Over at Harry's Place Edmund Standing has collated some quotes from EDL members that shed some light on what motivates the EDL.
I recommend that you read that piece in conjunction with BritologyWatch's excellent ‘Racist’ English nationalism: an alibi for Britain’s anglophobia and Islamophobia.
It's all too easy for the commentariat to describe the EDL as 'English nationalists', and looking at the English Defence League, with their profusion of English flags, they could possibly be forgiven for using that label. But it's an incorrect label. It is labelling to compartmentalise and isolate. It's a label, as BritologyWatch argues, that is conveniently used to distance the views held by the EDL from those of mainstream British society. In this way English nationalism can be objectified as 'the other' in a simillar way to how the EDL objectify Islam as 'the other'. But the English Defence League are not really English nationalists (they're not advocates of popular sovereignty, and they're not demonstrating for an English parliament or English independence). No, they're actually very pro-British with a strong sense of Britishness. It will be an inconvenient truth for some but the EDL are as much a British disease as they are an English disease.
