History
The constituency was created in 1983 by the merger of the seats of Hastings and Rye. The Conservative MP for Hastings since 1970, Kenneth Warren, won the new seat, while the Conservative MP for Rye since 1955, Bryant Godman Irvine, retired. Warren held Hastings and Rye until his retirement in 1992; during this period it was a safe Conservative seat, with the Liberal Party (now the Liberal Democrats) regularly coming second. Jacqui Lait held the seat for the Conservatives on Warren's retirement. However, in 1997 the Labour candidate Michael Foster narrowly defeated Lait, becoming the second-least expected Labour MP in the landslide of that year and turning the seat into a three-way marginal. Foster held the seat, again with slim majorities over the Conservatives, in 2001 and 2005, but lost it to the Conservative Amber Rudd in 2010. The Liberal Democrat vote has fallen considerably, leaving them in a distant third place.
Read more about this topic: Hastings And Rye (UK Parliament Constituency)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)