I’m reading Owen Hatherley’s LRB review (3 November 2022; archived) of Richard Vinen’s Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain (“The unofficial title of ‘second city’ has changed hands many times. York, Norwich, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have all taken a turn. Since the First World War, Birmingham has generally been considered the UK’s second city”), and I have a question about this passage:
Birmingham became prominent because of its industrial power, but its history is very different from that of the ‘industrial North’. It sits in the middle of England but it is not ‘Middle England’; it is one of the most multicultural places on earth, but it is not exotic. The upshot is that this economically and demographically important place is relatively culturally obscure.
I looked up “Middle England” in Wikipedia and was told that it is “a socio-political term which generally refers to middle class or lower-middle class people in England who hold traditional conservative or right-wing views”; is that what it means here? How do my UK readers understand the term? (I think of Birmingham mainly as the etymon of brummagem; we discussed its accent a decade ago.)
I take it to be the English equivalent of “the plain people of Ireland”.
“Middle America” envy?
“Middle America” envy?
So sez Wikipedia.
“Middle England” generally refers to the middle-class, conservative-voting “South” (i.e. south of the “Midlands” where Birmingham is), far from the dark Satanic mills of Lancashire, the mines of Yorkshire, or the industrial heartland of the Black Country. Basically south of Birmingham, east of Bristol, west of London, I’d say? Now I think about it, there are some similarities with Middle America.
The “multicultural” aspect of Birmingham is a comparatively recent development. Per the 2021 census the city’s population was by then 51.3% non-white, but back in 1961 when it was still 97.6% white (and the future members of Black Sabbath were adolescent boys in some of its less posh neighborhoods) I still don’t think it was what people had in mind by “Middle England.”
If you were to try to locate it on a map, how would “Middle England” differ from “the Home Counties”?
That’s the thing, I can’t figure out if “Middle England” is primarily geographical, sociological, or political.
If you were to try to locate it on a map, how would “Middle England” differ from “the Home Counties”?
[Brit who left ~30 years ago, so you’re probably going to get an outdated sense of the term.]
“Middle England” is not defined geographically, but culturally. And it’s defined differently whether the politician appealing to it is of the left or the right.
conservative with a small ‘c’ yes. That is not so far right as Thatcher or Boris or Farage and certainly not Liz Truss. My central idea of ‘middle England’ politically would be Ted Heath merged with Soc-Dem era Roy Jenkins.
I’d say Middle England was mildly against quitting Europe (but also fairly grumpy that the European ‘project’ hadn’t delivered — I think John Major/Maastricht Treaty was the watershed). The Brexiteers are an unholy alliance of extreme right with extreme left, so pretty much by definition outside ‘Middle England’.
Now that quitting EU has been a total frigging disaster, Middle England is pissed off with politicians generally. I think a significant proportion will vote Labour this year, but with some distaste, and only because they’d have a gutsful of the current bunch of Tories.
I think the whole Wikipedia article is a good overview of the term, but trying to distill it further down to the opening sentence or paragraph will cut away too much.
It’s one of those terms used by commentators to describe who politicians are trying to address, as opposed to a term used by the politicians or addressees themselves.
@zunggg “Middle England” generally refers to the middle-class, conservative-voting “South” (i.e. south of the “Midlands” where Birmingham is), far from the dark Satanic mills of Lancashire, the mines of Yorkshire, or the industrial heartland of the Black Country. Basically south of Birmingham, east of Bristol, west of London, I’d say? Now I think about it, there are some similarities with Middle America.
I’d say that’s pretty thoroughly wrong. For example Yorkshire is not all mines/Industrial. Sunak’s constituency is Yorkshire (Richmond); Harrogate and York are genteel; I’d put them (or rather the bulk of their populations) in Middle England. County-town or suburban, not city-centre. “suburban” includes the bulk of London.
If you insist on a geography, I’d consider ‘Betjeman Country’, and note his “the prettiest suburb in England” is in Sheffield.
I’d say that’s pretty thoroughly wrong. For example Yorkshire is not all mines/Industrial.
I don’t think zunggg was trying to provide an accurate description of current reality, but rather a quick overview of popular and doubtless antiquated clichés.
zunggg’s description was trying to fit “Home Counties” (maybe as a cliché) — which is a geography, albeit with rather elusive boundaries. So it would never have fitted ‘Middle England’ — no matter at what era of antiquity.
Rural North Yorkshire has always been solidly Conservative-voting and Middle England.
@Hat’s o.p. is that [wp’s “Middle England”] what it means here?
Substantially, yes. wp’s description is broadly correct. (I’d de-emphasise the “right-wing” these days — chiefly because that wing has now gone so far right it’s the lunatic fringe.) “Middle England” would never call itself socialist (small ‘s’), OTOH they see the NHS as one of the crown jewels of England, and are appalled it’s getting run into the ground.
wrt Birmingham, we should note it has some very posh suburbs (Neville Chamberlain MP for Egbaston — which includes the cricket ground — for most of the inter-war years; although now it’s a Labour constituency: Preet Kaur Gill of Indian ancestry, which ties up with @JWB’s characterising its multi-culture as recent.)
So parts of Birmingham might be “Middle England”, but mostly not. Also worth noting Wolverhampton, a little north of Birmingham, was Enoch Powell’s constituency up ’til his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech — 1968 delivered to West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. “Middle England”/Ted Heath was appalled; not least because it was immigrants from the Commonwealth who in large part kept aforementioned NHS running.
I see wp’s “Modern popular usage” attributed to Thatcher, so post-dates Heath; nevertheless that’s who Heath had in mind in sacking Powell. Thatcher might have thought of herself as “Middle English”, and brought up in a rural market town in what we might describe as East Midlands would easily be “Middle England” (not “Home Counties”), but she was no longer a Middle Englander by the time she’d done more damage to the British economy than the Luftwaffe.
This list at the bottom of the Wikipedia article is something. (Also, the hivemind is incapable of preserving alphabetical order.)
Afternoon tea
Anglophilia
Art
Castles
Country clothing
Cuisine
Demographics
Education
Folklore
Fête
Landscape garden
Identity
Innovations and discoveries
English language in England
Middle England
Museums
People (list)
Religion (Church of England)
Science education
Sunday Roast
“Middle England” is definitely sociopolitical rather than geographic – the latter is “the MIdlands.”
I agree with AntC’s characterisation of it, pretty much.
Heath’s reaction to Powell’s speech is a welcome reminder that the Tory party was not always a midden of xenophobic arseholes and cosplayers of xenophonic arseholes pursuing supposed electoral success. It is good to be reminded that it is possible to be right-wing politically and still be a decent human being. May we live to see their like again!
[Powell himself was another thing entirely. I’m perfectly sure that he genuinely believed all that crap. Not for nothing is he my go-to example of a highly intelligent extremely stupid person.]
@DE: How does Powell compare to, say, John McWhorter? Or any number of academics who conflate narrow expertise with universal wisdom, to be applied to burning issues of the day?
Well, I didn’t say he was the only example …
I haven’t been following McWhorter’s slide to the right (I don’t gawp at car crashes either), but Powell is a good paradigm case because he was both an extremely clever academic and a highly competent professional politician (in some respects, even an admirable one.) He wasn’t just a professor unable to recognise the limits of his own expertise (and he didn’t leverage his reputation in one field to artificially bolster his standing in the other, like some politically salient academics one can think of.)
