Catching up, belatedly as ever ...I don't see any kind of "either/or" about people and their preferences for music from different cultures and their own. However, as this thread is concerned with the attack on "British" folk music (perhaps this should be "English") via the attentions of the BNP, and as English folk music and dance have been under various forms of attack by the media over more years than I want to think about (mostly humour, mostly harmless, admittedly, but not helpful), and as it is often more difficult to attract grant funding for projects to do with English folk culture than for music and dance from other cultural backgrounds ... in short, as in this context English folk music is very much the minority interest and one of the few places it happens is in folk clubs my point was that I don't want accusations of nationalism, fascism, jingoism and racism to attach to folk clubs that don't book other varieties of world music as a result of their booking policy.

The cultural diversity question, applied to modern Britain, is indeed complex and full of contradictory potholes, to mix my metaphors and images. All I'm saying is that everyone is entitled to be proud of their own heritage, and that includes English folk enthusiasts and performers. No "either/or" involved. And when it comes to the old chestnut about how we're all essentially mixed ethnicities anyway over here - actually, not necessarily. In my family history the biggest mix was between Yorkshire and Oxfordshire, with a sprinkling of Devon, back at least as far as 1700. And most of them, I'm very proud to say, agricultural labourers or aspiring white collar workers rather than titled aristocrats.

And none of this makes me a white supremacist, a racist or a follower of the BNP. I don't think I'm better than anyone else, but I do insist that my cultural heritage is equal to anyone else's. I am rather tired of feeling apologetic about being English - and unable to make a statement about this without appearing to be a moronic nationalist.