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.

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.

Keep reading this piece over on The Guardian site

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.

This kind of surveillance was nothing new in the area. In 1880, a notorious raid on a nearby temperance hall halted “disgraceful proceedings” at which almost 50 men, half of them dressed as women, gathered “for the purpose of inciting one another to commit abominable offences”. They were dancing the cancan to the accompaniment of a blind harmonium player.

Raids on gay clubs were rife in the late 80s. “The biggest perpetrators of hate crime in the city were the police at that time,” says Mary Murphy, a lesbian city councillor. The effect was to activate the gay community, which forged an alliance with the city council, which, in turn, gave support to gay businesses. Now the place is so successful that it simultaneously welcomes and dreads hordes of straight invaders.

The ghost of missionary Anderton was finally laid to rest when the current chief constable led his gay colleagues’ contingent at EuroPride 2003, a 10-day Mardi Gras in the gay village.

“I love the village,” says Sergeant Jan Brown, one of the team that polices the 24-hour city centre. “It’s vibrant – and what could be nicer in summer than sitting by the canal, lovely food and lovely ambience? Crime? Next to nothing.”

A place notorious for “drinking, robbery and cruising” has been through a cultural revolution, says Pat Karney, one of the city politicians whose time as a councillor spans Manchester’s metamorphosis from a dirty old town run by rightwing elements of old Labour to a modernising metropolis run by a maverick, new-left council that is neither old nor New Labour. These municipal radicals took over the council during the 1980s when government money poured into inner-city regeneration and cultural entrepreneurs played midwife to Madchester’s pop renaissance.

But the very success of the gay village brought its own risks – it has had a trajectory which the gay quarters of other cities might recognise.

Back in the 1980s, there were only a couple of pubs on Canal Street, remembers Iain Scott, who now runs Taurus, one of the village’s many cafe/bars. “If you got off the bus and turned up your collar and turned left, you’d head for the Union or the Rembrandt – it was a sign to other people of your inclination.” Those were the days when gay punters had to “knock twice and ask for Dorothy”, Scott says. Gay men had cause to be wary, and as for lesbians, few bars made any women welcome.

The era of the bar-as-bunker changed in 1990 when Carol Ainscow and her business partner Peter Dalton bought a wreck of a building in Canal Street and opened up Manto, a gorgeous, glass-walled bar that turned everything inside out. Ainscow, a lesbian property developer from Bolton, says, “I didn’t feel comfortable in the places I was drinking in, and they weren’t particularly women-friendly. I felt sick of having to knock on doors and hide.”

French-style cafe society’s incarnation in Canal Street had a wider significance for the city, says Drew Stokes of Marketing Manchester. “We had the Hacienda, the made-in-Manchester new music and drugs culture, and the rise of frightening doormen but, for both gay and straight people, Manto and the village were stylish and safe.”

For all that, says Ainscow, “For the first six months we lost money: people were frightened to be seen.”

Metz, then run by Scott, followed across the canal from Manto, modelled on a Prague cafe/bar. “Our approach was, don’t discriminate, integrate, we don’t care how old you are, what language you speak, you are welcome.” That spirit was to define the village.

Every autumn, a new generation joins the city’s massive student population, curious, freed up, drinking too much and, for some, coming out. Michelle Reid arrived in Manchester in 1986 as a student from a small Northumbrian town, at a time when the gay village existed more in spirit than in space. “It wasn’t a beautiful place to be then, but it was magical. I looked around and saw all these gay people – it was a brave new world. I’d never come into contact with people with extremes, living a life, looking very different – I’d come from a place where there was only one black family – and I felt I could be part of this. There were moments when I thought, ‘Jesus – this is my life!’” Reid never left.

There had been a plan to clean up the canal and the dingy streets approaching Piccadilly station, but there had never been the cash. Then in 1988 a development corporation was set up by the government and, says one city hall insider, it “came riding into town with saddlebags bulging with money. It was like the IRA bombing of the Arndale Centre – we could access money for stuff we wanted to do, anyway.”

It was the ghost of Section 28 that seemed to spirit the gay village into existence. “There was no sense of a village,” recalls Ian Wilmott, a gay liberation activist and now a Labour councillor. “The main dance clubs were outside the village, and what gay space there was existed only once you went through the doors and paid your money. The concept of gay space didn’t exist. Section 28 was such a monstrous attack on civil liberties that hundreds of campaigners came together to oppose it. People were feeling besieged. We had no homeland, no part of the city. We needed somewhere … It had to be more than a club. We willed the village into existence.”