Powell would still be a good example if he hadn’t been an academic at all.
like some politically salient academics one can think of
Oh, right.
I also mostly agree with AntC’s characterisation. If I have to desribe an archetypal representative of Middle England, I probably would put them in the Home Counties, but that certainly doesn’t mean Middle England is located there.
While it is a political term, I think a fundamental part of Middle-England-ness is a lack of interest in politics – Middle Englanders fairly reliably turn out and vote, but their ideological positions aren’t the result of much consideration, and may be very incoherent.
I do disagree that Brexiteers “are an unholy alliance of extreme right with extreme left”. Certainly there are parts of the extreme left that are anti-European, but they’re not electorally significant. Most of the (former?) Labour voters who voted for Brexit are mostly pretty moderate in most respects – Labour’s equivalent to Middle England, in a way.
I live in what was Enoch Powell’s constituency, though its boundaries have changed somewhat. It’s changed hands repeatedly in recent years, though my ward is depressingly solidly Conservative.
There was a joke (maybe a running one in multiple episodes?) on _Are You Being Served?_ about the purportedly high quality of curry in Wolverhampton. But I now realize I don’t know if the premise was that it was plausible-if-comical-sounding (because Wolverhampton had ended up with one of the earlier large influxes of South Asian immigrants) or comically implausible (because as of the date of the joke Wolverhampton was the last place you would expect to find high-quality curry).
I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I want to say “county cricket”.
Somewhat to my surprise, the also-non-geographical “Little England” remained per the google books ngram viewer more common than “Middle England” until 1996.* Although perhaps both bigrams have had a variety of different senses and referents that may have to some extent shifted over time.
*Until 1993 in the BrEng subcorpus, although that doesn’t seem that dramatic a difference.
“Daily Mail reader, loved Thatcher, probably white, maybe a bit racist. Not manual laborer, but not highly educated either. NOT from the Midlands! Not necessarily raging fascists.”
The above stream of consciousness came from my wife, who lived most of her life in the East Midlands. I asked her, “When you hear Middle England, what do you think of?”
An oddity of Birmingham is that unlike virtually all other large cities it is not located at an obvious geographical feature. No mountain; no coast, no river (unless you count the river Cole.) Any examples of other large cities with the same characteristic? My recollection is that it was put where it is to be as far as possible from three major cathedrals — Worcester, Lichfield and Coventry.
An oddity of Birmingham is that unlike virtually all other large cities it is not located at an obvious geographical feature.
Yes, that’s addressed in the review:
London : Birmingham :: Abidjan : Yamoussoukro
Discuss.
Wikipedia states (idk how reliably) that Birmingham was one of five English towns (the others being Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds & Sheffield) that were not even among the nation’s 30 most populous at the Restoration but by 1750 less than a century later had grown to be among the seven most populous (exceeded only by London and Bristol). So something was happening (rhymes with Rindustrial Evolution?) that suddenly made the traditional geographical-feature factor less relevant to urban prominence and success?
The review goes into all that at length.
Various geographic factors were crucial in the growth of such towns during the Industrial Revolution — principally proximity to coal mines and ports, and especially in the case of Birmingham and Manchester, access to rivers for barge transportation. The first factories used fast-running water for power, so appeared in the hills of central England. But once steam power appeared, factories spread to the lowlands. Liverpool was important because it was where cotton from the US was imported.
Actually, I’ve long been wondering: Moscow is on a river, but on a random place on that river, right? And it’s on one of the smaller rivers of the region…?
Middle England is the traditionalist section of the country: people who largely voted for Brexit and are now disappointed by its flawed implementation, are friendly and tolerant to all races, but against further mass immigration, and generally voted Conservative in the past but are now turning towards the Reform party, especially now that the Conservatives have moved far towards socialism and have raised the tax burden to its highest since the late 1940s. Geographically it is spread over the whole country but tends to be concentrated in the better-off suburbs, the small towns, and rural areas. The people of Middle England are mainly white, but not completely; I estimate that at least five percent of them are not.
@Hat The review goes into all that at length.
Thanks, so I think the Brits here should stop retelling that. Does the review point out Birmingham-Coventry was the centre of the Brit motor industry (when there was such a thing); and a huge amount of light engineering that serviced it?
factories spread to the lowlands.
In particular, vehicle assembly needs large, flat areas of land for production lines in contrast to the aforementioned dark satanic mills in the water-fast-running hills.
Maybe people mean different things by “all that,” but I thought the review treated the sudden 18th/19th century boom of Birmingham as an (unexplained) given and then talked about what happened after that.
I don’t have a good sense of the geographical spread of the one-time UK motor industry. Maybe Birmingham was where they made the dull-but-worthy cars that didn’t get exported but were made in large numbers for the domestic market? Just looking at wikipedia it seems likely that the TR-3 my dad drove when I was born was assembled at the Speke works in Liverpool and the Sunbeam Alpine that replaced it when I was maybe three years old hailed from Ryton-on-Dunsmore (the works there having been subsequently reduced to manufacturing Peugeots until finally being demolished in 2007). My wife’s BMW-origin Mini which we are currently looking to replace (it having been damaged beyond repair, in the opinion of our insurer, by a falling tree shortly before Christmas) apparently came from Cowley in Oxfordshire.
If I suddenly had a sufficiently large financial windfall, I might commission the Morgan folks in Malvern, Worcs to build me something, but they shouldn’t count on that happening.
Ah, if you want more on that growth than the review provides then you will have to do some research. Report back!
now that the Conservatives have moved far towards socialism
Hey! Can I come and live on your planet? It sounds so much nicer than the real one!
I do disagree that Brexiteers “are an unholy alliance of extreme right with extreme left”. …
Middle England is the traditionalist section of the country: people who largely voted for Brexit …
I appreciate the EC has always been problematic for ‘Middle England’, and indeed probably divides them right down the middle.
And I left UK permanently just after the Maastricht brouhaha, so I might be out of touch. But …
The Brexit referendum was won by a tiny margin — much smaller margin than the referendum in 1975 — and on barely 70% turnout. So I don’t think any sector “largely voted” for anything. Specifically, the “traditionalist” sector could be expected to vote as recommended by their traditional party.
The Tories had a ‘Eurosceptic’ wing — that had campaigned to have a referendum in the first place. So it was only the non-centrists (on each wing) who campaigned to leave.
“… loved Thatcher …” [@chuchuflete’s wife]
Hmm. Even when Thatcher was Prime Minister, she was described by the wags as the leader of the Opposition. Note that although wp attributes “Middle England” to her, they go on to say she barely used it, and it was John Major who deployed the phrase. Because Thatcher had become more extreme and betrayed Middle England; Major was desperately trying to regain the Tory’s hold.
In particular, Major was trying to get the Maastricht Treaty adopted, against the Maastricht Rebels in his own party — who were on the right wing. And Labour had its own rebels on the left wing:
I think “Middle England” loves the free movement into Europe — particularly cheap package holidays in the East European capitals now free from Warsaw Pact durance, and retirement villas on the Costa del Sol. It may be they’re mildly racist against immigrants from Commonwealth countries (“immigrants” who’ve lived in UK for several generations, of course); but Europeans in actual foreign Europe are OK; also Polish truck drivers and hospitality workers are OK.
