justice for his murdered son, he risked his life by turning to the purported enemies of his state – the human-rights organisations.

McCord joins the band of relatives who become heralds for their lost loved ones, whose journey confronts them with the state itself. McCord didn’t retreat when he found himself in a web of special branch and loyalist assassins.

The human-rights advocates are heroes too, because they would not bow to the slur that they were mad, bad or Provo agents provocateurs for investigating the state’s patronage of death squads. Lest we forget, the ombudsman’s investigation was prefigured by an earlier report naming the guilty men, published by Jane Winter, the forensic director of British Irish Rights Watch.

None of these people are republicans. But the sectarian slur ricocheted across the ombudsman’s bows again yesterday when Lord Maginnis – a liberal in the unionist firmament – dismissed her report not only as “rubbish” but as having “an alternative agenda” – code for Provo propaganda.

The devastating McCord report that was published yesterday tells us that allegations of collusion once dismissed as rubbish are true. But that epochal admission risks being swamped by an old paradigm: tribal paddies dragging the reluctant Brits into their dirty war. It is time for a paradigm shift. It is time for Britain to be brave and tell the truth about itself. It must narrate a new story about that 30-year conflict.

The ombudsman tells us that the collusion prevailed between the prelude to the ceasefires and the new millennium. Her investigation was constrained by the narrow focus imposed on her: she was only able to investigate the murder of Raymond McCord Jr, a 22-year-old RAF cadet. But Mount Vernon, his north Belfast neighbourhood, is both the local and the larger story of collusion.

Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary, acknowledges that this is very embarrassing for the state. This is progress – when O’Loan published her heart-stopping chronicle of the RUC’s disastrous role in the Omagh bombing of 1998 she was insulted by unionists, abused by the chief constable and abandoned by Downing Street. The ombudsman was being warned by No 10 that she was on her own.

At least this time Hain has accepted her critique. Even so, he consigns it to the past. But the past lives on – the ombudsman insisted yesterday that Ronnie Flanagan, the former chief constable, had responsibility for everything that happened in the police force he commanded, whatever he did or did not know. He has not been called to account before a public tribunal, and no one expects him to be now. Indeed, after his retirement he has been reincarnated with her majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Flanagan wasn’t alone. He was part of an entire system. Who were the civil servants who staffed that security system in Northern Ireland during the Mount Vernon terror? Where are they now? What else were they doing to thwart justice while the state was investing in the Mount Vernon boys? What did these civil servants think they were doing? What did they tell the politicians sequestered in Hillsborough Castle? And the biggest question: what was the overarching agenda?

The Mount Vernon boys were state-sponsored assassins. Special branch ran their local leadership. We now know that British security services had penetrated all the paramilitary organisations. Was there ever an audit of all the murder, rape and pillage?

Collusion tells us about our institutions and their purpose. After 1987 – when the loyalist paramilitary organisations were beginning to contemplate peace – Britain re-armed, reinvigorated and refocused them, taking control through its proxies among the warlords, and prolonged the war. Their reputations as ruffians, religious maniacs and pumped-up thugs merely gilded the reputation reserved by the British as law-abiding peacemakers.

But by enlisting the Protestant militias as auxiliaries while presenting itself as a neutral arbitrator, Britain left itself vulnerable to exposure. It could not stop a father seeking justice for his son wherever he might find it – not from the UVF or Protestant politicians, but among the human-rights groups, in Dublin, in Washington and at the United Nations.

All these pressures are bearing down on Britain. It has been exposed not as peacemaker but as perpetrator, spreading terror and spilling blood; as the most powerful presence among the warlords. That is the national narrative we need to contemplate before we can consign collusion to the past.

‘Blame‘, written by Judith Jones & Beatrix Campbell opens…

read more about Blame & book tickets online