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

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why exactly do some Australian trade unions have such a socially conservative culture?

Most Australian trade unions (like most trade unions everywhere) are controlled by small cliques, who often have views that are not reflective of their members: after all, joining a trade union is an act of collective self-interest, not a political statement and most members don't care about the latter. It happens that in Australia some (certainly not all!) of these cliques are Catholic ones. This goes back a long way - it was a major factor behind the famous split in the ALP in the 1950s - and is related to the prestigious position that the labour movement held in Australian public life during the first decades after Federation and the desire of the country's Catholic population to attain equal social status and the desire of the country's Catholic hierarchy to attain social prestige and also serious political influence: Daniel Mannix (Archbishop of Melbourne from 1916 until 1963) was a particularly important figure in encouraging this process.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why is former Sudetenland the most populist part of Czechoslovakia while the parts of the German empire that are now Polish generally are more liberal(even if urban rural polarization has hit Poland)

This came up the other week, and...

The difference isn't the economic history of the regions in question, but the parties concerned: right from the very beginning PiS has appealed to the idea of wiping out as many traces of the Communist period as possible and creating instead a 'real' and 'organic' Poland, rooted in Catholicism and some form of re-imagined traditional social order. Babiš is a former Communist and represents something quite different. 'Populism' in this sense is a euphemistic label for a particular style of politics rather than a euphemistic label for a particular political ideology.

In other words, it makes perfect sense that a politician like Babiš would find his greatest appeal in the most rootless parts of the country, and it also makes sense the a political force like PiS would find its greatest appeal in the least rootless parts of the country: the same being true of e.g. the AKP in Turkey, which is a lot weaker in repopulated ethnically cleansed regions than the areas with a stable (for the region...) population history.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Afaik, it was Tony Blair who broke the convention (in terms of PMs leaving office, MPs ofc had resigned via the aforementioned procedure previously).

Stanley Baldwin resigned his seat on his resignation as Prime Minister in 1937 and Anthony Eden did much the same under somewhat more awkward circumstances in 1957.* Clement Attlee fought one more General Election after losing power in 1951 and then resigned his seat at the same time as the Party leadership that he'd held for twenty years. Of course he only stayed on as leader after the 1951 election to make sure that Herbert Morrison would be too old to realistically succeed him: Morrison had tried to topple Attlee shortly after the 1945 election and Attlee was very much a dish-served-deep-frozen kind of man.

_{*And may have been acting irrationally due to amphetamines at the time as he immediately started searching around for a way to return to the Commons and was hastily gifted a Peerage to prevent an embarrassing spectacle. Alternatively, the searching around for a new seat may have been the case of acting irrationally due to amphetamines, rather than the resignation.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What would the best plausible electoral result for Plaid Cymru look like?

General Election or Senedd?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What would the best plausible electoral result for Plaid Cymru look like?

General Election or Senedd?

Either.

Looking at the new boundaries, then the best plausible result for Plaid at a General Election in the near future would be four seats, but one of those would be very tricky and perhaps only plausible if their leader runs there himself as he was planning to do before he was drafted in to fill the sudden vacancy at the top of the party. And the party has a rule that says that the party leader and the group leader at the Senedd must be the same person, which makes that awkward. There are two others where activists would likely insist that they are serious challengers, but in both cases they would have come a poor third in 2019.

As for the Senedd, the electoral system makes it tricky to work these things out exactly (and it may well be changed by the time of the next one anyway) as does the voters habit of treating it like Wales County Council, but they've never done better than they seventeen seats they took in 1999 and that is probably around about their functional maximum.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What's the deal with the Peak District? Why is it so undeveloped despite being next to a bunch of big cities--is it just downstream effects of topography?

Most of it is completely unsuitable for development, except for the slopes and the more accessible valleys, which often have been developed. Some of these were very industrial: the district has the same place in the history of the modern textiles industry that the Severn Gorge in Shropshire does for iron and steel production (i.e. the place where many critical innovations were made in the 18th century, but which proved to be sub-optimal for large-scale production, which occurred elsewhere), and it was also once (like many upland regions in England and Wales) a major centre of lead mining, likely from antiquity. And a lot of the prettier bits that are more accessible have been protected from development by its designation as a National Park in 1951.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The big exception is South Wales, where the towns in The Valleys climb further up into the mountains than is typical (in both senses because the settlements climb up onto the hillsides themselves, as the narrow valley floors were reserved for industry), but, of course, there was a reason for that.

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What is the most libertarian region of Wales?

Nowhere as the Welsh are a people ever prone to taking The Rules extremely seriously (and to the point of pedantry, really), no matter what The Rules might be at any given moment.

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Suggesting to a Wulfrunian that they are basically a Brummie is the sort of thing that tends to be followed by the acquisition of a brand new black eye. Of course to purists, only parts of Wolverhampton are actually Black Country at all, though they are, admittedly, rather large parts.¹ Traditional Birmingham attitudes towards the Black Country can be adequately expressed by noting that the most famous of Brummies named a fictional Hell-on-Earth after the region.²

Birmingham was already a well-established metalworking centre before the Industrial Revolution and once that got underway became an internationally important centre for all the more complex and delicate aspects of metalworking now that that there was such a thing as truly insatiable consumer demand and the technology to cater to it: and it was especially famous for pens, jewelry and firearms. Consequentially, industry was dominated by workshops rather than large factories and its population clustered tightly around what was still the town centre. As its industrialists tended to be rather bright and enterprising fellows, the opportunities that emerged as society changed, technology powered ahead and as more people had more disposable income were readily grasped, and the city became a centre of newer sorts of commercial goods manufacturing (most famously chocolate) and engineering. As actual factories were needed for these things, the city expanded outwards in a roughly circular direction. As further developments in the early 20th century led inevitably towards the manufacturing of motor cars and goods vehicles, so the city expanded again,³ and, again, in a broadly circular direction. Although a conurbation stretching from Birmingham to Wolverhampton existed via Smethwick (a curious place with a foot in both camps) at quite an early date, none of Birmingham's principal waves of expansion linked up at all with the Black Country and even now it is necessary to note that, somehow, 'the Birmingham Metropolitan Area' and 'the West Midlands Conurbation' only partially overlap.

