this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
19 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
22763 readers
19 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
tbh I did watch this and it didn't really help. But I think I'm at a disadvantage since I don't really have any familiarity with English counties in the first place, except for knowing a few by name in the back of my head.
Anyway, what I'm getting, just for the purposes of local government, is that counties are either two-tier or single tier. Single tier counties are run by the "unitary authority" which runs all local services in the county. Two tier counties are the non-metropolitan counties that have both a county council, but are also split into districts that run different local services. Then there are metropolitan counties which seem to be like the opposite of unitary authorities? Where the county council has been abolished and local services are now fully in the hands of the boroughs, which are the different districts of the county?
That's actually not too hard to understand (if I'm right), and some of that isn't too dissimilar from how we do it over here. I still don't understand what a ceremonial county is but I was mostly going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how local gov't worked in England.
i love this sort of rabbithole because local government is sort of the water you're swimming in and you just know without investigation where specifically you are, what services you use and who you pay tax to
but actually studying it is brainmeltingly absurd bureaucratic horseshit.
I’m guessing ceremonial counties are just so that the nobility which used to own a whole ass county isn’t made to feel bad that the county that their granddad owned has had its borders changed.
yeah pretty much, it seems like ceremonial counties are just the area where the monarch's representative is appointed. Which for some reason is different from the local gov't administrative counties, but is also different from the "historic" counties. Based on what I've read I think this is the case.
Yeah, like in the US most counties manage any land that is not incorporated in a municipality, but some counties are exactly coincident with municipalities and some are sub-units of municipalities. We don’t make any distinction between them; I guess in the UK they do make the distinction.