Who replaced Barbara Castle as MP for Blackburn in 1979?
Blackburn 2015, the MP was former Secretary of State for Justice and former Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. Previous MPs for Blackburn include former Labour cabinet minister Barbara Castle, who represented the town in Westminster from 1945 to 1979. The current distribution of seats (May 2018) is 44 seats for the Labour Party, 17 for the Conservatives and 3 for the Liberal Democrats. In the 1970s Blackburn experienced its first significant wave of Asian immigration and became a focus for far-right politics. In 1976, two National Party councillors were briefly elected, including John Kingsley Read. The next resurgence of support for the
Barbara Castle Barbara Castle Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, PC, GCOT ("née" Betts; 6 October 1910 – 3 May 2002) was a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament for Blackburn from 1945 to 1979, making her the longest-serving female MP in the history of the House of Commons until that record was broken in 2007 by Gwyneth Dunwoody. She later became the Member of the European Parliament for Greater Manchester from 1979 to 1989 and subsequently a member of the House of Lords, having been granted a life peerage in 1990. One of the most significant