English Democrats

The English Democrats are a political party in the UK, formed in 2002. Their main policy is a push for a devolved English Parliament in a similar way to the current devolved Scottish and Welsh parliaments. They also wish to see more devolution to local government level and allude to the idea of regional referenda to provide a more direct form of democracy.

Their main selling point is national pride with their website and other promotional materials covered in St. George Crosses and decrying how 'Englishness' is apparently being lost in a sea of multicuturalism. In keeping with this theme, they also want a stricter immigration policy. Whilst not going as far as other parties who take this route there may be good reason to wonder about the 'hidden values' of a party that seem to want to go into so much depth to explain away policies that are basically anti-immigration and anti-asylum in nature. Particularly worrying is that they find it necessary to include the disclaimer '(not racist)' in the meta description tag of their homepage.

Presumably aiming for voters in the right wing, Daily Mail-reading, johnny-foreigner-hating camp they include standard the europhobic messages including a policy of never joining the European single currency. Whilst they don't seem to go as far as to say they would actually leave the EU, their strong criticism of it suggests they couldn't complete their aims without doing so.

They have enjoyed a limited success at a few local elections in which they have stood candidates, but place their current hopes in the European Elections due to the system of proportional representation and presumably the xenophobia stirred up by right wing tabloids, and of course, by the British and American governments in their War on Terrorism.