Beatrix Campbell
Encyclopedia
Mary Lorimer Beatrix Campbell, OBE
(born 3 February 1947) is a British campaigning journalist and author.
Since the mid 1970s, she has published numerous articles and book reviews in such publications as Marxism Today
, Red Rag
, Time Out, Feminist Review, New Statesman
, New Socialist, The Guardian
, The Independent
, Scotland on Sunday
, The Scotsman
and the Sunday Mirror
. She describes herself as a communist feminist. She was born in Carlisle
and was one of the founders of Red Rag
.
Her books include Wigan Pier Revisited (winner of the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize); films include Listen to the Children, a documentary about the watershed Nottingham
child abuse
case; and Dangerous Places, Diana Princess of Wales - How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy.
. She was educated at Harraby Secondary Modern School and Carlisle and County High School for Girls. Her parents, Jim and Catherine, were Communist Party members and she had a sister, Tini, and a younger brother, Jimmy who also became a Communist. Campbell failed her A-levels.
journalist Bobby Campbell, a folk musician who went on to work at The Scotsman
in the 1970s. At the age of 23, while still married, she came out
as a lesbian. Her partner is Judith Jones, with whom she has co-authored a book, Stolen Voices (withdrawn under libel laws), and a play, All the Children Cried. She lives in France
.
around the time it was turning itself from a bulwark of trade union
officialdom towards a more feminist and multi-culturalist programme. She joined a reform faction founded by university lecturer Bill Warren in 1970 and was one of the 'Gramscians
' who "took leading positions in the party" when she joined the National Women's Advisory Committee. She worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star newspaper, with critics noting she received state subsidised holidays to Communist East Germany during this time and praised the country.
At that time, Campbell excused the party membership's identification with Stalinist oppression in Eastern Europe
: "… in the main it is a solidly working class part of the Party which is called Stalinist … only by virtue of the fact that they thought the CIA was about to take over Czechoslovakia and it was therefore politically correct that the Russians moved in
." However, Campbell did use the label 'Stalinist' as a negative, but what she meant by 'Stalinist' was those elements in the Communist Party who criticised the line put forward by its leadership. So she condemned the "Stalinists in the party who have actually realised a position which is a very comprehensive criticism of where the leadership is going".
In 1977 Campbell defended the Communist Party's revolutionary
credentials: "There is no way it is legitimate to say that the party isn’t revolutionary... the defeats, the comings and goings doesn’t make it an organisation that sells out the masses."
In 1984 Campbell suggested that rising unemployment would lead to the criminalisation of young men: "the form of boys' masculinity constitutes them as folk devils, a 'danger to society' ... they generate a kind of moral panic ... symbolised by the social nuisance of big bad boys who bite social workers". Seven years later, though, Campbell lost her critical distance on the criminalisation of young men reporting rioting in Blackbird Leys
: "The riots of 1991 were driven not by pain but by pride, the vanity of fragile masculinity... Some of the 'bad boys' have just made some crap estates even worse."
As Campbell's distaste for the mob intensified, her attitude to the forces of law and order softened. Her sympathetic interview with Derbyshire Chief Constable John Newing was titled 'A Fair Cop'.
In September 2008, she applied for membership of the Women's National Commission
, a government quango
set up to speak on behalf of UK women, and was successful.
In July 2009, writing for The Guardian
she wrote in support of surveillance of the public and vetting of authors before allowing them to present to children in schools.
In October 2009, she was announced as the Green Party Parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn
stating "We put at the absolute centre of our policies, the sustainability of social relationships and the need for a fundamentally fair society. We stand for social justice, respect and equality between the genders and the generations. And we don’t think that slicing public services to ribbons can be the way forward for British society."
aren't taken seriously," and for some reason professionals were reluctant to believe that Satanists were "organising rituals to penetrate any orifice available in troops of little children; to cut open rabbits or cats or people and drink their blood; to shit on silver trays and make the children eat it."
In 1998 Campbell reported on the Newcastle City Council
report into allegations of child abuse at the Shieldfield Nursery in the city in 1993. She claimed the council inquiry was "stringent" and had found "persuasive evidence of sadistic and sexual abuse of up to 350 children". The alleged perpetrators were workers at the nursery, Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, who had already been cleared of multiple charges in a criminal trial in 1994. They subsequently successfully sued the Council, the "Independent Review Team" who produced the report, and the local Evening Chronicle
newspaper for libel. Awarding Reed and Lillie the maximum possible damages of £200,000 each, the judge in the case made a "very rare" finding of "malice
" on the part of the Independent Review Team, in that "they included in their report a number of fundamental claims which they must have known to be untrue and which cannot be explained on the basis of incompetence or mere carelessness." One of the four people on the Independent Review Team was Campbell's close working partner Judith Jones (see above), who was previously involved in the Nottingham case.
