In search of Rutland

When I was a child, my parents had a map of Britain on which the counties of England were labelled.  One of them was called Rutland - a small county which has long since been swallowed up by Leicestershire.  Other lost counties of England include Middlesex, Westmoreland, and Huntingdonshire.

It is reported that a goverment minister called Eric Pickles - a Conservative - wants us to start using these old county names once again.  As it happens it was a Conservative government back in the 1970s which was largely responsible to redrawing the local government map so as to alter the boundaries of many of our historic counties.

But then of course not that many people nowadays are in a position to remember the county boundaries that existed in England in 1970, and even those boundaries were not the same as those that had existed just ten years previously.

So is this change aimed at winning the votes of the small number of voters who can remember the good old days?  Maybe.  I suspect that most people in this country care little for traditional county names, and are far more interested in things like the state of the economy or the condition of their local roads.