by Max Barry

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29

Tinhampton: The Official Factbook (150th Anniversary Edition)

The Self-Administrative City of Tinhampton
(but we're identifying as a republic for now)

Flag - Aspect ratio is 5:8


Motto: "Proudly Urban, Unashamedly Rural"


Location
Where the tin mines are


Voting Population: 310,281 (includes 302 on Barrier Islands)
-Density: 3,180 people per km² (mainland only)


Largest, Only and Capital City: Tinhampton
Incorporation of Tinhampton: 8th October 1866
Devolution: 1st November 1928


Official and National Language: English


Demonym: Tinhamptonian


Government: What the Americans call "a municipal system"
- Mayor/Leader of the Assembly: Lydia Anderson (CP)
- Deputy Mayor/Deputy Leader: John Price
- Speaker of the Assembly: Ian Jones
- Chief Justice: Michael Norton
- WA Ambassador and Delegate: Alexander Smith


Legislature:
- Unicameral Assembly with 149 Assembly Members elected in a city-wide district
- AMs elected using closed-list PR - a party often needs just 2,000 votes for a seat
- In addition, there are also Mayoral Elections using FPTP (plurality voting)


Establishment: 8th October 1866 (in case you needed reminding once again)


Land Area:
- 76.5km² (29.54mi²) for Tinhampton proper.
- 90.4km² (34.9mi²) for the mainland.
- 92.08km² (35.55mi²) including the Barrier Islands.
Water Area: 8.61km²
Water %: 8.55%


Elevation
Highest Point: The "Tin Mountain" in the east (162m amsl)
Lowest Point: The coastal beachy bits (0m amsl)
The highest point on the Barrier Islands is no more than 10m amsl.


GDP (nominal): $8,600,000,000 approx.
GDP (nominal) per capita: $27,716.81


Human Development Index (NS): 0.750


Currency: Dollar ($) (result of schism in devolution process)


Time Zone: GMT


Drives on the: Left


Calling code: +58


Internet TLD (ISO 3166): .ti


NS Stats not used for: Population, GDP, Nation Pretitle (for now).




The Self-Administrative City of Tinhampton

The Self-Administrative City of Tinhampton (commonly called Tinhampton, and referred to in UK Government documents as the Tinhampton SAC) is a republic located somewhere in the UK, surrounded on all sides by it (even the beaches are in the shared Demilitarised Zone). Tinhampton covers approximately 100 square kilometers, or about 3% of Rhode Island (that includes the water), and has an estimated population of 287,794 (including the 302 in the Barrier Islands) as per the City Census 2014, give or take the odd immigrant and tourist or twenty. Tinhampton comprises of a single unitary region, which also covers the disputed barrier islands.

Tinhampton is a somewhat influential figure in its region, the Federation of Fictitious States (so... you're telling me that this isn't a spoiler?), but remains politically eager. It has already garnered two World Assembly endorsements, having joined on the 6th of October 2016 (despite Tinhamptonian voters voting against United Nations membership by just 728 votes in March 1983 - yes, we do like tagging on referendums on election day, like the Americans - and the city about to join when the UN building exploded in a blaze of interdimensional controversy in April 2008). The nation's ambassador and delegate to the WA is Alexander Smith, Conservative mayor of the city between 2003 and 2007.

Etymology
Well, its main export is tin, and it has an ending of "hampton" (of which information about the etymology of that is easily findable on the Internet), so it is pretty obvious as to how the name arose...

History
In 1866, after developing for the previous few decades, Tinhampton was officially recognised as a city. Its main industry back then was mining, which has remained strong ever since. After at least two decades of arguing, convincing and World War One-ing, the city became self-administrative in 1928. Ever since, it has come up with laws abound - some well-received (the Electoral Reform Act 1952 instituted "a PR-style system" as the nation's voting system), some controversial (the Mayoral Impeachment Bill 1986, which almost seemed taylor-made for previous Mayor Brian Young, only failed after pressure from the major parties and concerns about specificness), and some plain weird (the Tomato Seeds Bill 1995, which would have made owning tomato seeds with intent to garden a criminal offence, was voted down 143-3 - the original proposer and the Seriously Serious Party's two AMs). Tinhampton has shown itself to consistently be one of Europe's most successful devolution experiments.

The Flag's Story
The flag was originally adopted in 1929 after devolution, and has remained constant since. There are three aspects of the flag: The top colour is a brownish-grey, the colour of tin; the middle colour is blue, representing the industrialisation of the city; and the bottom colour is yellow, representing the prosperity of the agricultural industries in the nation (attempts to change this to green were rejected in 1962; as modern-day people would have it, it was rejected for cringeworthiness).

