History
The constituency was created in 1950 when the former two-seat constituency of Brighton was split between two new single-member seats. It underwent boundary changes in 1955 and 1983, although not in 1974. Labour gained the seat in 1964 with a majority of just 7 (making it the most marginal seat in the country at the time), and increased its majority in 1966, but lost the seat in 1970 and did not gain it again until 1997. Dennis Hobden, the victor in 1964, was not only the constituency's first Labour MP but also the first Labour MP to be elected in Sussex.
Boundary changes in 1997 moved the town of Peacehaven, a semi-rural area, into the constituency. This was thought to favour the Conservatives, but instead Labour gained the seat in their landslide victory, and held it until 2010 when the Conservatives regained it. The Greens do not do as well here as in the neighbouring Brighton Pavilion constituency, where they gained their first MP in 2010.
Read more about this topic: Brighton Kemptown (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)