Through the late Eighties into the early Nineties, Martin J. Walker worked as an investigator for lawyers in criminal and civil cases and with defendants - with and without lawyers. In the late 1980s he co-founded Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA), a group which worked on the defence of people assaulted, fitted up and wrongfully arrested by the police in north east London . Throughout these years, he wrote four books about the police and crime. In 1990, he began investigating and writing about the ‘health fraud' movement and vested interests in science and medicine. His fifth book in 1993 - Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural healthcare , which took three years to research and a long time to write, was described by Christopher Bird, author of The Secret Life of Plants, as ‘a masterpiece of investigative journalism and attentive scholarship, elegantly written'. Since then he has published further titles including Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert strategies in British science policy and HRT: Licensed to kill and maim and most recently, Cultural Dwarfs and Junk journalism . For five years up until 2006 he was one of the legal advisors to the BBC 1 drama series ‘Judge John Deed'. Most of his writing can be accessed at: www.slingshotpublications.com .

Martin Walker Writes ….

Firstly let me thank JABS for putting links to my work on their site. If you read me here on the JABS site, you will know not just about my books, but about the shorter pieces that I write that tend to disappear down the cracks in the internet.

On January 2nd 2008, I released my latest short book about the Guardian journalist, Ben Goldacre, Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism: Ben Goldacker, quakbusters and corporate science . This book was ignored by the mainstream media despite the fact that it raised important questions about the Guardian , their journalists and vested interests. I published the book free as an ebook so that there would be no impediment to people reading it, not because I consider it to be valueless! I am trying to work out a policy for my work, which gets it distributed widely but also returns me some money. At the moment I am thinking about publishing everything I write or have written, as e material for free (with a small administrative charge for downloading), while hoping that enough people will order hard copy books, from the ‘print on demand' company that we intend to work with.

I followed up Cultural Dwarfs , with a twenty-page essay about the Guardian, it's relationship with a group called the Social Market Foundation, and the work of the science lobby in relation to the censorship of medical and health news. You can download this essay, Guardian of What? The Guardian, the science lobby and the rise of scientific corporatism for free from both the Whale              ( http://whale.to/vaccine/walker13.html ) and the One Click ( www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk ) sites.

In the next couple of months, I hope to bring out the first volume of The Hearing that contains my reports of the GMC prosecution case against Dr Andrew Wakefield, Dr Simon Murch and Dr Walker-Smith. The hearing begins again after a six-month break with the presentation of the defence case in the last week of March. My reports of the prosecution case can be found at www.cryshame.com.

The prosecution has used the break to its utmost advantage and there has been lots of material about vaccination published in the hope that it will influence the Panel in Dr Wakefield's case. All the parents of vaccine damaged children who will be demonstrating outside the GMC the day the hearing begins again are hoping that the Panel that is judging the case see sense and ask why none of the parents were asked to testify against the doctors. The answer is, of course, clear to any informed observer: all the parents of children treated at the Royal Free Hospital for gastrointestinal problems and related signs of regressive autism are one hundred per cent behind the doctors whom they believed treated them and their children with sympathy and exceptional clinical experience.

I will be back to tell you about more of my writing, especially in relation to the case of the three doctors, in the near future. In the meantime if you want to download anything relevant from my site ( www.slingshotpublications.com ) feel free to do so.

Martin J Walker

Martin Walker's Essay Review of Rose Shapiro's book 'Suckers'
Shaking hands with Monsanto and big pharma: The Guardian and Observer's ongoing war against alternative medicine.