Electronic English

One of the most valuable things I think MPs contribute is their work on the issues that rarely are deemed newsworthy, or which very few people think about but which need lots of work below the surface. You just have to do a search of some of the committees backbench MPs set up or belong to to get a flavour of some of these.

I've written about one such issue that I feel strongly about for the Labour thinktank Progress. At university I studied History, which we perhaps commonly associate with hefty books and dusty archives. But history's a living thing: we're creating it every day, and today much of it is documented on websites.

So what happens when the subject a particular website covers finishes; which for current affairs happens every hour of every day? That documentary evidence is lost. Coupled with the gradual closure of local and regional newspapes, a vast amount of historical record - local, national and international - is disappearing to the extent that future historians will be able to find out less about today's society despite the contradiction that more information than ever is available to us all via the web.

That's the theme of my article, which you can read online here...at least for the foreseeable future!