WestDevonConservatives.com
Title
Torridge & West Devon Conservatives
Description
The beautiful hills, valleys, coastlines and moorland of the west of Devon makes up the second largest constituency in England in terms of geographical size. The constituency stretches from Bideford along the North Devon coast to Hartland, and in the south from Chagford across Dartmoor to Tavistock and the Bere Peninsula aside the Tamar Valley. The constituency contains a large part of Dartmoor and is mostly made up of market towns such as Okehampton, Holsworthy, Great Torrington and Hatherleigh, as well as the aforementioned Stannary Town of Tavistock and the ‘Little White Town’ of Bideford, which nestles on the banks of the River Torridge near Northam and the romantically named village of Westward Ho!.
Politics in both Torridge and West Devon has always been a competitive affair, with Conservatives and Liberals vying for popularity. Past MPs for the area include Lord John Russell, a reforming Victorian Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine, Jeremy Thorpe served Bideford, and for a brief while Mark Bonham Carter scored an early by-election victory for the Liberals in the old Torrington constituency before being unseated at the next election by Percy Brown for the Conservatives. Conservative Sir Peter Mills is remembered with great affection for his qualities of being an honest, hardworking local MP, whilst turncoat Baroness Nicholson became notorious for her defection from Conservative to Liberal Democrat. Between 1997 and 2005 the seat was held by Lib Dem John Burnett, who retired in 2005 having had his majority cut in 2001 by the new Conservative candidate Geoffrey Cox, who was subsequently elected MP in 2005.
This is a rural constituency with rural issues. Population sparsity works against fair funding for local services, which are consistently under funded by the Labour government on a per-capita basis in comparison with the national average or particularly Labour dominated areas. The on-going depression in Agriculture, most recently aggravated by Foot and Mouth, continues to alter the face of the local communities and means less reliance on the traditional means of earning a living, whilst more and more people look towards Barnstaple, Exeter and Plymouth for a job.
Contact
- Torridge and West Devon Conservatives
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