@DE Can I come and live on your planet?
I agree that @Graham’s descriptions seem divorced from any reality I know.
Domestic British political alignments and divisions on the Common Market (not yet rebranded as a “Union,” which probably would have been imprudent) were rather different in 1975 than they were decades later when Brexit rolled around.
To cut and paste rather than summarize/paraphrase:
The ‘Yes’ campaign was officially supported by Wilson[13] and the majority of his cabinet, including the holders of the three other Great Offices of State: Denis Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer; James Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary; and Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary.[citation needed] It was also supported by the majority of the Conservative Party, including its newly elected leader Margaret Thatcher — 249 of 275 party members in Parliament supported staying in the EC in a free vote in April 1975[13] — the Liberal Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party.
Tony Benn, Secretary of State for Industry, was one of the senior figures in the No campaign.
The influential Conservative Edward du Cann said that “the Labour party is hopelessly and irrevocably split and muddled over this issue”.[13] The ‘No’ campaign included the left wing of the Labour Party, including the cabinet ministers Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and Barbara Castle who during the campaign famously said “They lured us into the market with the mirage of the market miracle”. Some Labour ‘No’ supporters, including Eric Varley and Douglas Jay, were on the right wing of the party, but most were from the left. The ‘No’ campaign also included a large number of Labour backbenchers; upon the division on a pro-EC White Paper about the renegotiation, 148 Labour MPs opposed their own government’s measure, whereas only 138 supported it and 32 abstained.[3]
“Many Conservatives feel the European Community is not good for Britain … The Conservative party is divided on it too”, du Cann — head of the Conservatives’ 1922 Committee — added,[13] although there were far fewer Eurosceptic figures in the Parliamentary Conservative Party in 1975 than there would be during later debates on Europe, such as the accession to the Maastricht Treaty. Most of the Ulster Unionist Party were for ‘No’ in the referendum, most prominently the former Conservative minister Enoch Powell, who after Benn was the second-most prominent anti-Marketeer in the campaign.[14] Other parties supporting the ‘No’ campaign included the Democratic Unionist Party, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, and parties outside Parliament including the National Front and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Executive Summary by JWB: So at the time you really had to decide whether you were on the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party’s* side of the issue or were instead on Plaid Cymru’s side of the issue.
*Not to be confused with the Progressive Unionist Party, who were a different group of folks, possibly aligned behind the scenes with a different set of paramilitary gunmen.
Thanks @JWB. My earlier post was defending my
[Brexiteers] “are an unholy alliance of extreme right with extreme left”
To use ‘Brexiteers’ of the 1975 referendum or 1992 Maastricht Rebels would be anachronous. And my “alliance” is deliberately provocative: they were not allied, they wouldn’t be seen on the same platform together — indeed their grounds for wanting out of Europe were entirely opposite.
But what you’ve quoted IMO confirms my claim that centrists (of both major parties) have remained pro-Europe throughout 50~60 years; it’s the extremes who have been anti. And in “centrists” I include much of ‘Middle England’.
@JWB I don’t have a good sense of the geographical spread of the one-time UK motor industry.
wp has a decent enough history 1900-1939. Plenty of mention of Birmingham-Coventry; Oxford(shire) counts as Midlands for these purposes [**]. Beware the article in general has much more coverage of today’s industry, which really is just an offshore assembly plant for S.E. Asian companies.
[**] There are two Oxfords: one with the dreaming spires; t’other where the real world lives and produces motor vehicles. They barely meet. The dreaming spires one is not Middle England; even if Middle Earth might be thereabouts.
an unholy alliance of extreme right with extreme left
For Americans, I’m sure I count as “extreme left” (I think Attlee was a great Prime Minister and have a coffee mug with a picture of Aneurin Bevan on it.)
I actually have some sympathy myself with the old-guard lefty anti-Common-Market position; it wasn’t irrational to see the group as an antisocialist endeavour at the time, and the treatment of Greece in 2010 was an almost perfect vindication of this view (I have a Hellenophile relative who voted Leave entirely for this reason, and I see her point.)
But times change, and you only have to look at who was pushing the Leave vote to see which was the right side. Offshore billionaires and willing conduits of dark Russian money. And the mechanism whereby the vote was swung has since become all too familiar: stoke racism and xenophobia to get people to vote against their own interests. It woz the racism wot won it (by a whisker, as the bastards* would rather we don’t remember.)
* © John Major, Prime Minister 1990-1997, when “decent Tory” was not an oxymoron.
So we are to suppose that in the interlude between 1975 and 2016 Plaid Cymru and the SNP switched from being xenophobes to being xenophiles? In any event, the post-EU administration in Westminster has thus far not repealed either metrication or decimalisation of the currency, so what’s the [British-expletive-goes-here] point, one might well ask.
Well, yes. Plaid was originally quite fascist-y, in Saunders Lewis’ day. It wasn’t always leftish economically, either. As I occasionally point out to my good friend the not-even-a-little-bit-fascist-or-racist quondam Plaid candidate for this very constituency, there is even now something of a tension between even friendly and inclusive nationalism of the sort they now espouse, and the internationalism that marks proper socialism.
(Incidentally, it was good to read in TFA of the antiracist activism of Communist union officials in the heyday of Birmingham’s car industry.)
It’s childish and superficial, but from my distant vantage point I immediately thought Brexit was a bad idea by just looking at Nigel Farage’s face. I fully approve of anyone outside the U.S. making similar judgments based on, say, Newt Gingrich’s face.
It’s not my place to opine whether Brexit was a good idea or a bad one, but one thing that fascinated me is how a democratic country with (essentially) a two-party system deals with an issue that crosses party affiliation. It was hard for anti-Europeans to get their voices heard when both parties were led, until the referendum, by Europhiles.
And debates in parliament are often a good spectacle. Which helps.
I immediately thought Brexit was a bad idea by just looking at Nigel Farage’s face.
But times change, and you only have to look at who was pushing the Leave vote to see which was the right side.
Seconded both. And knowing Boris’s history as Journalist and Mayor of London: wouldn’t trust him with the petty cash at a lemonade stall.
For Americans, I’m sure I count as “extreme left”
Me too. And I voted/campaigned against EEC in 1975 (with Tony Benn and Neil Kinnock) — because it was a capitalist conspiracy and Heath had got a bad deal. And UK still had a chance to rebuild relations with the Commonwealth.
I was opposed to the specific terms of the Maastricht treaty — as indeed were several EC members, who negotiated themselves carve-outs — which is exactly what Major should have done, both to save his political face and for the good of the country.
I didn’t take part in the 2016 referendum because I don’t live in UK any more. But I would have voted to remain (reluctantly). Being in NZ, I have experienced how UK kicked the Commonwealth in the balls/I well understood Brexiteers were dreaming there was anything they could recover. Every country is now part of a power/trade block; a divorced UK would be ignored in its one-bedroom flat staring at the wall.
there is even now something of a tension between even friendly and inclusive nationalism of the sort they [Plaid] now espouse, and the internationalism that marks proper socialism.
Good point. Fake it until you make it, comrade!
