Questions About Other Countries' Politics that You Were Too Afraid To Ask

[Filuwaúrdjan]

7. But perhaps this is not a coincidence: an outsider may well be preferred to a more locally-rooted candidate from one of the other towns.

I've seen something similar as a possible explanation for the curious fact that none of the last three Orkney & Shetland MPs have been from either Orkney or Shetland.

Huh, that makes some sense. Particularly given that, when you split them up, that curiosity goes away.

I cannot go into that much detail, but I am aware of a conversation that occurred at an event held at a well-known museum in Dudley to launch a book written by a well-known figure born in Walsall. This conversation entailed the bookseller hired for the event wondering whether it would make sense for the museum to buy a few copies from the publisher for its own shop and the senior member of museum staff they were talking to expressing the view that, as nice an idea as that sounded as the person in question was from Walsall there would be no demand for the book in Dudley.

[Oryxslayer]

I guess I'll provide the obvious follow-up to the Black Country Question: Is it really still the case?

Yes, there are plenty of examples worldwide of adjacent economic cores developing differently, maintaining differences, and ending up in different places with different cultures. And those cultures like to persist even when the resident populations shift and times change. There's no denying that.

However, in the modern age where everyone wants to be in or near a city, cause that's where the good paying jobs are, areas that might have once been distinct end up in an unholy mess of urbanization. The most obvious example that springs to my mind is San Francisco and Oakland, but there are many, many more worldwide.

It's not that hard to get past census data to examine this. As a percentage of the resident working age population, you still see larger shares commuters coming in the from the areas to the north, east, and south of Birmingham - the Black County does provide for some of her own. But in terms of raw people, Sandwell, Walsall, and Dudley are numbers 2 through 4 in terms of thousands of commuters to Birmingham. Sandwell is only surpassed slightly by Solihull. Conversely, as a sign of the urban integration, people from Birmingham go in the other direction for work. Solihull has the number one spot by far for Birmingham -> somewhere else, but Sandwell and Walsall are 2 and 3.

[CumbrianLefty]

I mean, the Black Country has its own flag and everything

[EastAnglianLefty]

Though of course Tom Watson is from Kidderminster, which is at least vaguely in the same area.

It's probably ideal, really. Kiddy is within the broader cultural region, but is certainly not part of the Black Country and so you are at once not exactly an outsider but also nowhere the wrong kind of local.

And Kidderminster is if anything even more insular than the Black Country, so the context is familiar.