Could we have an English National Party?

Isn't it interesting how 'wrong' that question feels? Yet in the wake of the defeat of the BNP in Barking - Nick Griffin failing to secure a seat and all the BNP Councillors losing theirs - it is a question I think worth asking, especially as many Christians seem to hate the BNP with a vengeance (and there's an issue worth debating as well).

Those same Christians seem to have no problem in principle with the Scottish, Welsh or Irish nationalist parties (respectively SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein), but I suspect it is not just the nature of the BNP's policies, but something about our whole psyche as a nation which makes an ENP a 'no go area' even before we've considered the policy. Is this simply a national sense of guilt - and if it is, why do we have it in such huge doses when other nations don't? Or is there something inherently wrong about nationalism which we allow the other nationalist parties to get away with because they aren't English?

So my question is really two-fold. Could an English National Party be so constructed as to be a good thing? And are the other UK nationalist parties really as innocent as we suppose?

As a PS, the BNP actually got more votes than any of the other nationalist parties!

As a PPS, I am a great fan of the Union, and for that reason not a fan at all of the nationalist parties, but if that's the way we're going ...

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Totalitarian Britain

totalitarian >adjective (of government) centralized, dictatorial, and requiring complete subservience to the state.

I was going to post something about the growing totalitarianism of the British state, but Pete Sanlon has done a good job of it here.

Comments should be posted on his site.

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