No country ever got as many major carve-outs from the EEC and EU as Britain. And there were valid reasons for that. But it doesn’t make sense to act like Britain got a raw deal.
Powell is a good paradigm case because he was both an extremely clever academic and a highly competent professional politician …
Whilst we’re divaricating, I would seek to know m’learned colleagues mind … wp’s write-up seems unbelievably glowing:
*Can* you learn Greek in two weeks? Props to the mater. Let’s presume he already knew Latin so was familiar with the idea of gender, declensions, agreement, … wot we do not ‘ave in English.
Was Powell’s academic work on y Gymraeg of value for study of the language? Or was it an English-speaking lawyer’s view on a translated text?
Was Powell’s academic work on y Gymraeg of value for study of the language?
Well, Cyfreithiau Hywel Dda Yn Ol Llyfr Blegywryd is actually in Welsh, though that is probably the work of his co-author (I haven’t read it.) It’s a study of one of the Middle Welsh law collections.
Said Stephen J Williams is presumably the same fellow as wrote my Elfennau Gramadeg Cymraeg (a grammar of Literary Welsh in Literary Welsh.)
Hywel’s laws are more interesting from a social and historical viewpoint than a literary one AFAIK.
*Can* you learn Greek in two weeks?
The question pretty much answers itself. Still, he was evidently a clever bugger. He’s supposed to have known a non-trivial amount of Urdu, too.
Define “learn.” Gaining or surpassing the skill set expected of grammar school boys after two years of how many lessons a week, in two weeks of doing nothing else, with a skilled instructor? Not that implausible to me, we are not talking Cambridge entrance exams here. (His father was a headmaster, but WP has nothing about his mother’s attainments before marriage).
People can learn a surprising amount of a language in two weeks; I’ve done it myself (not vouching for the “two weeks” part, but you know what I mean). Not enough to actually know the language, but enough to have a strong sense of it, read simple materials, and impress people. And let’s face it, how much Greek does the average Oxbridgian who took it for years actually know? Could they pick up an unknown text and read it confidently, with full awareness of shades of meaning? (We discussed that issue some years ago.)
Or what Lars said while I was typing.
I suppose I learnt Modern Greek well enough to have conversations in in a couple of weeks, but I had an A Level in Classical Greek, which is cheating. (This was also still the period where you could get things lke major newspapers which were pretty nearly in New Testament Greek.)
enough to have a strong sense of it, read simple materials, and impress people
No great level of proficiency is needed to impress people with your Mad Language Skillz in the UK. I suspect that the somewhat breathless tone of the Powell WP article reflects this a bit (though Powell clearly was pretty damn good at such things.)
I’m old enough to remember when David Cameron found the mainstream conservative fraction of the European Parliament not conservative enough for the Conservatives and co-founded the next more conservative fraction in 2009. It has generally unpleasant members, most of them tiny splinter parties with the notable exceptions of PiS and the Fratelli d’Italia.
On economic matters, the Conservatives aren’t conservative, of course – but they aren’t socialist either, quite the opposite. The “mini-budget” was a gem of liberal purity that the Libertarian Party of the US probably watched with envy (assuming they didn’t own any stock in UK companies). The empty-headed Liz Truss has learned nothing from this disaster, BTW; just a few weeks ago she gave a speech at the “Conservative” Political Action Conference and proved it at length.
Then came Thatcher, made the whole thing overtly capitalist, and successfully negotiated an immense rebate on the UK’s membership fee. Decades later this rebate was still a subject of political discussion in other countries; in German it was called the Britenrabatt, and there were many calls to abolish it until Cambridge Analytica obviated that problem. There were other concessions as well, e.g. keeping the pound without even pegging it to the € (the way the Danish crown is).
The SNP started out as what its name says: nationalists. By 2014 (I visited a few months before the referendum), they were nothing of the sort; they were (and AFAIK are) a left party that figured the only way to get a country not dominated by Tories was to cut England loose. Tellingly, all residents of Scotland were allowed to vote in the referendum, and many who weren’t UK citizens did so.
Nationalism is very many things. The nationalism of the weak doesn’t have to make the same claims as the nationalism of the strong. The nationalism of internal solidarity doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with a nationalism of external aggression. The nationalism of cultural revitalization will be different from the nationalism of exclusion.
Though admittedly, aggressive nationalists will appropriate the language and symbols of the decent, which makes the lines difficult to maintain as soon as bad nationalism arrives.
I don’t believe in decent nationalism. Anyone who believes “my nation is inherently better than others” is ripe for the plucking by autocrats and warmongers.
I know an American who spent a year or two circa 1970 doing graduate work in classics at, um, I think the University of Edinburgh. A university located somewhere on the island of Great Britain, at any rate. At some point while he was there Powell stopped by and gave lecture or talk or something on some fairly abstruse philological topic of potential interest to grad students but of no obvious current political import, and he was (says my informant) at least as good in that context as typical full-time career classicists who did not have day jobs as MP’s.
@Hat: That “my nation is inherently better than others” is well past my “decent”. But this may be more about semantics and the definition of nationalism. Where do you place the struggle for independence in, say, the Baltic republics, or the movements for linguistic and cultural survival of Breton, or Uighur, or Greenlandic?
Plaid Cymru started out very much as a vehicle for preserving the Welsh language and culture from the wicked English, and had some very unpleasant ethnonationalist vibes at the time.
They are still very much into preserving/promoting the language, but long since realised that this is scarcely a vote-winner given that most Welsh people don’t speak Welsh, and many of the di-Gymraeg feel threatened at the prospect of being potentially second-class citizens in their own country. Plaid have got better at defusing such fears, which is good in itself and also welcome to someone like me who actually does want to see the government active in language promotion (though I have doubts about how effective this can be in the long term.)
The Plaid pitch at the moment seems to be basically socialist, with the added proviso that the English are hopelessly Tory and the only prospect of escape lies in separating Wales from England. I do not share this pessimistic view of the English, whom I regard as God’s creatures after all. (Also, see my remarks on socialism and internationalism above.)
I will go find somewhere an empty room with very thick walls and a very heavy door, open the door and yell into the room a definition of Zionism — any will do, by friend or foe — and quickly shut the door and lock it behind me and throw away the key.
I don’t believe in decent nationalism.
A fine position for an anarchist, but in the real world with ethnocentric states and multinational states with various modes of ethno-cultural interactions there is still a need to distinguish between degrees of indecency.
Anyone who believes “my nation is inherently better than others” is ripe for the plucking by autocrats and warmongers.
Well yeah. Europe having suffered two severe bouts of warmongering in nearly living memory (and many other skirmishes), you’da thought EU would be the mechanism to guard against autocrats.
Then how is it that Erdogan and Orbán can yank Europe’s chain so often and so disruptively? (Turkey isn’t even a full member.) And Greece bare-facedly lying about its economy.
I think one of the difficulties for “Middle England” is that Brits see themselves as keeping their word/taking literally agreements Britain has signed up to. Then it’s easy for the Brexit tub-thumpers to point at other EU countries’ ‘informal economies’.