Writing on the Sally Clark
case, Campbell rejected any feminist arguments based on the "suspicion that medical men play God and pathologise women's distress". Such feminist arguments, she thought, ignored women's psychoses, or what Campbell called "the dangerousness of motherhood: it can make some women lose their minds, it makes some mothers murderous." These speculations about Clark's mental state proved unfounded, however, as she was cleared of murder on appeal. In 2007 Campbell defended paediatrician David Southall
, whose involvement in the Clark case was being investigated by the General Medical Council
, saying "David Southall established a gold standard in the detection of lethal child abuse." Southall was struck off the Medical Register for gross professional misconduct.
However, Dr Southall is back on the medical register after winning an appeal against this decision in a higher court. The Appeal Court's decision means he is able to practise medicine again
and an Honorary Doctor of Letters at the Open University
. She was awarded a Simon Fellowship from Manchester University.
Her journalism has gained several awards both for Campbell’s books and newspaper articles. She was awarded the Cheltenham Literature Festival Prize in 1984 for her book Wigan Pier Revisited and the Fawcett Society Prize for her book The Iron Ladies. Campbell was named Campaigning Journalist of the Year by the 300 Group, an initiative to get more women into Parliament founded by Lesley Abdela
, and later involving Elizabeth Vallance and Shirley Williams. Her Dispatches
documentary "Listen to the Children" resulted in her receiving the Independent Television Producers First Time Producers award.
In June 2009 Campbell was made an OBE
. She argued that "by clinging to symbols and rituals that belong to a cruel imperial order the government compromises the gonged" but defended herself on the grounds "getting gonged confers recognition of 'citizens' contributions' to a good society – in my case equality – and the gesture affirms our necessity; the radicals – not the royalists – are the best of the British".
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
(born 3 February 1947) is a British campaigning journalist and author.
Since the mid 1970s, she has published numerous articles and book reviews in such publications as Marxism Today
Marxism Today
Marxism Today was the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was disestablished in 1991. It was particularly important during the 1980s under the editorship of Martin Jacques...
, Red Rag
Red Rag
The Red Rag blogsite was at the centre of a UK political scandal that became known as smeargate. The scandal broke on 11 April 2009 when it was reported by the Daily Telegraph that Gordon Brown's special adviser, Damian McBride, had sent a series of emails to left wing political blogger Derek...
, Time Out, Feminist Review, New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
, New Socialist, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, Scotland on Sunday
Scotland on Sunday
Scotland on Sunday is a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published in Edinburgh by The Scotsman Publications Ltd and consequently assuming the role of Sunday sister to its daily stablemate The Scotsman...
, The Scotsman
The Scotsman
The Scotsman is a British newspaper, published in Edinburgh.As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 38,423, down from about 100,000 in the 1980s....
and the Sunday Mirror
Sunday Mirror
The Sunday Mirror is the Sunday sister paper of the Daily Mirror. It began life in 1915 as the Sunday Pictorial and was renamed the Sunday Mirror in 1963. Trinity Mirror also owns The People...
. She describes herself as a communist feminist. She was born in Carlisle
City of Carlisle
The City of Carlisle is a local government district of Cumbria, England, with the status of a city and non-metropolitan district. It is named after its largest settlement, Carlisle, but covers a far larger area which includes the towns of Brampton and Longtown, as well as outlying villages...
and was one of the founders of Red Rag
Red Rag
The Red Rag blogsite was at the centre of a UK political scandal that became known as smeargate. The scandal broke on 11 April 2009 when it was reported by the Daily Telegraph that Gordon Brown's special adviser, Damian McBride, had sent a series of emails to left wing political blogger Derek...
.
Her books include Wigan Pier Revisited (winner of the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize); films include Listen to the Children, a documentary about the watershed Nottingham
Nottingham
Nottingham is a city and unitary authority in the East Midlands of England. It is located in the ceremonial county of Nottinghamshire and represents one of eight members of the English Core Cities Group...
child abuse
Child abuse
Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
case; and Dangerous Places, Diana Princess of Wales - How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy.
Early life
Born Mary Lorimer Beatrix Barnes in Carlisle, EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. She was educated at Harraby Secondary Modern School and Carlisle and County High School for Girls. Her parents, Jim and Catherine, were Communist Party members and she had a sister, Tini, and a younger brother, Jimmy who also became a Communist. Campbell failed her A-levels.