But if Section 28 brought together three communities – customers, commerce and the council – there was by this point another galvaniser: Aids. John Hamilton, now chair of the Village Business Association, arrived in the city 16 years ago as an HIV health adviser. “Everybody had heard the message from the government ads, and nobody was taking any notice.” He worked the venues and events to raise funds and awareness about Aids. All that activity, he says, was “integral to bringing the village together”.

When a vigil was organised spontaneously in the village in memory of a man killed by the virus, it metamorphosed into the Gay Pride every August bank holiday which, after a few years of sulks and spectacular success, climaxed in the triumphant EuroPride 2003. That, too, was backed by the city council.

The village’s hot sex, drugs and rock’n'roll culture was famously showcased at the end of the 1990s when the television screenwriter Russell T Davies, encouraged to “go gay”, wrote Queer As Folk. Nothing like it had ever been shown on British television: men at work, bickering, buddying, cruising, swaggering and shagging. If people weren’t already consuming the village as an urban erogenous zone, they became tourists to Canal Street, which was now, like Coronation Street, “As seen on TV”.

Businesses loved it, and their influx provided an attractive model which has been admired and attempted by other provincial cities such as Newcastle. But it can be a victim of its own success in that it can move through the cycle of undesirable area to desirable very quickly indeed and the gay people for whom the area was once a haven find that it soon becomes yet another place in which they feel alienated. A change in the gay village was under way, and punters felt as if they were in a zoo. “As soon as the corporate breweries arrived, out went discernment about who was coming into the area,” Scott says. “They didn’t care where the money was coming from, they just wanted to get ‘em in. The people working the doors didn’t care, either. They were predominantly big, straight guys who let loads of girls in for hen nights. So there were large groups of girls who felt they could have a fun time, they felt safe, they weren’t harassed. Says something about straight bars, doesn’t it?”

Former Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith opened his Essential club in 2000 and remembers truckloads of hen parties, “wearing bunny ears and flashing bras, having a savage night out. But they were followed by coachloads of lads”.

As Scott confirms, “Big groups of straight lads were looking for totty and late-night drinking, and they started taking it out on gay men.” By the beginning of the new millennium, one of the police officers patrolling the area noticed a “straightening of the village”. And it was generally agreed young, straight men cause the problems in city centres.

A safe sex worker in the village recalls recoiling from the hordes of party people “who didn’t understand the gay lifestyle. They were abusing us – undesirables without any manners, people who didn’t understand where they were”.

Sergeant Brown says, “The gay community are great – they’re very keen supporters of safer clubbing.” But two-thirds of the big new bars on Canal Street were now heterosexual and corporate, and some venues were “commercially driven to sell as much alcohol as possible, and didn’t care about the consequences”. Suddenly, the village seemed at risk from the straight invaders.

“I remember sitting in a bar reading the Pink Paper and a huge party of women came in, and I felt they were pointing and laughing at the funny gay people,” recalls Michelle Reid, now chief executive of one of Britain’s oldest HIV trusts. It was lesbians, above all, who found themselves unwelcome. Nick Dearden, a solicitor who regularly parties in the village, doesn’t have much time for “unchecked masculinity” at large, but says that “hen parties, a load of women out in the white stretch limo, can visit a lot of grief on your lesbian friends. They may celebrate the poofs, but straight women are not nice to lesbians.”

Brown reckoned “some straight men seem to think that gay men’s very presence is waving a flag at them”, and by meeting it with aggression, they felt they were “reinforcing their own sexuality”.

Difference, it seemed, had to be met by domination. “I’d like to say, ‘You’re welcome in my space – which is tiny, as it happens,’” added Dearden, “but I don’t want to have to account for myself.”

Now the village is changing yet again. “It would not exist without the clubs and bars,” says Martin-Smith. “The corporates moved into the village and they thought money could be made out of the pink pound. But the gay community began to think: you’re not investing in us, you’re exploiting us.”

Hamilton calculates that at least half a dozen straight, corporate bars on Canal Street have had to sell up in the past year or so. “You can’t just come in as a corporation and hope you’ll make money,” he says. “You have to know your clients.”

Claire Turner, the director of EuroPride, treasures the moment when the Slug & Lettuce chain was confronted by the community: the chain didn’t support EuroPride, but decorated its windows with rainbow bunting as if it did. “People just went in and pulled it down.” If it didn’t support the community, then the community would use its power and withdraw its custom. The Slug & Lettuce closed. Martin-Smith acquired it and cheekily reopened it as Queer, a dance and internet venue next to Velvet, an elegant eaterie, and Scott’s community cafe bar, Taurus, which offers free space to gay organisations and artists. “None of this is rocket science,” says Scott. “It is back to basics.”