This was the case with the European Working Time Directive, which caused major problems with doctors’ rotas, largely because (at least as interpreted in the UK) it made no distinction between (say) a paediatric houseman, who indeed became a disaster waiting to happen when their shifts were too long, and (say) an ophthalmology senior registrar, who could generally count on sleeping away most of their on-call and actually quite liked the salary boost that came with an ostensible 120 hour week.
I remember a UK ophthalmologist asking a French colleague how they coped with all this. The Frenchman was genuinely astonished that the Brits were actually trying to abide by the letter of the Directive, when this was so obviously a stupid thing to do.
(The BMA played an inglorious role in this, as I remember it, by interpreting the Directive as literally as possible as a negotiating strategy, blithely ignoring specialties where the effects were quite different and highly damaging to what was already a safe service. Many units had to close out-of-hours services altogether as a consequence, which in turn led to their daytime activities becoming unviable too.)
If strong pre-existing cultural differences mean that an identically-worded rule is going to be interpreted/applied in practice in radically different ways in different areas, that’s actually a pretty meaningful signal that an institutional set-up that predictably imposes the same rules with the same wordings on all those areas is probably not a good idea and each area should instead be governed according to locally-determined rules that are a better fit with its particular cultural particularities and peculiarities. Unless of course there is a Felt Need to impose the Right Way of doing things by force and arms on those culturally habituated to doing them the Wrong Way. But if so, be clear about that.
should instead be governed according to locally-determined rules that are a better fit with its particular cultural particularities and peculiarities
In principle, the EU does in fact officially subscribe to that idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(European_Union)
There may have been an element of bad faith in the UK interpretation of the Working Time Directive. And after all, it’s not as if the UK did not actually have a major part in the drafting of such rules, politically convenient though it was for congenital liars like de Pfeffel Johnson and Farage the Fraudulent to pretend otherwise.
But of course, the EU has not always lived up to its principles, any more than any other organisation in this sad sublunar sphere. Doesn’t make them bad principles, and doesn’t mean that the organisation is an evil conspiracy. (But no Hatter needs to be told this. We have Logic here.)
It’s a perennial complaint. Every good thing was ever squandered by Eurocrats. (Then they don’t let Johnson interpret away the Northern Ireland protocol).
The story on Enoch Powell’s website, if you can call it that, is even better: Ellen Mary Powell gave up teaching in order to learn Greek and then teach it to her son.
Brits see themselves
I used that wording to allow that Middle Englanders might be deluded in that belief. But thank you for the examples where it seems to be true.
de Pfeffel of course isn’t from Middle England and never was: he’s a toff and a congenital liar. Why anybody ever voted for him is the point at which I throw up my hands and disclaim any association with the country I was born in. (But then why did anybody ever vote for that other blond — even in 2016, let alone 2020, and especially 2024? It’s not as if anybody could allege he keeps his word.)
Conservatives have moved far towards socialism and have raised the tax burden to its highest since the late 1940s.
Ah, perhaps friend meant Socialism for the rich.
The [Liz Truss Tory] “mini-budget” was a gem of liberal purity that the Libertarian Party of the US probably watched with envy (assuming they didn’t own any stock in UK companies).
Quite. Truss also isn’t of Middle England. She seems always to have been stuck in student politics [from 0:20 here, and Ian Hislop HIGNFY passim, cont. p 94].
I don’t believe that voting eligibility was different in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK. You had to be a citizen of the UK, Ireland, or a commonwealth country, just as is the case for general elections. Residency isn’t and wasn’t enough.
@Jonathan D: No, the franchise for the referendum was much more expansive, with respect to age and citizenship. However, it is true that mere residence in Scotland was not enough. Neither my brother nor his wife are British subjects, but she was eligible to vote while he was not.
Just realised you were talking about the independence referendum in 2014, not Brexit. But voting rights were still restricted to British, EU, or Commonwealth citizens there, in line with local elections at the time.
Getting back to David’s question:
Actually, I’ve long been wondering: Moscow is on a river, but on a random place on that river, right? And it’s on one of the smaller rivers of the region…?
I understood Moscow’s prominence is basically due to the Golden Horde. The Mongols devastated the more important trading cities and cultural centers of Rus, but unassuming Moskva was just the right size to be a good vassal and well located geographically to collect tithes on the Horde’s behalf from other Rus settlements. Over time Moskva leveraged that position to consolidate control, and then expanded into the vacuum left behind by the Horde’s decline.
I know a lot of people from outside London who voted for Brexit basically as a “fuck you” to London. This includes British of African and South Asian heritage, so “racism” played no obvious part in their vote, more a vague feeling that Londoners are arrogant and needed to be brought down a peg, and Londoners were all “Remain”. Ironically, as far as I can tell in my fairly regular trips to the UK, London has not suffered a whit from Brexit whereas the very people who voted Leave are now doing even worse.
Over time Moskva leveraged that position to consolidate control, and then expanded into the vacuum left behind by the Horde’s decline.
Exactly, and I think the crucial ruler was Vasily I, who married the daughter of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, married his daughter to Emperor John VIII Palaeologus of Byzantium, and kept making official submission to the Horde until it was safe to ignore them, setting the stage for his brutal grandson Ivan III to crush the independent duchies and create a centralized Russian state with an autocratic ruler.
@AntC
Indeed, 66 Labour MPs voted against the against the Maastricht Bill on the third reading. But while they included MPs on the left of the party like Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, by no means all of them were – I don’t think Peter Hain or Tessa Jowell have ever been accused of being on the extreme left by anyone sane. And while the margin in the Brexit referendum was narrow, the fact remains that more than 50% of those who voted did vote for leaving the EU, and I don’t think you can say they were all extremists. Like it or not, there are plenty of people in Britain whose views aren’t particularly extreme but who weren’t keen on the EU, including many Middle Englanders and fairly ordinary working-class inhabitants of the cities and towns of the Midlands and Northern England.
Middle England undoubtedly did love free movement for themselves, but most pro-Brexit people seemed to believe it would magically continue. (Much like the farmers and fishermen who apparently thought all the EU regulations would go with nothing to replace them, and, God help us, the Indian restaurant owner who thought without all these European immigrants, they would let people in who knew how to cook.)
And “It may be they’re mildly racist against immigrants from Commonwealth countries (“immigrants” who’ve lived in UK for several generations, of course); but Europeans in actual foreign Europe are OK; also Polish truck drivers and hospitality workers are OK”? I didn’t have you down as quite that much of a Pollyanna! In the runup to the referendum, we were treated to lots of interviews with very polite people in small towns and villages expressing their fears of being overrun with Poles.
Why would anyone have thought Poles would be a better fit in England than oh let’s say for example Jamaicans (huzza the Windrush etc.)? Surely being Anglophones and cricket enthusiasts and some sort (even if lapsed and only ancestrally) of Protestants ought to count for more in terms of cultural compatibility than merely having white skin.
You expected racism to be rational?
Wait, now David E. is calling the decision to join the Common Market (or maybe this was just Maastricht later on that let citizens of other EU nations live and work in the U.K. as of right without getting permission from the U.K. government under U.K. law) racist? I mean, there are certainly prior historical examples (the U.S. and various Latin American nations) of countries that encouraged mass white immigration from Lower Slobbovia and other such benighted parts of Europe in order to dilute the non-white percentage of their population. (In Argentina, I think, this immigration policy was called something in Spanish that translates as “bleaching” or “whitening.”).