Personal life
Campbell was married to the Morning StarThe Morning Star
The Morning Star is a left wing British daily tabloid newspaper with a focus on social and trade union issues. Articles and comment columns are contributed by writers from socialist, social democratic, green and religious perspectives....
journalist Bobby Campbell, a folk musician who went on to work at The Scotsman
The Scotsman
The Scotsman is a British newspaper, published in Edinburgh.As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 38,423, down from about 100,000 in the 1980s....
in the 1970s. At the age of 23, while still married, she came out
Coming out
Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....
as a lesbian. Her partner is Judith Jones, with whom she has co-authored a book, Stolen Voices (withdrawn under libel laws), and a play, All the Children Cried. She lives in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
.
Political development
Campbell joined the Communist Party of Great BritainCommunist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
around the time it was turning itself from a bulwark of trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
officialdom towards a more feminist and multi-culturalist programme. She joined a reform faction founded by university lecturer Bill Warren in 1970 and was one of the 'Gramscians
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
' who "took leading positions in the party" when she joined the National Women's Advisory Committee. She worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star newspaper, with critics noting she received state subsidised holidays to Communist East Germany during this time and praised the country.
At that time, Campbell excused the party membership's identification with Stalinist oppression in Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
: "… in the main it is a solidly working class part of the Party which is called Stalinist … only by virtue of the fact that they thought the CIA was about to take over Czechoslovakia and it was therefore politically correct that the Russians moved in
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet Union and her main satellite states in the Warsaw Pact – Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic , Hungary and Poland – invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in order to halt Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring political liberalization...
." However, Campbell did use the label 'Stalinist' as a negative, but what she meant by 'Stalinist' was those elements in the Communist Party who criticised the line put forward by its leadership. So she condemned the "Stalinists in the party who have actually realised a position which is a very comprehensive criticism of where the leadership is going".
In 1977 Campbell defended the Communist Party's revolutionary
Revolutionary
A revolutionary is a person who either actively participates in, or advocates revolution. Also, when used as an adjective, the term revolutionary refers to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor.-Definition:...
credentials: "There is no way it is legitimate to say that the party isn’t revolutionary... the defeats, the comings and goings doesn’t make it an organisation that sells out the masses."
In 1984 Campbell suggested that rising unemployment would lead to the criminalisation of young men: "the form of boys' masculinity constitutes them as folk devils, a 'danger to society' ... they generate a kind of moral panic ... symbolised by the social nuisance of big bad boys who bite social workers". Seven years later, though, Campbell lost her critical distance on the criminalisation of young men reporting rioting in Blackbird Leys
Blackbird Leys
Blackbird Leys is a civil parish and ward in Oxford, England, and is one of the largest council estates in Europe. According to the 2001 census, the ward had a population of 5,803. Unlike most parts of the City of Oxford, the area has a civil parish. The parish was created in 1990. Its 2001 parish...
: "The riots of 1991 were driven not by pain but by pride, the vanity of fragile masculinity... Some of the 'bad boys' have just made some crap estates even worse."
As Campbell's distaste for the mob intensified, her attitude to the forces of law and order softened. Her sympathetic interview with Derbyshire Chief Constable John Newing was titled 'A Fair Cop'.
In September 2008, she applied for membership of the Women's National Commission
Women's National Commission
The Women's National Commission was a United Kingdom advisory non-departmental public body , it was set up in 1969 to advise government on women's views and to act as an umbrella body for UK-based women's groups in their dealings with government....
, a government quango
Quango
Quango or qango is an acronym used notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere to label an organisation to which government has devolved power...
set up to speak on behalf of UK women, and was successful.
In July 2009, writing for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
she wrote in support of surveillance of the public and vetting of authors before allowing them to present to children in schools.
In October 2009, she was announced as the Green Party Parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn
Hampstead and Kilburn (UK Parliament constituency)
Hampstead and Kilburn is a borough constituency electing one Member of Parliament to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.-History:...
stating "We put at the absolute centre of our policies, the sustainability of social relationships and the need for a fundamentally fair society. We stand for social justice, respect and equality between the genders and the generations. And we don’t think that slicing public services to ribbons can be the way forward for British society."
Child abuse controversies
In Marxism Today, Campbell protested that "anyone who respects children's accounts of child abuseChild abuse
Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
aren't taken seriously," and for some reason professionals were reluctant to believe that Satanists were "organising rituals to penetrate any orifice available in troops of little children; to cut open rabbits or cats or people and drink their blood; to shit on silver trays and make the children eat it."
In 1998 Campbell reported on the Newcastle City Council
Newcastle City Council
Newcastle City Council is the local government authority for Newcastle upon Tyne, a city in Tyne and Wear, England. The council consists of 78 councillors, three for each of the city's 26 wards...
report into allegations of child abuse at the Shieldfield Nursery in the city in 1993. She claimed the council inquiry was "stringent" and had found "persuasive evidence of sadistic and sexual abuse of up to 350 children". The alleged perpetrators were workers at the nursery, Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, who had already been cleared of multiple charges in a criminal trial in 1994. They subsequently successfully sued the Council, the "Independent Review Team" who produced the report, and the local Evening Chronicle
Evening Chronicle
The Evening Chronicle is a daily, evening newspaper produced in Newcastle upon Tyne, covering Tyne and Wear, southern Northumberland and northern County Durham. It was founded in 1885 by Joseph Cowen...
newspaper for libel. Awarding Reed and Lillie the maximum possible damages of £200,000 each, the judge in the case made a "very rare" finding of "malice
Malice (legal term)
Malice is a legal term referring to a party's intention to do injury to another party. Malice is either expressed or implied. Malice is expressed when there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a human being...
