I WAS fortunate enough to take a short break to Berlin last week. I walked through the streets of a city so rich with history – full of memorials and reminders of the horrors and atrocities of genocide and fascism.

There was something terrifying about walking through a city which has dedicated itself to the principle of “never again”, while simultaneously being in a land where the AfD party are achieving the best electoral results for the far-right since the 1930s, and where a supposedly centre-left government is, much like our own in the UK, actively complicit in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

The horrifying irony was not lost on me that it was as I was leaving a history museum which explored how the Nazis silenced their political opponents when I opened social media to see footage of a young Labour Party member being violently removed from its party conference in a chokehold for daring to challenge Keir Starmer over his complicity in Israeli genocide.

Alongside the AfD in Germany, far-right and right-wing populist parties are thriving across Europe and around the world. This weekend in Austria, the FPO – a far-right party founded in the 1950s by former Nazis – decisively topped the polls in their country’s general election, with leader Herbert Kickl styling himself as “Volkskanzler” – a term previously used to describe Adolf Hitler.

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From Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to the Netherlands’s Geert Wilders, to the very real possibility of a Donald Trump re-election in the US, far-right leaders and those invoking far-right rhetoric are consistently topping the polls and edging closer and closer to – and in some cases grabbing on – to power all across the Western world.

While a minority of these leaders are outright embracing and invoking the terminology of fascism, most are shying away from using such a label to describe themselves, instead positioning themselves as “common sense” and trying to suggest that really, they’re just centrists and that those to the left of them are extreme.

This has been very much the playbook of Trump and his supporters throughout the US, with bizarre claims that Kamala Harris – whose capitalist ideology by global standards is centrist at best, and far more in line with many European centre-right parties – is a communist or socialist (ironically making her sound infinitely cooler to me than she actually is). Similarly back at home, Reform UK have actively hit back at being labelled “far right”, while accusing one of the most right-wing Conservative governments in recent memory of being too left-wing.

The fact is we must make fascists and the far-right embarrassed about more than just the label – they should be ashamed to hold fascist and far-right policy positions too.

This must also apply to those who may not overall hold overarching far-right ideologies, but aren’t afraid to court fascists and dip their toes into far-right policies every now and then.

Since the election, Starmer’s Labour government has collaborated with Meloni on immigration policy, failed to call out Islamophobia during the recent far-right race riots, and has refused to commit to repealing the horrifying anti-protest laws implemented by the previous Tory regime – laws which have just this week seen peaceful activists defending our planet against climate destruction sentenced to years in prison.

I don’t believe Starmer is far-right, but I do believe he’s far more willing to try and placate the far-right than any decent person should be, and that this will leave the UK in an extremely dangerous position indeed come the next Westminster election.

Starmer won this year’s election on fewer votes than Corbyn won in 2017 or 2019, and his popularity has plummeted since entering power.

The British political landscape is changing rapidly, with Reform overtaking the Tories in many seats across the UK – including here in Scotland – as the dominant right-wing party, and regardless of the outcome of the ongoing Tory leadership contest, the subsequent battle for the right of British politics will not be pretty, as the campaign continues to demonstrate.

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At the weekend, contender Kemi Badenoch wrote in The Sunday Telegraph: “We cannot be naive and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not.

“I am struck, for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here.”

It’s quite clear that this statement is intended to do two things: first, to further whip up anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment by invalidating other cultures; and secondly, to manufacture consent for the UK’s ongoing support for Israel’s genocide.

While Badenoch deliberately uses the evocativeemotive word “hate”, her implication is that support for Israel is an inherently British value. The reality is that UK polling has consistently found that most Brits support a ceasefire and a UK ban on arms sales to Israel, and that UK citizens consistently sympathise more with the Palestinian plight than with Israel.

Despite not being remotely representative of the general population, the cosy support for Israel among the British political elite is not only actively enabling the genocide of Palestinians and the terrorist extreme actions of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Lebanon, it is also continuing to embolden fascists and Islamophobes right here in the UK.

It was no surprise that after the Union flag, the second most visible flag at last month’s far-right rally in Glasgow was that of Israel. By supporting a state which is indiscriminately bombing a predominantly Muslim population in the Middle East, the UK essentially legitimises those who wish Muslims harm here in Britain.

It is no surprise that in so many countries where the far-right are thriving, the centre-left’s capitulations to them – including through support and complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza – have only emboldened them, not stamped them out.

Only by offering a genuine, left-wing alternative in which working people can thrive will the far-right be quashed. Only by listening to the pleas of the electorate – such as by ending arms sales to Israel – will trust be restored in politicians such that populist movements lose their momentum.

Only by refuting bigots, rather than meeting them where they are at, will we end their hateful movements.

These must be the lessons for the Labour Party and for supposedly centre-left parties globally. Otherwise, the far-right will only continue to prosper.