These are momentous times in Flanders.  My friend, Johan Van Vlaams, blogs below on the new beginning for pro-Flemish politics.

Meanwhile, I want to look backwards at the Vlaams Blok model.  Does it have a wider applicability?  What if any lessons does it hold for the benighted natives of my own country.  For the avoidance of doubt and in deference to my Scots friends I will restrict my observations in this respect to my own band of raiders south of the border.

The Blok took its character and drew its determination not from anything so nebulous as political ideals - or, God help us, values - but from the Flemish people themselves.  They are children of the North Sea coastal lands of Europe, cut from much the same cloth as the Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans who, with the Celts of the fringe, constitute the indigenous peoples of Great Britain.

But unlike us, the Flemish have, even under the multicultural onslaught and in the maw of the Belgian Establishment, retained sufficient self-knowledge and self-respect to found a liberation movement on national identity.

National identity in a European people, no less than any other, ought always to be contiguous with the nation state.  A discreetly related people is the heart and soul of nationhood.  But that nationhood is not merely diminished by the artificial conjunction of differing peoples with differing interests, it is permanently disfigured by the inevitable contest and still more inevitable one-sided outcome.

But there is an upside to this, too.  Ancient rivalries do speak to public feeling.  A people who suffer injustice are likely to be as mindful of their identity as any single-malt nation.  All too clearly, being gripped in the Belgian maw has served just such a purpose for the Flemish.  The Blok was all about that.

We English, by contrast, have effortlessly dominated that artificial construction known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland.  And whilst we, at least, would argue that our dominance has been benign, the Scots, Welsh and, especially, Northern Irish Catholics would quickly point to our failings (at considerable cost of a reply in kind, I might add).  Accordingly, their identities have been defined against us as much as by their own particular uniqueness.

For our part, we have suffered the fate of the rival who is victorious.  Alright, don’t all say “Ahhh” at once.  As de facto head of this family of nations we have given our money to the Scots and Welsh and our blood to the Irish.  At the same time we have put away our national identity lest it be too galling to the subjugates, and replaced it with something inclusive – Britishness.  It has not made us more acceptable to them or in any way resigned them to their secondary status.  It has merely caused us to be careless as to who we are.  And we have been criminally careless.  We did not - and do not - care to retain any but the vaguest and most general-purpose comprehension of self.  No good has come of it, nor can.

In acknowledgement of this curious duality of ours a national debate was engendered by the BBC a few years ago.  So … was it to be an inchoate, backward-looking Englishness of Constable’s Hay Wain, Elgar, cream teas on Exmoor, Hovis ads in the Dales?  Or a slightly less inchoate and backward-looking Britishness of bowler hats on London Bridge … the bulldog spirit …the Monarchy … PG Tips, Corrie and Tony Blackburn.  People seemed utterly divided on the issue and one can’t blame them.

Predictably, our betters sought to settle the debate with a Third Way - the Blairite attachment to shallow modernity and all things compassionate.  What we got, then, was the predictable reification of our “centuries old tradition of tolerance”, a Post-National deception that, today, is repeated with Goebbelesian frequency.  It will go on being repeated until we finally understand and acquiesce in our racially egalitarian fate.  We shall be a veritable Winston Smith with Victory Gin as a token of our former being, and true love in our hearts for our cosmopolitan Big Brother in Brussels or New York.

Nope, tolerance is a scam.  Never grant it the moral status its pushers claim.  It is an invitation to the self-sacrificial guilt-trip of multiracialism.  It is productive of the death of nationhood and the birth of the Multi-cult.  The truth, anyway, is that we are more foolish than tolerant, more phlegmatic than foolish and more self-estranged than phlegmatic.

All this must be immensely comforting for our political elite.  Divide and rule, they say.  But an inner, seemingly irresolvable duality that obscures the one exit strategy we might have had is an astonishingly handy gift to these people.  No wonder they have come to see Englishness as an artefact of the past.  What other meaning can one ascribe to their carefully designed Census Form of 2001?  You remember, perhaps, how it afforded a tick-box to every racial identity under the tropical sun and even some that weren’t.  The white “minorities”, ie, the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish Protestant majorities in their own homelands, were each accorded a little box to tick.  There was just the one exception.  We English men and women were given a box marked “British”.

I and, no doubt, hundreds of thousands of others obliterated those seven untrue letters and scrawled “ENGLISH, YOU CREEP!”  But it was only the anger of the impotent.  The Hausa (naturally, not a Nigerian) who processed my form deep in the bowels of the executive wasn’t listening.  And, anyway, if genuine Englishness suddenly arose out of the mists with purposeful stride he and his masters would only scream “racist”, “Nazi”, “anti-Semite”.  It’s what they must do to protect the Multi-cult and, thereby, themselves.  The artificial conjunction of different peoples with different interests really is disfiguring.

It’s a fact, though, that all modern political elites commend diversity in the west.  It is particularly noticeable among the international corps.  Strictly speaking there are both geopolitical elites as in the EU’s nomenklatura and global elites as in the petty fiefdoms of the UN, World Bank and WTO.  In today’s climate both categories can be confident of surviving the nation state.  They are the inheritors of the dawn.

With that in mind, the value-based Post-Nation is a globaliser’s wet dream.  It will afford them power without accountability and plenty of deep pile, tax-funded personal comforts, too.  Sever the tree from the root, cast the seeds of Africa and the Middle-East thick upon the ground … and rule.  Simple as that.  Of course, it will be done with all their store of wise and generous humanity.  The greatest pleasure in political elitism is the sense of moral superiority bestowed by generosity with other people’s money.

So, then, that’s our future.  All roads bar one lead to it.  The Flemish are travelling on the exception which, of course, is marked “nationalism”.  But not for them the half-baked, doomed, sun-wheel idealism of what, wrongly, is known as the Far Right.  The Blok was mainstream, conservative and populist.  But more than anything else it was completely professional and disciplined in its focus on secession from Belgium.

That is a very significant lesson.  It means that there are still conditions in this world under which conservatism and nationalism can be reunited.  It means that our scared rabbit of a multiracial, socially-liberal Conservative Party could, in theory, embrace a genuine right-wing philosophy.  At the very least that’s better than being dragged into a disingenuous simulation by the electoral successes of the BNP or UKIP.

You will point out, rightly, that the Blok had only a quarter of the Flemish vote.  But it began with nothing in 1977 and campaigned in the teeth of the most intense Establishment hostility and behind a cordon sanitaire erected by the other Flemish parties.  Everyone saw it as a success – including the Walloon Establishment which killed it.

Another clear lesson is that nationalism is not á priori wrong.  It seems incredible to have to say so.  But that is what it has come to in this universalist, culturally marxist age.  If you, sir, feel even a scintilla of doubt or discomfiture about nationalist sentiment you are a victim of decades of politically correct group-think.  My advice to you is to part forthwith from this artful travesty.  Your choice, after all, is: know thyself or lose thyself.  There is no middle way.  Of course, if for reasons of your own you prefer or don’t care if one day you see a Post-English rump living in Post-England, my advice is to be happy.  You probably will.

The last lesson of the Blok is somewhat negative.  As we await the final acts in the drama of the dissolution of Belgium we cannot assume that we will be favoured by transference in any shape or form.

It would be rather useful if some brilliant political scientist could develop a unit of public disaffection with conventional politics – a blok, perhaps.  Making due adjustment for mass and national temperament, he could calculate the bloks under which indigenous Britons now labour and how far distant we are from the level that proved critical among the Flemish.

But, failing that, I think we have to assume that we are very far distant indeed.  The Flemish, at least, are lighting the way.