When Steph Kay, formerly general manager at Manto, canvassed the banks to bankroll a women’s club, however, none would. But backed by Colin Rigby, whose Cruz 101 appeared as Babylon in Queer As Folk, she created Vanilla, the village’s only lesbian club. It prospers. She directs custom to other venues, because though her club may be small and perfectly formed, it can’t house a kitchen or a lounge; she puts on club nights at other venues, too, because Vanilla attracts a bigger constituency than can be satisfied by a little lesbian nook. “I have to get deliveries four times a week because our cellar is probably the smallest in the village,” she says, “but it’s a cracking business.”

The ratio of independents is growing, the space is becoming more diverse, and Ainscow reckons, “The village is going gayer again.”

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.

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.

But The Lion King demands something of them that they don’t deserve: that they minimise their literacy as spectators of nature. Children are now more informed than Disney about lions, hyenas and Africa. The science of natural history, popularised in nature programmes, and politicised by the Green movement, has transformed the way humans interpret animals. But Disney has deployed discredited anthropomorphism for a project that has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with a psychic crisis in America.

Lions are inscribed in human myths of power and pride. So it has been a hard lesson for Man the Hunter to learn that the lion community is sustained by Lioness the Hunter.

Climatic changes 25 million years ago created grasslands, and with them the great grazers – wildebeest and zebras. They were stalked by cats and dogs – the lion and the hyena. The lioness can run at only 80mph. But she is strategic, she stalks, she plans, she organises among her sisters. The lioness is the only cat to co- operate. She is a swift, surgical killer. Lions aren’t kings, they are studs. They hang around their communities, driven not by social mastery but genetic survival. Any addict of David Attenborough knows all this.

But in The Lion King we get a shocking reinterpretation of lion culture: in a story that has been dubbed Bambi in Africa, the narrative of mother and child has been displaced by father and child. King Mufasa fathers his cub and rules his community. The lionesses are almost erased: they slink, elegant, enigmatic and marginal. The death of Mufasa, the blond king with flaming mane, is plotted by the black prince, Scar. This thin, camp Polonius inhabits the shadows between lion territory and the cavernous ghetto of the hyenas. The racism is palpable. Scar mobilises the hyena horde to overwhelm his kin and cast them, with him, into the dark ages.

Now for the hyenas. Not so speedy as wildebeest or lions – they go at about 65 mph – hyenas are known to be the most sophisticated communities, organised around mother hunters. Their language of sound and sign is elaborate, their sociability renowned. What they lack in speed they make up for in strategy: they pre-plan their stalking and killing, they collaborate, they ambush, they are successful. Humans have reinterpreted their conviviality with contempt – the laughing hyena.

Because humans needed their myths of mastery and majesty they misread the relations between lions and hyenas. Humans assumed that hyenas scavenged their morsels from the great white hunter, the lion. We now know hyenas are so assiduous that lions often prey upon the hynenas’ harvest.

What does The Lion King give us? Hyenas as slithering and sly, squatters in an apocalyptic ghetto. This could be Compton, LA. When they celebrate Scar’s coronation, the hyenas are represented as not only Faustian but fascistic, dependent sidekicks of the royal cats. And the cats? Well, they can’t live without their kings.

Finally there is the landscape. Disney didn’t care that lions don’t live in jungles – we’ve got Simba living, like a happy hippie, in the jungle anyway. There is more to this than artistic licence, there is contempt for a continent: Africa is merely the set for an American parable.

The great Disney feature- length cartoons transformed landscape from a still life to an ambient star in its own right. Forests were not just the gothic maze of the fairy story, a lair of fright. Landscape became an April shower, a storm and, most magnificently, Tyrus Wong’s dense, misty meadow in Bambi. In The Lion King, the landscape is once again subordinate, flat and inert.

Not only has the West appropriated someone else’s prairie, it has subliminally scripted its own problem on to it. In the US and the UK there is a crisis of the flawed, flaky father; from this chaos The Lion King has rescued the royal father. This figure is simultaneously powerful king/president and paternal authority, presiding honourably and dutifully over his territory.

Oddly, the film lacks the passion of parenting. There is nothing so subtle and devastating as the mother’s murder in Bambi or mother love in the all-singing, all-dancing Dumbo. In this movie mothers are the disappeared ones in a populist fantasy whose object is to redeem the father and the reputation of presidents.

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