New California: Plans unveiled for the Golden State to be split in two

For years, officials in California have pushed for the break-up of the state, and now one splinter group has revealed its partition plans for the future.

'New California', is a campaign group calling for the Pacific sea state, which it describes as "ungovernable" to be split into two to make it more manageable.

The plan is for the rural areas of California to constitute one state, and include areas such as Redding and Eureka to the north, Fresno and San Jose in the centre with San Diego to the south.

This would leave the large urban areas such as Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco to form the other state.

In a statement issued on Tuesday 16 January, the group said: "The current state of California has become governed by a tyranny.

"After years of overtaxation, regulation, and mono-party politics the State of California and many of its 58 Counties have become ungovernable."

The body added that the push for independence was in part due to a "decline in essential basic services" including education, law enforcement, infrastructure and healthcare.

The effort is unlikely to succeed, and any concrete study of the proposal with state officials will probably not commence until the end of 2018 or early 2019.

The question of California's size has come into question before, with submissions for a division made in 2014. But the Golden State's size mean that it is difficult for major changes to take place.

As a population, the state is by far the largest in the US, with almost 40m inhabitants, 10m more than the next largest state, Texas with a 28m population.

In 2015, the state's economy continued to rise and its GDP was calculated at $2.4tn. If California was its own country, then it would have been the sixth largest economy in the world behind only the rest of the US, China, Japan, Germany and the UK.