Put out more flags (that'll show 'em)!

Mr Griffin and the Province of Northern Ireland have a love-hate relationship. He loves it, for all the wrong reasons (for its residual sectarianism and thuggery) while it hates him (or rather what he represents) partly for the same reason all decent patriots do. Another reason being, that it has experienced and largely overcome its own home-grown, faith-based versions of the race-based political sectarianism which he has unsuccessfully peddled there in the past.

The classic sectarian pitch is to claim to offer protection to one community against the perceived encroachments of another, alien community. In order for this to succeed, however, so the sectarians argue, organization and discipline is necessary. And who better to provide it than, you guessed it, the sectarians themselves!

Soon, however, these self-proclaimed saviours of their own people show their true colours. And they're not the red, white and blue of the Union Jack, but the black and white of the Jolly Roger. For what else can one call preying on one's own people, operating a thinly veiled protection racket, under the pretence of defending them from the aggression of an alien community, than piracy?

The freedom-loving English will never submit to the tyranny of tin-pot wannabe dictators like Mr Griffin and his mercenary imitators, no matter how serious the threat from ethnically alien intromission and no matter how unpleasant may be the consequences of the latter.

A political party that goes to our people with the offer to cleanse the Augean stables of the corrupt Establishment must have clean hands itself, if it hopes to be taken seriously by them. Mr Griffin's BNP does not and neither does any of its rivals so far on the scene.

Like the sectarians of Ulster, in its smaller way, the BNP's leadership leeched off (ie, abused and exploited) its own members. What kind of advertisement for nationalism was (and is) this? Little wonder that nine-tenths of the party's activists and members have left it. And less wonder that the electorate does not trust its few remaining candidates with public office. If the BNP is no better than the rotten parties of the Establishment, then 'better the devil you know than the devil you don't', reason the electorate. And who can blame them?

'Out of the frying pan, into the fire', is an unappealing slogan. The legal, electoral road to nationalism is the highway to national salvation, but it must be followed in a suitable vehicle, namely, a new and respectable, broad church ethno-nationalist party. A party, moreover, which does more than merely pay lip-service to the principles of democracy and free speech, but has these core values at its heart.

Decency and democracy will be the twin watchwords of the new party. This will attract the support of decent nationalists as well as the wider electorate. The electorate will recognize the real thing when they see it and will not be turned off, as they were in the case of the BNP, by a leader with embarrassing baggage and an inability convincingly to make the case for nationalism, because he no longer believes in it himself.