Wait, now David E. is calling the decision to join the Common Market (or maybe this was just Maastricht later on that let citizens of other EU nations live and work in the U.K. as of right without getting permission from the U.K. government under U.K. law) racist?
You’ve lost me.
unassuming Moskva was just the right size to be a good vassal and well located geographically to collect tithes on the Horde’s behalf from other Rus settlements
I’ve heard trade in pelts had something to do with it. Moscow controlled pelt harvesting to the north of it and it was a sort of currency at that time in those places. But the original question, as I interpret it, wasn’t why this principality rather than any of the others in North-East Rus, but why this spot on this river. I don’t think there can be a real answer. Berlin doesn’t seem to occupy a geographically prominent spot either.
Both Moscow and Berlin started out as late comer settlements. So, why this spot on the river? Simple, the better spots were already taken. It required a series of historical accidents for both settlements to end up becoming the most important in their regions, and Berlin arguably was still an afterthought among German cities before the 18th century.
The nationalism of cultural revitalization will be different from the nationalism of exclusion.
that hasn’t been true, generally, in the jewish world. the zionist movement has never really admitted a distinction between the two faces of its project, though its tactics in relation to diasporic jewish cultures have sometimes been less based in physical violence than those it uses on palestinians (and sometimes not). and the parts of the yiddish world that have specifically embraced a cultural nationalism have been the ones to make their peace with zionism, and to lend it their practical support even when they hold a theoretical distance. the Bund, for instance, largely set aside its anti-zionism after 1948, and the largest organizations that claim its legacy (the Workers Circle/Arbeter-Ring, in particular) are firm in their zionist commitments.
Orbán would be noticeably worse if the EU weren’t constraining him. The leash is very long, but it’s visibly distinct from infinite.
Erdoğan can’t be reined in like that because Turkey isn’t an EU member and isn’t getting tens of billions of €.
Immediate reactions to the referendum: #Londependence #Scotlond
Berlin was on a ford, so for some importance for middle-distance trade through the swampy forest.
Languagehat, the term “middle England” is used here in the UK and what it means is open to the interpretation of whoever’s listening, but I take it to mean those all over England who aren’t overtly anything, who do their job, pay their taxes (or not, as the case may be), don’t claim benefits, mainly own their own homes, do what’s right and British, whatever that may mean right now, and who keep the place running. As for Truss, Johnson, Starmer, Livingstone, Cameron etc, they represent themselves and their own misguided self-interest only and nobody in middle England relates to that or believes anything they say any more. Much like middle America, I’d guess. Hope that helps.
Thanks!
Just to note that the British citizens most affected by Brexit, i.e. ones who didn’t live in the UK, didn’t have the right to vote. The contrasts with French practice, where citizens who live outside France are represented in the National Assembly.
British citizens most affected by Brexit, i.e. ones who didn’t live in the UK, didn’t have the right to vote. [I presume you’re talking the 2016 Referendum]
I permanently (as far as I’m concerned) live outside the UK; I’m still a British citizen (since I never renounced it), but also a NZ citizen. I could have gone to the UK Embassy here to vote — they put out a public notice to that effect. (Or I could have obtained a postal vote or appointed a proxy. [**]) But chose not to because Brexit doesn’t affect me at all. (If I travel to UK in future, it’ll be on my NZ passport.)
[**] I see here, limited “for a period of no more than 15 years” after leaving UK, so that would exclude me.
I don’t see why you say “most affected by Brexit” (especially the “most”). Brexit didn’t affect any UK citizen’s right to travel to UK? How else would it affect those living outside UK?
There’s a ex-Brits NZ chat forum thread of people saying mostly they don’t care/can’t be bothered.
It deposits a layer of bureaucracy on the heads of those living in the EU, and that’s a lot of people.
What David said. I personally know several people with British passports who went through more or less costly and arduous processes to obtain EU nationality in order to have continued security of residence, employment, medical and other benefits, etc. I personally feel it was a missed opportunity to create an EU passport and offer it to any British person who was entitled to a passport at the time the UK left the EU. It might still be necessary if anyone takes a case against UK government / EU.
I saw in the early coverage of last weekend’s election in Portugal that they hadn’t yet figured out the party allocation of the small number of seats reserved for out-of-country voters, but having legislators who represent vague amorphous groups of individuals rather than a district (or “riding” or whatever you may call it) with specific geographical boundaries seems in substantial tension with how Anglo-American political systems typically think about how legislatures work.
Under current U.S. law (not an innovation of the last two decades but maybe an innovation of the last half-century or so?), U.S. citizens who reside overseas in a permanent or open-ended way and might in other legal contexts not be thought to retain any legal domicile in any specific U.S. state nonetheless retain the federal statutory right to vote in federal elections as if they remained citizens of the last U.S. state in which they were domiciled. (U.S. citizens who are out of the country only temporarily were historically in a different category, and their voting rights have been established longer.)
So they, if they wish, get to vote for that state’s choice of U.S. Senators and its choice of presidential electors for the Electoral College. I think for purposes of the House of Representatives they are treated as if they still lived at the exact same last address in the state they had, even though Congressional district boundaries may have shifted with reapportionment since they last lived there. We don’t have plesbiscites or referenda on a nationwide basis and whether the states that do will allow their own expatriates to vote is a question of state law that different states may handle differently.
The sort of ontological concept, I think, is that as a constitutional matter you, if a U.S. citizen, stop being a citizen of let’s say Arkansas and automatically (w/o any “naturalization” paperwork) become a citizen of let’s say New Jersey if you relocate there with the intent to remain permanently/indefinitely. But if you instead permanently relocate from Arkansas to some foreign place that isn’t a state of the Union, and thus acquire no new state citizenship, your status as a citizen of Arkansas continues because it has not been displaced or superseded.
a layer of bureaucracy on the heads of those living in the EU
If you’ve lived outside UK for more than 15 years, haven’t you incurred all sorts of bureaucracy wherever you are? Why blame Brexit or blame your local government? Like you’ve been somewhere 15+ years, but still see yourself as essentially on holiday/about to return any time.
I pay NZ taxes, NZ council rates, register to vote, filled in forms for citizenship. It’s hardly bureaucracy, not an ‘extra’ layer compared to living in UK — because I don’t, so avoid the UK layer.
This seems just another pretext for whinging Pommery. Get over yourselves!
I personally feel it was a missed opportunity to create an EU passport
If you’ve lived in Spain/wherever for long enough, get a Spanish passport. It’s not like you have to go through durance to renounce UK citizenship.
@AntC: Before Brexit, you didn’t have to choose – you could live and work in the EU with a British passport as long as you wanted. After Brexit, you have to choose. That’s a deterioration whatever way you look at it. I have a British colleague who has worked with our German company based on his EU right to work everywhere in the EU since over 20 years, who for years resided in SE Asia because his family was from there (we work with clients all over the world and travel a lot, so living in Germany is not required for working at our company). After Brexit, he had to get German residency to be able to continue working, upsetting a lot of his family arrangements. Just because things don’t matter to you, doesn’t mean they don’t matter to other people.