Geography
There are four major elements to Tinhampton: The farms, where food products are sold to the poorest of Tinhamptonians in the absence of enough money to get things from the supermarket; the beach and the barrier islands, which arised as devolution's toughest obstacle but which were given Demilitarised Zone status, along with the motorway to the north and the radio/TV mast to the east, and which remain popular with visitors; the city itself, which contains homes that they've been forced to reduce to a maximum of $100,000 (or $100 rent per month) and all the usual things they've been forced to reduce to even lower prices than ever before; and, of course, the tin mines, the home of the major industry in the nation, having been a consistent top 20% industry since World War Two (despite scares of falling out in 1948, 1972 and 2016), which produce their world-famous tin to go into more products than can be listed here, and the official residence of the SAC's highest point, the "Tin Mountain".

Demographics

Population
The population, according to the most recent census, is 287,794 (controversially including the 302 residents of the disputed Barrier Islands, where a ferry service runs, of which about 92% of ticket-bookers end up on a capsized ferry). For the city proper, the population is 285,192.

Language
Tinhampton's official and state language is English.

Religion
Tinhampton remains a largely Christian city, although with some diversity. On the March 2017 election ballot, there will be a ballot measure to see if Anglicanism, having been de-recognised upon devolution, will once again be recognised as the national faith.

Race
The city itself is about 86% white (with about 71% identifying as White British or White Tinhamptonian), with the remaining 14% being comprised of ethnic minorities (BAME and others).

Largest Cities
There's only one city in Tinhampton, and it's called Tinhampton.

Municipal Politics
This section is somewhat sizable, so prepare yourselves for another factbook on this subject matter.

Economy

Economic Indicators

Rank: Not very high, to say the least
Currency: Dollar ($) - exchange rate is 1TID to 1GBP
Fiscal Year: 1st April to 31st March


GDP (nominal): 860 million dollars
GDP (nominal) per capita: 2,771.68 dollars
Labor Force: 195,000 (as of 1st October 2016)
Unemployment: 67.76%

If you need to know anything about our economy, it's to your right.

Culture
Almost non-existent, apart from our media...

The Media
Television

  • Television in the nation only started when a mast was put up in a hill convieniently located in the Demilitarised Zone in 1958. Having long tired of the BBC and TinVision (the local ITV franchise) by 1966, the Tinhampton Broadcasting Service was proposed that August, taking up Channel 9 and making demo broadcasts of the Centennial Celebrations in October. Further demos were broadcast until the system finally became up, running and in glorious colour on the 1st of September 1969. All TV and radio in Tinhampton is now broadcast from this mast.

  • The official start time of the watershed is 9pm, as in the UK.

  • Tinhampton has never been famous for creating its own rating systems: it officially uses the BBFC and PEGI rating systems, and even the TBS has taken their Parental Guidance Lock on TBS Player from the feature of the same name from BBC iPlayer!

  • The nation's TV stations are those as recieved in the UK, plus the TBS.

  • Whilst devolution haggling was meant to finish in 1928, the start of TV in the city 30 years later posed some problems concerning the license fee, which was originally the same as the payment in the rest of the UK. The creation of the TBS in the late 1960s posed even further problems, sorted by creating a fixed license fee of £9/8/- (as fixed to inflation), split 60% to the BBC and 40% to the TBS. This license fee is now convieniently almost identical to that of the UK.

Radio
Radio was the first electronic media to officially come to the city, having arrived in 1951 with a now-demolished transmitter broadcasting what was on the BBC at the time. Once Independent Local Radio came a quarter of a century later, Tinhampton ended up getting very little, and despite an upgrade to 106.4KHz in 1987 to counterpart with 1087MHz, the TBS has only ever been lucky enough to run one station to compete against the countless nationwide stations. Despite this, TBS Radio remains one of the city's most popular, reaching 70,000 every week.

Sports
Whilst sports teams in the city do exist, they play as part of English leagues. Tinhampton City were lucky enough to play in the fourth tier of English football and reach the FA Cup 4th round in the late 80s, and the Tinhampton Miners were once a top-tier Rugby Union team, but both have since fallen from grace, to the point where they now flounder in semi-pro leagues.

Infrastructure
Much of the infrastructure that exists in the city is of typical quality, but of deliberately low prices for affordability purposes (and even then, they remain out of reach for Joe Average).

Energy
Only traditional power borrowed from the National Grid is used. There are no nuclear power plants to be see, and only two wind turbines (there were more, but the north of the city was jokingly named "Orwell Valley" due to their wind turbines with their power storage areas that looked like CCTV cameras, and they were taken down in 1994).

Acknowledgements

  • We doubt that this could ever be completed without the help of our resident City Council historians.

  • The original template for this was created by The Free Republic of Ponderosa. This template may be found here.

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