It's all Tim Ireland's fault. Almost two years ago he wrote an article called Why Politicians Need Weblogs which explained why a weblog is a useful channel of communication between an MP and his or her constituents. I didn't know about anything about all of this until I saw him give a talk based on How To Run a 'Proxy' Weblog on Behalf of Your MP at NotCon in June 2004. It sounded like a good idea to me.
My MP is Martin Linton and whilst he has his own official web site he and his staff are all too busy to keep it particularly up to date, so I've been thinking for some time about putting an unofficial site together that would be easier to keep up to date. But like many of my projects I was too busy to do anything about it.
Then a couple of weeks ago, I was given a leaflet about a meeting where Martin Linton would be speaking to members of the Wandsworth Stop the War Coalition. I went to his web site to get more information, only to find that this was one of the meetings that they had been just too busy to mention. At that point I decided that this site was more important than some of my other projects so I put them to one side and set this site up.
The site is intended to track whatever the current Battersea MP is doing. It will contain information about voting records and speeches made in the House of Commons, links to news stories and any other information that might be interesting. If you have a story that you think we should be covering then please email it to dave@battersea-mp.org.uk.
I should make it completely clear that this site is completely unofficial and has no connection whatsoever to Martin Linton or any of his staff. However I'd like to point out that if anyone in Mr. Linton's office wants to contact me then I'd be only too happy to give them an account so they can add stories to the site.
