Martin J Walker.....Background and at Wikipedia
Born in Manchester, England, in 1947, I went to London in 1965 to attend Hornsey College of Art. Having been a top student there, I was expelled after the student occupation of 1968. Over the following thirty years, I was a libertarian/Marxist political activist and campaigner, involved in a wide range of anti imperialist and community campaigns. Throughout the seventies and early eighties I was part of the prisoners movement and researched police corruption and wrongful arrest, in London. In 1984, I took a job with the Labour Borough of Greenwich in south London, as head of the police committee support unit, which tried to make the police responsible to the ratepayers of the Borough
In 1985, when the miners strike began, while still at Greenwich, I went to work with Yorkshire NUM, advising the union and the pickets on their rights and on police strategy. When the strike ended I left Greenwich. Between 1985-86, I was employed by Manchester City Council to investigate the attacks by police officers on students in Manchester. Through the late Eighties into the early Nineties, I worked as an investigator for lawyers in criminal and civil cases and with many defendants in criminal and civil trials, with and without lawyers. In the late eighties, with others, I founded Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA), an anti-racist group which worked on the defence of people assaulted, fitted up and wrongfully arrested by the police in north east London.
In 1990, I began investigating and writing about the ‘health fraud’ movement and vested interests in science and medicine. From the time of publishing Dirty Medicine in 1993, I have continued working in this area. I have written books since the early seventies, always trying to write about campaigns and issues in which I have been directly involved.
