Imagine a trusted activist, welcome in a wide range of far-right organisations, described by the British National Party as “a keen Party member and an active supporter over the last eight years … [who] would travel across London to support meetings in any area”. A man who “would never miss an opportunity to go out leafleting, despite having to use a walking-stick to get around … devoted to the Nationalist cause … a regular supporter of the Trafalgar Club fund raising dinners … [and] attender at the Red White and Blue gatherings, where his humour and love of life made him very popular”.

That was Duncan Robertson, who died aged 48 on 19 March 2013 and whose glowing obituary, by the BNP’s Croydon and Sutton branch, appeared on the BNP website on 29 April.

The British National Party’s glowing tribute to Duncan attracted 17 positive comments, providing further evidence of how successful his infiltration of the far right had been over the past ten years. Here are some of them – spelling, grammar and silly names are all their own.

“RIP fellow patriot” – imnokuffar

“RIP proud patriot” – A Wayne Lamport

Duncan’s funeral ceremony included a selection of readings chosen by the celebrant from the British Humanist Association in agreement with Searchlight. We reproduce two here.

Man’s dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him to live but once he must so live as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose; so live as not to be seared by the shame of a cowardly and trivial past; so live that dying he can say “All my life and all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world, the fight for the liberation of mankind.” – How the Steel was Tempered by Nikolai Alekseyevich Ostrovski

This month Searchlight is devoting eight pages to the threat to democracy in Greece. At this time all those who care about combating Nazism and hate should come together to ensure postwar history in Europe is not repeated, with the destruction of whole sections of society such as under the rule of the Colonels in Greece from 1967 to 1974 and the mass genocidal killings in the Balkans in the early 1990s. After the Second World War people thought fascism and genocide had been banished from Europe for good, but that proved not to be the case.

Now the austerity that has affected many parts of the world since the financial crash that started in the USA has resulted in a growth of far-right extremism even in countries that were seen as strong democracies. This is undermining postwar progress. Parliamentary democracy in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece has been threatened at one level or another, but it is in Greece in particular that we are witnessing a clear rightward shift. We see to our horror the growth of racial and religious hatred, and fascistic parties winning parliamentary seats, chief among them Golden Dawn, which Searchlight warned of many years ago with a front cover story and investigation. Now its representatives sit in the Greek parliament and there is some evidence that they also have their jackboots under the table at Cabinet level. People are being murdered, beaten, chased into exile, and strikers forced back to work at gun point.