Campbell was 14 years old when, in 1961, she took part in the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's march from
Aldermaston to London in protest against nuclear weapons, and was still a teenager when she joined the
Communist Party. At that time, the party was deeply divided over its relationship with the Soviet Union. She belonged to the party's anti-Stalinist wing that opposed the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In London, she and Bobby Campbell joined a dissident group within the Communist Party, founded by university lecturer Bill Warren, that produced a critique of both
Stalinism and the party's economic policy. From the early 1970s, Campbell's engagement with the Communist Party was increasingly as that of a feminist: from this perspective she challenged the tenets of the Communist Party, both its political approach to organising among women and its overall strategy. Geoff Andrews wrote of her opinions in his book
End Games and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964–1991 that feminism now "became a priority, not subordinate to some higher goal. It was a crucial part of redefining socialism". Campbell was one of a group of journalists on
The Morning Star who in the early 1970s challenged the editor to break the paper's exclusive ties to the Communist Party and the trade union movement, and open a dialogue with newly emerging social movements. After the appointment of
Tony Chater as editor in 1976, Campbell felt the struggle to reform the
Star had been lost, and resigned, joining the journal
Marxism Today and the
Gramscian New Times. By the end of the 1970s, Campbell was working principally for
Time Out, whose staff were involved in a long strike and occupation in 1981 over equal pay for all and for the right of staff to be consulted about major investments. Ultimately, she and the majority of the staff left and started the cooperatively-owned London magazine
City Limits. The emergence of the
women's liberation movement changed Campbell's life. With Nell Myers, she set up a women's liberation movement group in
Stratford, East London, and in 1972 was in the group of women Communist Party members that founded the magazine
Red Rag. It immediately opened itself up to women in the wider women's movement, describing itself not only as a Marxist but as a "feminist journal", and defining feminism as "the political movement which emerges as women's response to their own oppression". When the Communist Party banned
Red Rag, the editorial collective's response was "it's not yours to ban", and the journal continued to flourish for ten years. In the 1980s, Campbell's writing focused on the transformation of Britain by
Thatcherism. She set off on a six-month journey around England and wrote a polemical critique of
George Orwell's book
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and what she saw as the myopia of sexist socialism. She investigated the Conservative Party's appeal to women. She also became associated politically and professionally with the emergence of radical municipalism, particularly in London, under the leadership of Labour's
Ken Livingstone. In 1998, Campbell reported on a
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. Campbell also wrote in favour of now discredited allegations raised in the Cleveland Child sex abuse Scandal, as well as similar discredited allegations in Nottingham. On 9 February 1991, Campbell
appeared on television discussion programme
After Dark together with the then deputy director of Nottinghamshire social services Andy Croall and others. Campbell stood twice as a
Green Party candidate in local elections, (in the
London Borough of Camden) and in the
2010 parliamentary election (in
Hampstead and Kilburn constituency), where she obtained only 1.4% of the votes, the seat being held by Labour's
Glenda Jackson. That year, following the cancellation of a
Julie Bindel speech, Campbell wrote an opinion piece in support of Bindel, saying of the incident: "Transgender people who used to live as men and now live as women persuaded the May 2009
NUS women's conference to mandate its officers to share no platform with Julie Bindel." Campbell concluded:The transgender vigilantes should listen up, wise up and grow up, participate in, not proscribe, the debate they started. And their best friends in the NUS should do what best friends do: tell them to stop it, their politics stink. She characterized identifying as transgender as "a kind of an exemplar of a neoliberal version of what it means to be human, at its most idiosyncratic, i.e. you can choose! You can choose to be anything you like," adding: "Well, I'm sorry, you can't." ==Honours and citations==