@JWB: Germany doesn’t really have the concept of voters abroad – you either still have a registered residency in Germany, then you can vote there, or you don’t, then you can’t. If you still are registered, you can do a postal vote from abroad, but the steps in the process take so long that your ballot most probably gets back to the election office only after the election is over, especially if you’re living in a faraway country or one with a less developed postal system. So most people don’t bother. Having often been in situations where I lived abroad for a couple of years on assignments, I always envied the citizens of countries that let you vote at the embassy.
The last university constituencies (i.e. for graduates of certain universities) at Westminster lasted until 1950, so the idea of non-geographical voting wasn’t completely alien there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_constituency
@JeninEd is correct re the university constituencies, but of course the Westminster Parliament required untold centuries of slow evolution from quite different-looking beginnings before it reached the full modern form that Enoch Powell was somewhat idolatrously obsessed with. It is less than 200 years since efforts to eliminate rotten boroughs began to get anywhere; it is barely over a century (the 1918 iteration of the Reform Act) since property-ownership qualifications for (male) voters were eliminated and just as importantly plural voting was abolished, So after 1918 those eligible to vote by virtue of a diploma for e.g. one of the Oxford-University MP’s had to choose between doing that or voting in the constituency where they resided rather than doing both (and there were some individuals who could and did vote in the same election in three, five, or a dozen different constituencies) as had previously been the case.
These anomalies deviating from what seems to shallow moderns like the only obviously fair way to run things were never quite as deeply rooted in the younger legislatures in the U.S., Canada, etc., although obviously there are some other local tweaks like the Maori seats in the New Zealand Parliament. But for purposes of those, the country is split up geographically into districts via another map that is sort of superimposed on the regular-constituencies district map (although how NZ made its regular map work got kind of weird a few decades ago).
I am not immediately certain whether the U.K. retains the rule that C. of E. clergy are not permitted to vote in elections to choose members of the House of Commons on the theory that they are instead represented in Parliament by their bishops sitting in the House of Lords. But (leaving aside the sham nature of the process by which C. of E. bishops are “elected” by their dioceses) the bishops of course represent dioceses that are themselves well-defined geographical areas with defined boundaries and a defined population of clergy, and back when the C of E had plenty of “overseas” bishops because the churches in the various colonies had not yet become autonomous, none of those overseas bishops got to be in the House of Lords.
This highlights the second-class status of the citizens of Washington, DC. If an American moves from Arkansas to France, they can still vote for senators, but if they move to the District of Columbia, they no longer get any representation in the Senate, and have only a nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives.
There is arguably no such thing as a “citizen” of the District of Columbia, since it lacks the subnational-but-real sovereignty of a state of the Union or, for that matter, an Indian tribe. I would be willing to argue that a federal statute entitling any U.S. citizen domiciled in D.C. to vote in federal elections in the state in which they were previously domiciled (if there is one) would be constitutional, but whether such a proposal would find political support is a different question. Many political figures who in fact reside in D.C. take for various reasons the position that they remain domiciled in whatever state or district they hale from and vote accordingly, even if e.g. they sold their house there when relocating to D.C., and they generally are not challenged in that position.
Of course, no U.S. citizen is compelled to be domiciled in the District of Columbia and those who choose to do so should weight the benefits and burdens of their choice. If they sufficiently value representation in the U.S. Senate they only need to move a few miles to have that possibility available to them while still residing within easy commuting distance of whatever job they held while residing within the District.
If they sufficiently value representation in the U.S. Senate they only need to move a few miles to have that possibility available to them while still residing within easy commuting distance of whatever job they held while residing within the District.
That’s not a realistic possibility for many of the poorer residents of the District.
Nor is it reasonable to argue that the large number of people who were born in DC and have lived their entire lives there are not being treated as second-class citizens because they have the option of leaving their homes and living elsewhere. Somehow other countries manage to get along while giving the residents of their capitals representation in their national legislatures.
I assumed JWB was not entirely serious, but you can never tell with lawyers.
local tweaks like the Maori seats in the New Zealand Parliament.
Thanks @JWB, lest your preceding “vote in the same election in three, five, or a dozen different constituencies” might mislead readers: every NZ elector gets two votes: a constituency-based one for a named candidate (first past the post basis); and a national one for a party list (proportional basis).
You can choose for your constituency-based one to be counted in a Māori electorate for a Māori named candidate; there’s far fewer electors who so choose, so those constituencies’ geographical boundaries are much larger. No elector can ‘swing’ the system to get more votes than another.
In any case, the Māori constituencies are no more than a distraction: whatever the balance of individuals/parties from the geographical base is balanced up to align with the party vote proportionality.
So what’s a good-faith estimate of the number of adult registered voters born in D.C. who have never lived anywhere else in their life and genuinely cannot afford to relocate to the least expensive option in Prince George’s County less than 10 miles from their current residence? More than 10,000 but less than 25,000? And if they can’t afford the lowest-end options offered by PG County it’s unreasonable to ask them to move a little further to e.g. one of the more affordable neighborhoods of Baltimore if access to U.S. Senate representation is their key priority? Surely the Isle of Man’s lack of representation in the U.K. parliament is a more high-priority injustice than this.
The alternative possibility, of course, would be to retrocede most/all of the residential neighborhoods of current D.C. to Maryland the way the parts of the original D.C. across the river were retroceded to Virginia in a prior century. Or maybe retrocede everything including federal property, and I’m sure we could come up with an appropriate legal regime to assure exclusive federal control over key federal facilities that might have escaped the imagination of those planning for the future in the 1780’s. Frankly, however it is the Canadian national government manages to get by with having its capital located within the boundaries of Ontario without undue interference from the Ontario provincial government would probably work for us. There is the question of whether Maryland would really want to receive this territory back, but I’m not sure that they should get a veto.
@jwb
Ýou are serious. You might like to remind yourself of a legal dictum to the effect that the less said, the better….
You know, you could always go with having the the voters being able to vote in Maryland without the Maryland government being able to interfere in Washington. Maybe shifts the injustice, but I had a couple of beers and I’m unable to see the disadvantages of that solution.
Surely the Isle of Man’s lack of representation in the U.K. parliament is a more high-priority injustice than this
The Isle of Man does very nicely for itself as a so-called tax haven, i.e. place committed to laundering the ill-gotten gains of the very rich. The salient injustices are not in the lack of Westminster MPs for the place.
It’s kind of the exact opposite of the DC case.
I’m registered to vote at “Special Address”, 10th district of Vienna, and have been voting accordingly by mail since 2005. The ballot arrives here early enough that I can be confident it’ll be received in time; moreover, the date of the postage stamp counts, not the date of arrival (so it always takes a while for official election results to be fully final).
Seriously, it was a matter of being treated like a local for almost all purposes and suddenly becoming a full-on foreigner for all purposes. That was noticeable.
Seriously, why bother to defend the unbelievable stupidity of the Founders to believe that no voters, other than the federal politicians themselves, were ever going to live in the national capital. The law on establishing the Douglass Commonwealth is ready to go and will be, if the Republicans manage to lose the House of Representatives (likely) and to blow their chance at gaining the Senate (trickier, but they’re working on it), implemented on January 3rd next year.
The Isle of Man isn’t part of the UK any more than Canada or NZ are. It never was a part of the EU or its predecessors because it would have needed to join as the separate country it is, and didn’t. Likewise for the Channel Islands.
