Spotlight on:

“Sex, drugs and madrigals”

The Principalities of Gobbannium is a colossal, environmentally stunning nation, ruled by High Prince Llewellwn Mawr with a fair hand, and renowned for its ban on automobiles. Its compassionate, intelligent population of 5.765 billion are fiercely patriotic and enjoy great social equality; they tend to view other, more capitalist countries as somewhat immoral and corrupt.

It is difficult to tell where the omnipresent government stops and the rest of society begins, but it juggles the competing demands of Education, Social Welfare, and the Environment. The average income tax rate is 91%, and even higher for the wealthy. The private sector is almost wholly made up of enterprising fourteen-year-old boys selling lemonade on the sidewalk, although the government is looking at stamping this out.

Organ donation rates are among the lowest in the region, leather-clad individuals can be seen walking their slaves in public parks, UFO sightings are listed daily in the morning news, and postmen have been arrested in job lots for selling junk mail as home insulation. Crime is totally unknown. Gobbannium's national animal is the mole, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, its national religion is Strict Druidism, and its currency is the ceiniog.

Gobbannium is ranked 20th in the region and 51,851st in the world for Highest Unemployment Rates.