Before "News and Political Views"

I publish "News and Political Views" for my own sake, to campaign, to review and to account for my work as a political representative.

It's my current website and blog, although I also use Facebook (Michael Edwards, me4sd) and Twitter (Michael Edwards, @MeadowsCllrMike). "NaPV" hosts a log of entries on news, events, political speeches and political statements. It also hosts a biography and my main statement of beliefs and values ("Socialism and a free society") - "I am a democratic Socialist. Proud to be a member of the Labour Party. I believe it’s important to have beliefs." Web-site logs are very handy for enabling written content to be easily shared by providing the url as a link - through other applications and messages, and written reports to meetings. "NaPV" started after 2 Labour Party hosted web-sites were withdrawn.

The latter public blog hosted by the Labour Party from 2008 to 2011 ("Labour blogs", suspended link) became very text heavy (I may not even have an image of how it looked) so when I started "NaPV", there was an intention to be very graphics based. (Most of the text has now been loaded; some from early 2010 and from 2012 posts are perhaps outstanding.)

During this period, I ran for Parliament in South Derbyshire (2008-10; me4sd.com - suspended link) and this had a very graphics based approach (many of the graphics are available from a Flickr folder).

The first public blog hosted by the Labour Party used an application called web-in-a-box and I claimed it was the largest web-site by any Labour Party councillor in the country (there was report that showed posts by author). Most of this material is now loaded, but the formatting could be better and some more images could be loaded. (From 2007, it started to collate entries posted on the "Labour blogs" web-site). Communications further back relied much more upon election leaflets, newsletters and reports to meetings. In Mapperley ward, there was first "Labour Foward", and later "Mapperley Rose". Reports to branch meetings were labelled such, but are later headed "New Labour Plus" (cos New Labour alone was never going to be quite enough). This web-site will seek to load all the previous material published on the internet plus election literature and newsletters from the past, and other communications that sought to explain current issues, particularly party members. Mainly they represent the simplest copies of the text, with formatting and text colours often lost. Like Wordpress, WIX doesn't easily allow text tables. Blog entries are amended to correct any spelling mistakes found and clarify meaning when it has been completely lost (there are times when I've written enormously long sentences). There are some posts that were just so insignificant or so unfinished that they were not worth re-loading. Previously confidential reports to private meetings that are now shared with have the confidential parts redacted. Not all of the material is political. Stories from supporting Shrewsbury Town Football Club sometimes make it. There's possibly some reviews of events and the arts and there's a couple of family stories. Dating the posts is tricky cos some of the material is from the previous century - which modern web-sites often don't understand. Even, worse the plain version of WIX doesn't allow you to type the date in - you have to click back month by month - so the publication dates are more recent and don't match the original posted dates. Nor does WIX allow pages to be time-stamped, so the order of the posts may be wrong sometimes. Also problematic are links within articles which may be wrong (with time they may be either refreshed or declared as suspended).

A plain archive of politics views and campaigning activity And for what purpose? The original aims of accountability are not much served here - and indeed, I expect the readership to be very low. But reviewing the past does refresh learning and prompt re-evaluation; and on occasions new posts on "NaPV" will want to refer back to material published here.