Politics
The town is generally seen as a conservative area, and this can be backed up by the fact that in the 2010 national elections Mark Prisk was elected for the Conservative Party with a majority of the votes cast (53.8%). Bishop's Stortford's constituency, Hertford and Stortford, covers many other settlements including Hertford. Caroline Spelman, the Conservative Cabinet Minister, is also from the town.
The most controversial political issue for the town relates to the expansion of Stansted Airport. A long-standing protest group called Stop Stansted Expansion vehemently opposes unsustainable growth at the airport and is wholly against plans for a second runway.
The town has a Youth Council that meets once a month. It is made up of students from the local schools, and many local and youth issues are discussed.
The International Monarchist League is based here.
In December 2011 the Conservative council of Bishop's Stortford voted 13 to 3 in favour of cancelling its twinned status with Friedberg in der Wetterau in Germany and Villiers-sur-Marne in France. It is thought that anti-EU sentiment within the grassroots Tory party was behind the vote.
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Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)