With world stock markets plummeting and unemployment spiking, it is only prudent to ask: will the global economic meltdown provide the toxic fuel for haters?

Early signs from Europe are far from reassuring. Ed Balls, a UK cabinet minister, worried that fascist movements, subdued since the 1930s, could emerge as a powerful force in British politics for “the next year, the next five years, the next 10 and even the next 15 years”. Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of Unite, a UK trade union, warned that the xenophobic British National party was leveraging the slogan “British jobs for British workers” to infiltrate the labour movement.