Made in 1988. Directed by Terry Flaxton:

Watch the hands of young men in prison, moving pens across the page, and you see a story scrolled on their scarred fingers and bulging, busted knuckles. Their heads bowed in concentration, lips sometimes moving as they spell words to themselves or ask, how do you spell ‘before’. . . or ‘gate’? And yet they have more to tell us than we might imagine about a passion for violence.

As a Writer in Residence at a prison, I gaze at these young men’s heads and hands as they write poems about everlasting love – their relationships are usually in crisis; about their babies’ births – so many are dads; their life stories – “I could write a book!” I promise them that they’ll surprise themselves, that they will do some beautiful writing and they will discover what that feels like.
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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

The Guardian, Monday November 14, 2005
The Sex Discrimination Act was passed 30 years ago this month, in a year when it was very heaven to be alive – 1975, the UN’s International Year of Women. It was in the sway of the women’s liberation movement and its delirious tumult, a year when the beautifully unruly mingled with the great and the good.

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?

The Observer, Sunday January 28, 2007
Nick Cohen’s mother and her shopping strategies guide us to his location on the left. It is a charming introduction – ethical consumption by his communist parents infused his childhood. I recognised the tone. Mine were communists and we were blessed by the belief that politics and active citizenship mattered. In our house, domestic and generational tumult roared over the terrain of Russia. My father, in raging exasperation, would shout, ‘The trouble with you is you’re a … a … social democrat!’

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.