January 2005 Archives

Martin Linton is the Labour Party MP for the constituency of Battersea in London. He won the seat in the 1997 General Election, beating the Conservative MP John Bowis. He retained the seat in 2001 and 2005. He is currently a Private Parliamentary Secretary (PPS) in the Department for Constitutional Affairs

He was born in 1944 in Sweden and educated at Limpsfield Primary School, Christ's Hospital, the Université de Lyon and Pembroke College, Oxford (where he read PPE). Before becoming an MP he was a journalist, most recently writing for The Guardian.

Contact details for Martin Linton and his team can be found on his official web site.

In the interests of full disclosure I'd better explain who I am and why I've built this site.

My name is Dave Cross and I live in Balham, which is part of the London Parliamentary constituency of Battersea. I'm a freelance computer consultant specialising in open source software and web technologies. If you're interested, you can read my weblog here.

I've been a Labour Party supporter for as long as I can remember (well, except for a brief flirtation with the Green Party in the late 1980s) but I didn't get round to actually joining the party until the disappointment of the 1992 General Election. By that time, however, the Labour Party had moved a long way from the Socialist party that I wanted it to be. When the leadership refused to listen to the membership and imposed its own candidate for the London Mayoral Election of 1999 it was the final straw and I resigned my membership. As a good friend put it "I didn't leave the Labour Party - they left me".

The Labour Government continues to act in ways that appall me. Their actions in taking the British Army into the invasion of Iraq make me ashamed to admit that I voted for them.

However, with another General Election due very soon I'm afraid that I will be voting Labour again. I despise the Labour leadership and I don't think that Martin Linton is a particularly good constituency MP, but I still believe that this is preferable to the danger of a Conservative MP or (even worse) a Conservative government. My forthcoming vote for the Labour Party should therefore be seen as a tactical anti-Conservative vote.

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.