5

 

Walker’s method in this book (and his other ones) is to combine field research with searching philosophical critique of the tools at his and our disposal. Unlike many writers of the ‘left’, though, his concern is with citizens as human beings, not ciphers, which means his work is not only easy and exciting to read but also full of sudden insights into the way the arm of the state actually thinks….

 

It would be nice to go on and on quoting extracts from the book. More practically, every reader of ER should buy a copy, read it, then pass it around as many others as possible. It is quite honestly the most coherent and programmatic analysis of what goes on in this country today, why and what to do about it, ever. It should explode the myth that state research is an esoteric discipline undertaken by weird ultra leftists, fit only to be scribbled then xeroxed on scraps of paper; it also explodes the myth that whatever sort of government we elect, it will make a precious bit of difference. The State is, literally, well sewn up.

 

 

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After 1990, all my investigative work and my publications became coloured by a long investigation into the British and American Health Fraud movement, which drew me into what has more recently come to be called the Health Freedom Movement. In 1993, after a two year investigation, I published Dirty Medicine: Science big business and the assault on natural health care.

 

 Since Dirty Medicine, my general areas of interest have stayed the same; they include vested interests in science and medicine, industrial intervention in medicine and the creation of illness and the marketing of treatments by the medical monopoly. Between 1993 and 1998, I worked in and around the London organisations of AIDS dissidents, principally centred on the magazine and campaigning support organisation Continuum.