History
The constituency was created in 1983 by the division of the former constituency of Oxford. Abingdon had its own seat prior to 1983.
The former Conservative Minister John Patten, MP for Oxford from 1979, won the West seat on its creation and remained the MP until he retired in 1997. On that occasion the seat was gained for the Liberal Democrats by Dr Evan Harris, who held the seat until the 2010 General Election, when it was regained by Conservative MP Nicola Blackwood.
Read more about this topic: Oxford West And Abingdon (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)