Why can't you come to terms with that, Sedayne?

Because your version of our own good culture doesn't in any shape or form match up to the reality of what our own good culture actually is. You keep harping about 1950s England like it was some sort of dream time, but on what evidence do you base this? I was born in a multi-ethnic & multi-cultural Northumberland in 1961 - I grew up with Yeminites, Chinese, Scots, Irish, Hindus, Pakistanis and even people from Seghill (who seemed a good deal more alien to me than any of the foregoing). The multi-ethnic & multicultural reality of England is my reality, and it is our own good culture. It embraces all, even you, in the acknowledgement that these British islands of which England is a part have always been islands of immigration & invasion, ever since the last ice-age & before. The whole of British culture is determined by tens of thousands of years of invasion and immigration, a process we see continuing into the present day & beyond.

English hymns and folk songs have precious little to do with English Culture as most of experience it; they are but one small aspect of it, similarly the other things that might interest you. Folk singing is a hobby to a few, and a profession for even less; but most people haven't even heard of it. Like I say, you can go for a lot of years in the real world without meeting another folkie, but you do meet folk, English Folk, whatever they might be ethnically, culturally, they are English - and yes, on the present evidence, more English that you'll ever be simply because you keep hanging on to your erroneous idealogy, no matter how wrong it has been proved to be - time, and time and time again.

English Culture renews itself every day; thousands die, thousands more are born; and quite a few arrive by sea & air too. All have as much right to be here as anyone else, and to experience English Culture as they find it, interpret it, contribute to it, celebrate it & ultimately change it, as they have been doing forever. Ultimately, humanity determines culture, WAV - not the other way round, otherwise things would stay the same. Traditions don't stay the same, they change and die and outlive their usefulness, assuming they ever existed in the first place. In this sense what you call Folk Music isn't even Folk Music at all - it's a minority hobby, like Railway Modelling, with the difference that, unlike you, evidently, most of us would recognise a real train if we saw it. But upon this authentic model railway vision of Hornby 00 1950s England you base your entire life's philosophy.

Personally, I couldn't care less to be honest - but that you then have the neck to publish your views & open up threads such as this to promote your misanthropic ideas is something I really can't see go unchallenged, for your own good as much as anything else.