Well, DC isn’t represented in Congress, but they punch far above their weight in electoral votes. I wouldn’t vote to let S and N Dakota in separately today either. Giving them two Senate votes just extends the travesty.
I will change the subject by noting that I have been reliably told that some Chicago tour guides have been known to claim that “Second City” actually refers to the rebuilding of the city after the fire, apparently oblivious to the use of the term in other countries as well.
If the Framers had a cloudy crystal ball, it was in the plausible-at-the-time assumption that it was necessary and desirable for the federal government to be based in its own enclave outside the boundaries of any state to avoid undue influence over a weak federal government by a powerful state government. Now that that’s obviously no longer a real-world concern due to historical changes, retrocession to Maryland would undo the various side effects and hassles of the separate-enclave approach. So that would be the plausible way of curing the Framers’ lack of foresight if those side effects were thought so intolerable to require a resolution, as opposed to being thought bearable on net because no system will be perfect and there are always transition costs and side effects associated with attempts to perfect the system you’ve got.
As Ryan alludes to, many states in the West were admitted to the Union on a sort of optimistic assumption that if they didn’t really yet have the population of a proper state they would likely grow to have it in time. The subsequent demographic reality has been varied, but also unpredictable. Nevada, which was probably admitted “too early” due the exigent political circumstances of the time, continued to have a preposterously small population for a very long time after statehood, but then started growing quite rapidly in the mid-20th-century and has continued to do so. Arizona was minimally populated until it wasn’t, while New Mexico, admitted at the same time as Arizona, has yet to boom in the same way. The relative scale of the apparent anomaly presented by D.C. has notably shrunk over time. As of the 1950 Census it had approximately 0.5% of the national population, which may not seem like a lot but corresponded to more residents than 13 out of 48 states which had Senators at the time not to mention the Alaska and Hawaii Territories which were moving toward acquiring Senators. By the 2020 Census (and this after a sizable rebound in population since 2000), D.C. was down to approximately 0.2% of the national population and only outnumbered two of the 50 Senator-possessing states. The original push to give D.C. representation in the electoral college was tied up with the 1950-vintage numbers even though by the time it actually happened in the early Sixties the trendlines away from that were already becoming obvious.
Claiming that the Isle of Man is a “separate country” is just affixing a rhetorical label to a historical anomaly. It doesn’t have ambassadors, it doesn’t have a military, and it doesn’t even have its own Olympics team (even though e.g. Bermuda does). It has such local autonomy (including but not limited to tax-related policy) as the U.K. Parliament has thus far chosen in its own discretion not to strip away from it. The decision of the Common Market to treat it separately from the U.K. back in the Seventies was a decision made for realpolitik reasons under the circumstances, not as a necessary logical consequence of first principles. If enough people on both sides of the negotiations had wanted Portugal to join the Common Market while leaving the Azores and/or Madeira outside of it, a rationale would have been found. In the French-ruled parts of the Caribbean, St. Martin is currently part of the EU but nearby St. Barts is not. That’s just the anomalous way it is. Note that I’m not saying the Isle of Man is *not* a “country.” It’s just that “country” is a fuzzy and ill-defined concept. At least in English.
Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
“No mountain; no coast, no river (unless you count the river Cole.) Any examples of other large cities with the same characteristic?”
I’d say the largest city in the entire Western Hemisphere, Mexico City, qualifies. It has some reason to be there — it’s where the Aztec capital was in the middle of a rather large lake (water source, defensible..)…but for a VERY large city, its locale is unusual.
As an American teen in the 1980s, my exposure to the Midlands accent was through the lovely speaking voice of Led Zeppelin’s singer Robert Plant. He’s from a town maybe thirty miles from Birmingham. Ozzy Osbourne has a more purely Birmingham accent.
(Most of the comments in the current topic have been about Middle England, nationalism, and fascinating related themes…but languagehat did reference the Midlands as well, including the post ten years ago on its accents.)
In the US specifically, it might actually be a concern again. (Imagine West Virginia or Idaho… or, rather, don’t.) However, the bill I brought up (I couldn’t find the whole text, but this bit is mentioned on the website I linked to) would leave this untouched; it would simply restrict the District of Columbia to the federal buildings, leaving it without a resident population. Its three electoral votes would be given to the winner of the national popular vote, BTW, until the 23rd Amendment could be amended.
I really don’t mean to dunk on the Framers too hard. Given the sources of knowledge they had available – they were basically inventing modern democracy from scratch, with nothing more similar than medieval Italian republics, Ancient Rome and Ancient Athens as role models – and the fact that they were under strong pressure to keep the Constitution at least as short as possible to give it any chance of actually passing, they did a phenomenal job with a lasting impact worldwide. But there is a small number of features that they could have thought through and yet didn’t.
Indeed, the imperfection of the Framers’ design became apparent when the bulk of them were still alive, when the presidential election of 1800 went seriously awry in terms of producing a clear outcome. Thus the Twelfth Amendment, duly ratified before the next presidential election, which prevented that particular mess from arising again.
The 23d amendment already gives Congress the right to determine by statute how D.C.’s presidential electors are selected. They can discontinue the practice of letting D.C. residents choose them by election anytime they want.
The glitch the Twelfth Amendment fixed had already caused problems in 1796. As soon as there were presidential elections contended by national political parties, the original method for choosing the vice president was nonsensical.
…and yet it was exported to the Philippines and is still in use there. The results are indeed nonsensical.
Other countries have learned from the failure of the denial that political parties would ever form. Germany’s constitution (1949, under heavy US influence and with US approval) assumes parties, calls them “important for the formation of the people’s political will”, and regulates them (e.g. they must be democracies internally, as opposed to “the leader principle” that a party had recently used with disastrous effects).
I don’t think the Filipino system particularly closely resembles the U.S. system that existed in 1796. Candidates are candidates for either President or Vice-President, rather than the Vice-President being the runner-up in a single election. It is true that having separate votes rather than a single vote for a “package-deal” ticket means that it’s possible in principle that you get a president and vice-president who don’t get along or have different policy views or party affiliations. Whether that’s a bug or a feature seems to me to be for the people of a given polity to decide.
At the state level in the U.S., 43 of 50 states have elected lieutenant governors. 26 of those states have a formal running-mate system where you cast a single vote for a two-candidate ticket; the other 17 have separate votes making it possible to vote for candidates of different parties, a la the way it works at the national level in the Philippines. You sometimes get enough ticket-splitting to affect the outcome. In the 1984 election in my native Delaware, for example, the voters in their collective wisdom chose a Republican governor and a Democratic lieutenant governor. The state survived the ensuing four years. (I don’t know or rather don’t recall what the issues were that drove ticket-splitting that year, but looking at the numbers for the two races on the order of 5% of the total voters in the election must have done so – and that’s a net number assuming no double-loser ticket-splitters who voted for the Dem candidate for gov. but the GOP candidate for lt. gov.) Even in states where the candidates formally run as a package deal, the current federal-level convention where the presidential candidate effectively gets to choose the running mate (within real-world political constraints) is not always followed and gubernatorial candidates can and do get their own preferred choices rejected and a running mate not of their choice foisted upon them by other decision-makers in their party.