In the blue corner we have the English Defence League (EDL), a collection of football crews and frustrated ex-street-fighting BNP types picking on an easy target in the hope that they will somehow be seen as virtuous rebels rather than the violent louts they are.

In the red corner we have Unite Against Fascism (UAF) a collection of middle class stoodents, lecturers and social workers who don't need to prove anything to anybody because they already know that they're your intellectual and moral superiors.

And caught in the middle are the English; a proudly diverse (both culturally and racially – although 'race' is has virtually no meaning when you look at the science rather than the myths) group of people who live in a little county with a long history of tolerance, freedom and justice – which is why people like moving here in the first place ;-)

This is not to say that things are perfect in our little country. England today is more unequal – in terms of incomes, wealth, health, education, life chances – than at any time since 1914. Economic inequality in the UK is at the highest it has been since records began in 1961. A third of our children live in poverty and all the evidence shows that a child's social class background at birth is still the best indicator of how well he or she will do in school and later on in life. The lower your socio-economic position the greater your risk of low birth-weight, infections, cancer, coronary heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, accidents, nervous and mental illnesses.

Social mobility is at the same level it was in the 1950s, only now the family and community bonds that once helped people in impoverished communities are no longer in place. As impoverishment and inequality rise so does anti-social behaviour and violent crime.

And the EDL think that the only thing we have to worry about is Muslim extremism!

The best way to fight the terrorists would be to screen Chris Morris's new film, 'Four Lions', in every school in the country. In truth your average militant-Muslim and right-wing-boot-boy have a lot more in common with each other than they care to admit. Both act without recourse to reason or ethics and both believe that the rest of us should surrender ourselves to their intolerant world-views.

The less fascistic right-wing have also caused us a lot of grief. With the introduction of neoliberal economics they started a process that would ultimately lead to the social, economic and ecological impoverishment of millions of people living in England. Through privitisation, deregulation, deindutrialisation and blatant theft the Tories effectively disempowered local communities, centralising power so that our lives are now under the absolute control of the state and the market.

Not that the left fare much better when it comes to liberty - these people are so authoritarian they even want control your language (Political Correctness anyone?). Under the Labour government things were set to get a lot worse. Not only would power become even more centralised, but the new, left-wing (despite the protests of other sections of the left,

Labour's attacks on liberty do follow left-wing ideology) government would even invade the private lives of the people of England. So nowadays, in a typical English town: you will be filmed an average of 300 times as you go about your daily business; you may be stopped and searched at any moment; you may be given an extra-judicial fine without recourse to the legal protections that have been at the heart of our country’s law for 800 years; you can be banned from entering public spaces at the whim of a ‘public servant’; and the police are allowed to arbitrarily detain (kettle) anyone who takes it upon themselves to protest about the state of the world. But don’t worry it’s all ‘for your own protection’.

What we really need to 'defend' ourselves from is the political parasites (both left and right) who threaten the liberties, freedoms and equality that the common people of England have held dear for millennia (even, in fact, before the idea of 'England' was born). We must abandon the politicos and take power into our own hands if we are ever to realise the dream of one of the greatest ever Englishmen, Col. Thomas Rainsborough, who said at the Putney Debates...

“LET THE WORLD REST IN PEACE AND ANARCHY!”