Christ Church Meadow
Turner's majority increased to 7,778 in the 1955 general election which coincided with a major controversy over roads schemes in Oxford. A new bypass road was planned to go across Christ Church meadow, and many local people opposed building on the unspoilt area. Turner supported the building of new roads, pointing out that the City Council was not aiming to destroy "what has been a pride and joy for so many centuries", but instead to divert traffic from the city centre.
In November 1955, Turner led a revolt against the budget proposal to increase the rate of Purchase Tax. He argued that the way to reduce the cost of living was for the Government to "reduce and eventually abolish all artificial taxation, of which Purchase Tax seems to me to be the most artificial of all". Turner deliberately abstained from voting rather than support the government.
Read more about this topic: Lawrence Turner
Famous quotes containing the words christ, church and/or meadow:
“Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)