RIGHT-WING boot-boy Tommy Robinson is back on the streets as of yesterday.

Having been freed on bail after winning an appeal against a contempt of court hearing, there was predictable joy and euphoria from within the serried ranks of bigots, racists, Islamphobes, neo-Nazis and other likeminded types.

“Fantastic news! Tommy won and will be released today. A free man again!” Dutch anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders messaged.

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So-called “commentator” Katie Hopkins, that most reasonable and reasoned of people, meanwhile said in a tweet she was “looking forward to an apology” from the judge who jailed Robinson.

It’s all too easy to dismiss such remarks as the haverings they undoubtedly are of people too blinkered to see Robinson for the toxic political pond life that he is.

But behind the poisonous circus that surrounds the Robinson issue lie far wider and even more worrying signs of the political times in which we now live.

The National:

I’m talking of the degree to which many further up the extreme-right-wing chain have elevated Robinson’s case to the level of a cause celebre. Right now there is no shortage of those with money, power and influence, whose “grand vision” sees street thugs like Robinson as indispensible henchmen in their campaign to create an internationalised far right propelled by deep antipathy towards Muslims, migrants, liberals, socialists or anyone else they deem enemies or inferior.

People like Robinson are useful idiots to overseers of this plan to create what Steve Bannon has called The Movement, which he hopes will lie at the core of a right-wing populist revolt transnational in nature and reach.

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If all this seems eerily familiar then, yes, it is. Without being melodramatic the very term “The Movement” has echoes of “The Reich” about it.

Already I can hear the chorus of sceptics who think drawing parallels between the 1930s and today is overblown and alarmist. But look again and there are some disquieting similarities. Now, just as then, we have growing extreme-right factions in many European countries that want to reassert national sovereignty and to hell with any “foreigners” or “outsiders” who get in the way.

Now, just as then, underpinning the rise of this fascism – and that is what it is – is a profound crisis within liberal democracy and the structures on which it rests. Now, just as then, the Left and progressive movements, parties and institutions that should act as the bulwark against the rise of the extreme right are too busy blaming each other to do anything effective about it.

As a spokesperson for Hope Not Hate, the anti-racist advocacy group which rightly pointed out that many of those people lionising Robinson right now probably have “little or no idea of the reach and influence of the money behind their man”.

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When a right-wing US think tank like the Middle East Forum rallies international support, pays speakers to talk at “Free Tommy” rallies and bankrolls Robinson’s campaign and legal defence to the tune of a five-figure sum, then it’s time to take notice of what is undeniably a transnational network in operation.

When Sam Brownback, a diplomat representing US president Donald Trump, lobbies the UK on behalf of the founder of the English Defence League (EDL) and threatens to publicly criticise its handling of the case then you know sinister and powerful influences are at work and being brought to bear.

Which takes me back to Steve Bannon and his determination to create The Movement. As Nico Hines, a journalist with the Daily Beast, recently highlighted, over the past year Bannon has held talks with right-wing groups across the European continent from Nigel Farage and members of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National) in the West, to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Polish populists in the East.

The National:

Bannon the same agent provocateur,who has described Robinson as “the backbone” of Britain, also makes no bones about his aim to bolster the anti-EU vote across the continent to undermine, and ultimately paralyse the EU.

In the process of creating his right-wing “supergroup” within the European Parliament, Bannon too of course has been in direct contact with Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Already Bannon has described Johnson as “his own guy” and said he had “texted a lot” with him and spoken by phone with him during his recent London trip.

Between them Johnson, Gove and Rees-Mogg represented a “deep talent bench” of potential anti-EU leaders for the Conservative Party, Bannon was also recently quoted as saying.

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Bannon’s political aim is quite clearly nothing less than touching off a “tectonic plate shift in Europe” and he is pulling out all the stops to make it happen, increasingly pulling onside some of the continent’s most opportunist and unsavoury political allies.

There is little doubt too that he is sharpening his new British “friends” to serve as tools and minions in his efforts to dismantle the EU.

None of this is politics as usual, far from it. It is unequivocal evidence of a nasty cabal afoot, hell bent on driving their right-wing agenda come what may. The writing is on the wall and any denial or complacency in the face of such threats leaves us all vulnerable to the predations of the vile beliefs and politics promulgated by those within this cabal’s ranks.

From Bannon to Robinson the threat from the extreme right is now fully and starkly before us and is transnational in nature. It schemes and plots in the corridors of power among the influential and wealthy, just as it encourages its ugly and brutal cadres on to the streets. Make no mistake about it, these forces are now one and the same and must be recognised and confronted as such.

Now is the time to step up to the plate and do this in an uncompromising and unflinching way. Let’s not write off the threat as being overblown. This is not the moment to deny the reality of those sinister forces in our midst. As history has taught us, the price of ignoring such things all too easily leads us to a dark place.