Not Can't. Won't

A decent post here, but I must quibble with some things.

First, if you're British, I can't give you better advice than what Peter Hitchens regularly gives: Don't vote BNP. Ever.

If you're looking for a solution to these problems, look elsewhere. If none exists, create one. Anyhow UKIP is much preferred over anything akin to the BNP. (I'm sure Shannon Love feels the same way about the BNP).

Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.

How did Britain come to this state?

Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces, in a narrative both historical and current that all the "stupid" people know is rubbish, but which the educated, intelligent people either believe or people pretend to believe and insist we all must as well.

That is because discussion of many of these problems are ruled out of bounds of civil discussion, except in the most anodyne and Progressive ways. But, more importantly, a response to a section later in the post is required:

If the mainstream parties cannot address the real concerns of many Britons, and if they cannot at least pretend to respect and value lower-income white Britons, then Britain may be only one ugly incident away from a political seismic shift.

Not "cannot" but will not. They could address these things, but they have become so wedded to certain ideas, they do not want to. For the Progressive Left, these are not "problems", except to the extent that people resist their effects, and the mainstream conservatives have largely been coopted for their own reasons, suffering from, at best, learned helplessness in the face of them, because seriously working to fix these problems and undo their effects gets you castigated as a fascist hatemonger.

So then it should not be surprising to anyone that real problems that the political mainstream will not address are left to the real fascist racist hatemongers. They remain real issues, and people who want them fixed are left with no real recourse.

Let us not kid ourselves that this is a meta-Political Problem that only Britain or Europe faces. In America as well, matters which receive upwards of 70% of public support when polled are routinely declared "outside of the political mainstream", off the table of civic debate. The problems are real and remain, however. Eventually some person or party will come around vowing to address them, as things worsten.

A mainstream political party could. It is not a matter of they can't. They simply will not, for reasons of their own. This then makes it inevitable that solutions will be extremist ones. No one should want that, but they are making it increasingly likely.

This then is the real corruption of our political class, our elites, what Glenn Reynolds has called "the worst political class in [American] history". Petty graft in the form of earmarks pale by comparison.