I  will be speaking at the Beyond Politics – Alternate Ways of Governing Society meeting at the Friends Meeting House tomorrow (Thursday, April 8).

Starts at 6.30, all welcome, entry by donation.

The Green Party is fielding more Parliamentary candidates than ever before – now electors in over 300 constituencies will have the opportunity to vote for the only party whose priorities unites social justice, sustainable society and sustainable environment.

We are the green shoots of British politics. Even in our hostile electoral system our presence is being felt and it is helping to renew our bedraggled political culture.

In the last European Parliamentary elections,  the Greens came ahead of Labour in the South East and the South West. Greens beat the Tories in Brighton and Hove, Oxford, Norwich, Liverpool and Manchester.

The devolved jurisdictions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have introduced forms of proportional representation and their governments are manifestly more representative of their voters. Not so in England where the unreformed Parliamentary electoral system has for the last 40 years distorted our political sentiments.

It is in local government that Greens have been able to get past our crazy electoral system. Already the Party’s impact is palpable.

Hampstead and Kilburn is a progressive constituency – the combined vote at the last general election shows that the anti-Tory vote is overwhelming. The addition of Kilburn wards makes the constituency even more like the Londoners who make London what it really is.

People say: but won’t voting Green risk letting in the Tory who currently trails behind Labour’s Glenda Jackson and the Liberal Democrats’ Ed Fordham? I say it is time for people to be allowed to vote for the candidate they really want to elect. If your priority is to keep the Tory out, don’t vote Tory.

Pressure for electoral reform is becoming irresistible – all the more reason to show by our votes that we want an electoral system that expresses Londoners’ green values, our social justice sentiments and diversity.

Let the green shoots grow!

You can contact me through this website

Beatrix

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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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