I fear it no exaggeration to say that fascism is again rising in europe and must be stopped. the success of ukip last night in Eastleigh and elsewhere, is surely just a protest. People are disillusioned with politics in general. If people actually thought about what ukip stands for, of course, nobody would be idiotic enough to vote for their brand of fascism-lite. For fascism it is, no matter how much farage and his minions might like to pretend that it isn’t: they would have us believe that they merely promote a valid, rational, alternative point of view when they stand for xenophobia and illiberalism. They are anti-immigration, anti-gay marriage, anti-tax and anti-wealth fare state. When you look at their policies, their general anti-modernity stance, they remind one of german nazism of the thirties. The truly frightening thing is, though, like german facsism, they are gaining popular credibility: people do not see them for the xenophobes they are, and instead talk about controlled immigration and leaving the EU as if it was rational.

It isn’t. I know I keep just writing things like tis and making generalizations without giving my reasons, but the fact remains stances such as those taken by ukip are not rational. They stem from a deep distrust of modernity and ‘otherness’: of course, people like Farage would have you think otherwise, pretending that their views have solid social and economic reasons behind them. But let’s cut the crap: what harm does immigration actually do? Even if it reached a level where the culture or even language was changed, so what? It has always changed, so it will merely be another chapter in he never-ending story of these isles. Nobody will be swamped and nothing will be lost: things will just change, an change is inevitable and natural.

But that is what people like farage don’t get. They seek to hold back progress, stop time, keep values fixed and absolute. The result, had they their way, would be oppression; a forced conformity to a norm that does not exist. It would also be isolationism: their misplaced desire to keep the uk independent wold merely keep it alone. We would become an irrelevance. In turn we would become more inward-looking: as our social fabric becomes stricter, it will split. As homophobia and xenophobia become normalised, as they will if people continue to give bigots like farage air-time, society will rupture, and the only thing that could hold it together is a system akin to that of fascist Germany. Thus if this trend continues we will loose sight of who we are.

This is why I am so worried about the rise of ukip and other far-right parties across Europe. He might seem jocular and amenable, and I realise that as people get desperate, they often turn to political extremes, but farage represents the return of something very dangerous indeed.