History
The constituency was created in 1950, when the former two-seat constituency of Derby was split into two single-member seats.
A notable former MP for the seat was its first incumbent, Philip Noel-Baker of the Labour Party. He served as a Cabinet minister in the post-war Attlee government, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959 for his campaigning for disarmament. He had previously represented the former two-seat constituency of Derby since a by-election in 1936.
The former Cabinet minister Margaret Beckett, who previously represented Lincoln (under her maiden name of Margaret Jackson) from 1974 to 1979, has represented Derby South for the Labour Party since 1983. At that election Beckett won the seat with a majority of just 421 over the Conservatives, but has gradually built up healthier majorities since.
Read more about this topic: Derby South (UK Parliament Constituency)
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“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)