Phew!
I admire your candour, Joe. And, as I mentioned on an earlier, thread, I admire your particular stance on religion, despite my usually militant atheism.
On the BNP thing, I'm going to have to differ, though. Having lived through the Seventies in the UK, I've seen what the far-right thugs of the BNP and its predecessor, the National Front, can do. I live in a small-ish country that needs cohesion and tolerance if it is to survive, and the BNP is the absolute antithesis of that.
This is far, far more than even the most polarised Republican vs Democrat schtick. We are dcealing here with an ideology that is founded on hatred and division; an ideology which modelled itself on national socialism and which, in private, is still proud to call itself national socialist.
It is an ideology which sets out deliberate to recruit the disaffected and to turn them into its foot soldiers. I've known MBS George for probably 10 years; certainly since she started coming to the Middle Bar. She has a beautiful voice and is an excellent singer who can bring a room to a hushed standstill. But.
If she - or anyone else for that matter - had said "I'm voting BNP", then I could have understood. It's easy to be swayed by the muscular rhetoric and the simplistic arguments of the fascists, after all. But to seek election as someone who embodies the values of the BNP and to ask the world to endorse your embrace of a known fascist and racist party is something else completely. Call me self-righteous if you will, but if someone is prepared to stand for election on a fascist and racist ticket, then I am going to 'jump all over them'.
Folk music is an awkward constituency - it likes to pride itself on its inclusiveness, yet in the UK it is almost exclusively white, and the BNP is on record as stating that it wants to make folk music its own. That's what the Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s, and to this day German folk music is tarnished. I don't want my culture to be dragged through the mud by people like MBS George. she is already attracting media attention in the UK for her political views, and I want to be as loud and forthright as I can in saying that she does not represent me or anyone else I know in the traditional music world.
Anyway, that's my two-pennorth. And thanks for starting what could be an interesting thread.