History
Before 1945, the Dagenham area was part of the Romford constituency. The MP for the latter seat since 1935, Labour's John Parker, continued to represent the Dagenham seat until 1983. Parker was the last serving MP to have been elected before the Second World War, and with 48 years in Parliament, remains the longest-serving Labour MP in history.
Dagenham has been held by Labour since World War II and is considered a safe seat. The far-right British National Party is very active in this area and its support has been steadily rising. It is home to a declining skilled manual industry such as the Ford Motor Company works, which downscaled production in 2001.
The British National Party received nearly 10% of the vote in the 2005 general election and in the 2006 local elections returned 12 councillors to Barking and Dagenham London Borough Council.
As of 2009 the new constituency of Dagenham & Rainham includes wards which have not traditionally supported the BNP or Labour, and the leaks of BNP databases has shown that membership in the area shown is diminishing.
Read more about this topic: Dagenham (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)