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."[9] Thirteen years later, though, her hostility to radical protest was writ large in a report on the Poll Tax riots: "when the movement takes to the streets, the sectarian samurai poke their spears at police and loot the Body Shop".[10]
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".[11] 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."[12]
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' [13]
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. [14]
In July 2009, writing for the Guardian, a newspaper run by a foundation claiming dedication to protecting freedom of speech, she wrote strongly in support of surveillance of the public and vetting of authors before allowing them to present to children in schools.[15]
In Marxism Today, Campbell protested that, "anyone who respects children's accounts of child abuse 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."[16] The county council's report into the Nottinghamshire child abuse case she referred to listed the following children's accounts: