"The whole idea of 'English' folk music is about as absurd as the idea of a true born English person."

Precisely. What I find worrying is that the BNP seem to be adopting a similar spurious, straight-jacketed and self-serving approach to folk music to that which Ewan MacColl invented to support a diametrically-opposed political perspective. Phrases like, "we should be pursuing some kind of national identity" and, "If we subject ourselves consciously or unconsciously to too much cultural acculturation, as the anthropologists call it, we'll finish with no folk culture at all. We'll finish with a kind of cosmopolitan, half-baked music, which doesn't satisfy the emotion of anybody." would be equally at home in a BNP manifesto as from MacColl. This sort of approach to folk music never has been and never will be acceptable to those of us who take a broader view of the genre, and it just comes back to bite us all on the arse.