Jewish students have voiced outrage at the news that members of the far-right IONA London Forum are due to attend tomorrow evening's talk by Jacques Vergès at SOAS, University of London.

Vergès is a notorious lawyer who has associated with and defended Nazis, mass murderers and antisemites. His invitation has been widely criticised with SOAS Students' Union, Mike Freer MP and the Holocaust Education Trust voicing concerns about his presence. Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, have called on the Home Secretary to ban him from entry to the UK.

Dramatic developments are taking place inside and outside the anti-immigrant movement in the United States, according to a study by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights. A report, The New Shape of the Anti-Immigrant Movement, published in December, details how the support has eroded for many of the national anti-immigrant groups. Further, the number of local nativist groups has plunged dramatically in the last two years.

Nevertheless, the amount of anti-immigrant legislation introduced in the States has continued to skyrocket. Opinion polls show nativist sentiment at dangerously high levels, as the Tea Party has become a new force driving anti-immigrant politics.

Remembrance Sunday in London has for decades been desecrated by various British nazis turning up to parade through the streets of the capital: an infamous insult to those who gave their lives to defeat fascism seventy years ago.

As reported in December’s Searchlight, the National Front’s numbers were boosted at its march to the Cenotaph last year with new recruits such as Richard Edmonds, a former second-in-command in the British National Party, taking part for the first time since the NF split in 1980 and marching alongside some of the most violent survivors of the Combat 18 factions from the 1990s.

But away from the cameras the same weekend saw further connections being built among the elite of British fascism, where far-right Catholics associated with the Society of St Pius X are increasingly active. This Society was founded in Switzerland in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and brought together clerics who opposed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.