History
Famous as the birthplace of American-raised comedian and Hollywood film star Bob Hope, and more infamously, where the black youth Stephen Lawrence was murdered, the seat was held by high profile Tory Peter Bottomley for over two decades (as Woolwich West and then Eltham) before Labour gained the seat in 1997. After fairly comfortable victories then and in 2001, the Labour majority decreased quite significnatly in 2005, though Labour were able to resist the national swing against them in 2010 to hold the seat then.
The Eltham Conservative Association became the first in London to select a candidate, David Gold, by means of an open primary election where any voter on the electoral roll was entitled to attend and vote at a meeting chaired by Michael Portillo on 31 July 2006 at the Bob Hope Theatre.
Read more about this topic: Eltham (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)