" on the part of the Independent Review Team, in that "they included in their report a number of fundamental claims which they must have known to be untrue and which cannot be explained on the basis of incompetence or mere carelessness." One of the four people on the Independent Review Team was Campbell's close working partner Judith Jones (see above), who was previously involved in the Nottingham case.
Writing on the Sally Clark
Sally Clark
Sally Clark was a British solicitor who became the victim of an infamous miscarriage of justice when she was wrongly convicted of the murder of two of her sons in 1999...
case, Campbell rejected any feminist arguments based on the "suspicion that medical men play God and pathologise women's distress". Such feminist arguments, she thought, ignored women's psychoses, or what Campbell called "the dangerousness of motherhood: it can make some women lose their minds, it makes some mothers murderous." These speculations about Clark's mental state proved unfounded, however, as she was cleared of murder on appeal. In 2007 Campbell defended paediatrician David Southall
David Southall
Professor David Southall, OBE, is a UK paediatrician who is a controversial expert in Fabricated or Induced Illness , and who has performed significant research into sudden infant death syndrome....
, whose involvement in the Clark case was being investigated by the General Medical Council
General Medical Council
The General Medical Council registers and regulates doctors practising in the United Kingdom. It has the power to revoke or restrict a doctor's registration if it deems them unfit to practise...
, saying "David Southall established a gold standard in the detection of lethal child abuse." Southall was struck off the Medical Register for gross professional misconduct.
However, Dr Southall is back on the medical register after winning an appeal against this decision in a higher court. The Appeal Court's decision means he is able to practise medicine again
Honours and citations
Campbell has received several citations and awards from British universities. She is an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Salford University, an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Oxford Brookes UniversityOxford Brookes University
Oxford Brookes University is a new university in Oxford, England. It was named to honour the school's founding principal, John Brookes. It has been ranked as the best new university by the Sunday Times University Guide 10 years in a row...
and an Honorary Doctor of Letters at the Open University
Open University
The Open University is a distance learning and research university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom...
. She was awarded a Simon Fellowship from Manchester University.
Her journalism has gained several awards both for Campbell’s books and newspaper articles. She was awarded the Cheltenham Literature Festival Prize in 1984 for her book Wigan Pier Revisited and the Fawcett Society Prize for her book The Iron Ladies. Campbell was named Campaigning Journalist of the Year by the 300 Group, an initiative to get more women into Parliament founded by Lesley Abdela
Lesley Abdela
Lesley Julia Abdela MBE at the London Gazette. "For services to the advancement of Women in Politics and Local Government." Hon D.Litt)...
, and later involving Elizabeth Vallance and Shirley Williams. Her Dispatches
Dispatches (TV series)
Dispatches is the British television current affairs documentary series on Channel 4, first transmitted in 1987. The programme covers issues about British society, politics, health, religion, international current affairs and the environment, usually featuring a mole in an organisation.-Awards:*...
documentary "Listen to the Children" resulted in her receiving the Independent Television Producers First Time Producers award.
In June 2009 Campbell was made an OBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
. She argued that "by clinging to symbols and rituals that belong to a cruel imperial order the government compromises the gonged" but defended herself on the grounds "getting gonged confers recognition of 'citizens' contributions' to a good society – in my case equality – and the gesture affirms our necessity; the radicals – not the royalists – are the best of the British".
Publications
- Feminist Review, Issue 5 by Campbell Beatrix; Azar Tabari; Margaret Stacey and Others (1980)
- Sweet Freedom: Struggle for Women's Liberation, by Anna Coote, Beatrix Campbell & Christine Roche (1982), Picador Books
- Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and politics in the Eighties, Beatrix Campbell (1984), Virago Press
- The Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory? by Beatrix Campbell (1987), Virago Press
- Unofficial Secrets: Child Abuse - The Cleveland Case, by Beatrix Campbell (1988), Virago Press
- Goliath: Britain's Dangerous Places, Beatrix Campbell (1993), Methuen Books
- Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy, by Beatrix Campbell (1998), Women's Press
- And All the Children Cried, by Beatrix Campbell and Judith Jones (2005), Oberon Books
- Agreement: The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland, by Beatrix Campbell (2008), Lawrence & Wishart