The industrial development of the Black Country - the name is a 19th century one of uncertain origin, though it seems certain to refer to one or more aspects of the appearance of the region at the time - was very different. It was originally a rather isolated upland region, but it was known to have substantial coal deposits and the building of the canal network allowed for their commercial exploitation on a massive scale. The coalfield was largely exhausted by the end of the 19th century and the region is not usually associated with mining (though a number of small collieries remained active as late as the first decades of nationalization) but local supply of huge amounts of coal and access by barge to every important port and major city in England led to the development of energy-intense metal industries: iron and steel production, chainmaking, nail-making and so on. Other industries established themselves as well, and often used local products: to give one example, the manufacture of furniture was important in and around Dudley, which just so happened to be the most important centre of the nail-making trade in the region (and Great Britain). The geography of the Black Country - it is very hilly - meant that although a continuous built-up area of a loose sort emerged rather quickly, the towns that comprised it never fused together into a single urban unit. There was substantial house-building after the War, but neither the boroughs nor the old Staffordshire County Council (which covered a substantial slice of the region)⁴ were keen on using housebuilding as a tool to fuse the towns together and, besides, there was plenty of reclaimed industrial land that could be used, and still quite a bit of open space around the fringes of the region.

The accents of Birmingham and the Black Country are related, but very distinct from each other. Birmingham accents are apt to be rather flat and, if very strong and old-fashioned, rather clipped and staccato. Black Country accents, in contrast, are characterized by remarkably strong diphthongs and a tendency for words to run into each other: the traditional Birmingham nicknames for people from the Black Country are 'Yam Yams' and 'Yo Yo's' (the latter being rather less polite than the former) and both reference this. Although Enoch Powell was a Black Country politician, he was himself from Birmingham and this was reflected in his rather peculiar voice: he made the effort to cultivate the Donnish drawl of interwar Oxford, but broadly speaking failed and the resulting combination somehow sounded vaguely Anglo South African. Most of the notable politicians to have sat from Black Country constituencies have hailed from outside the region (Powell, but also e.g. George Wigg, Betty Boothroyd, Patrick Gordon Walker,⁵ John Stonehouse,⁶ Tom Watson... Pat McFadden these days, I suppose) which is interesting given its reputation for parochial insularity.^6.

The Black Country is notable as one of the finest brewing regions in England, with a large number of small, local breweries producing remarkably high quality beer in various traditional styles: it is particularly strong for 'Best' Bitter and Mild. Most of them used to impossible to get hold of outside the Midlands and some still are. Birmingham's main contribution to the history of English beer is that the city's largest brewery - Ansells - was bankrupted as a result of excessive industrial action in the 1970s and 80s, which is, I suppose, notability of a kind.

<sub>1. Bilston and Wednesfield for those who find such things interesting. Bilston is as core a part of the Black Country as Tipton or Darlaston, while Wednesfield is further out and has a lot of postwar housing, so has less of the... feel.
2. I.e. Mordor. 'Mor' being the Sindarian for 'black' and 'dor' translating as 'land' or 'country'.
3. When Tolkien referred to the countryside he knew as a boy being 'shabbily destroyed' this is the exact process to which he referred: it was also one of the inspirations for The Scouring of the Shire.
4. In fact all of it other than the County Boroughs of Dudley, Smethwick, Walsall, West Bromwich, and Wolverhampton (which were independent), and the Municipal Boroughs of Halesowen, Oldbury and Stourbridge (which were under the jurisdiction of the Worcestershire County Council, as would Dudley have been had it not been a County Borough). Halesowen and Stourbridge were a bit posh and their residents thus rather less likely to think of themselves as living in the Black Country, of course. Probably not even entirely inaccurately in the newer suburban developments.
5. Though that ended... badly.
6. As did... er... oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...
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.</sub>

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bilston and Wednesfield were only annexed by Wolverhampton in the same 1960s round of local government changes in the area which massively expanded West Bromwich CB and turned Smethwick CB into Warley CB annexing Oldbury and Rowley Regis. Not being from the area, I'm not sure to what extent they regard themselves as part of Wolverhampton today.

That would be a complicated question. Honestly, it's a bit of both: on the one hand they are both places with a definite sense of being their own places, but on the other Bilston was to Wolverhampton what Smethwick was to Birmingham, and so many people from the core of Wolves moved to housing estates in Wednesfield after the War that things get very murky. Both were also integral parts of the Wolverhampton Parliamentary Borough that existed from the 19th century until 1950, though so was Willenhall.

There's also a smaller district of Wolverhampton to note, namely Heath Town: it was originally a small lock-making town (Chubb had its main factory there and the rather impressive building is still standing) and had its own Urban District until the 1920s. Most of its residential areas were levelled in the 1960s and replaced with high-rise council flats. If you've ever been through Wolverhampton on the train, yes, those tower blocks.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

[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.