Diane Easby,

"Nor do I want people like David Hannam who is high up in a racist organisation hijacking the genre to:

(a) raise BNP funds at his barbecues and
(b) sing lyrics which extol how nice the English countryside would be if only immigrants weren't blotting the landscape."

I wish it was that simple, but the BNP has a much nastier programme in mind for folk music than just raising BNP funds. These scumbags are genetic determinists, whose primary aim is the ethnic purification of Britain. IE., they believe that everything British comes about because of the racial/genetic makeup of the British. Therefore, just like Hitler and the Nazis before them, they believe that in order to reinstate true 'Britishness', they have to eliminate all traces of 'foreign' culture. That is widely known already.

What seems to be less widely understood, and what perhaps concerns us more directly as members of Mudcat, is that the BNP also believe that British folkways - and the forms which they take - are a natural consequence of said British genetic makeup. In other words, the 'reinstatement' of a racially pure Britain necessarily involves the 'reinstatement' of racially pure British folkways.

Yes I know it's codswallop. It's very dangerous codswallop. The last time anyone tried to put a programme like that into force it cost the lives of 55 million people in the second world war.

BTW., somebody opined that, since a large part of our musical folklore is bound up with Gypsies and Travellers, we have a natural bulwark against BNP ideology. Don't believe it. If the BNP ever get their hands on power, they will intern the entire Gypsy and Traveller population on the grounds of racial and social degeneracy, and they will wipe all traces of Traveller musical culture from the record. Just think how empty the shelves of the Vaughan Williams memorial Library will look if these bastards get their way.