Europe’s brief hiatus of peace after the destruction of the fascist jackboot and the fall of the Iron Curtain may be over

It’s a black day for Europe, no doubt about it. This is not just because the European Union has lost Britain, but because the loss of Britain is just another indication that something far more sinister is happening.

Fascist sentiments are on the rise again, marked by calls for ‘independence’ and ‘self-determination’, by calls to nationalism and hatred of invaders and The Other. And ironically, this time round the first skittle to fall is Britain, the one European country not to fall under the fascist jackboot in the first half of the 20th century, where Oswald Mosely and his British Union of Fascists remained marginal and sneered at even as fascist sentiment took over the rest of the continent.

Europe has had precious little peace, security and stability, but we have taken it for granted since 1990. Those who have grown to adulthood since that year know nothing else. Those of us who are older knew a very different Europe, but still we have allowed ourselves to relax into what we thought was a state of permanency – the new order.

My grandparents grew up in a continent that was a mass of many warring states on a map completely different to the one we know today, ravaged by the First World War and with millions of impoverished Europeans leaving forever for the New World across the ocean.

My parents were born as the worst war the world has ever known broke out and knew nothing but war, bombs and destruction for the first few years of their lives. And I was born into the thick of the Cold War, and grew up thinking it entirely normal that half of Europe should be locked behind the totalitarian wall of Communism, segregated in its prison from the other half, with people IN EUROPE being killed for trying to escape to freedom. Until the Berlin Wall came down when I was 25, I thought – because I had grown up with it – that the division of Europe and the imprisonment of one half of its people was a permanent state of affairs because I had known nothing else. “Another young man has been shot in a hail of bullets for trying to flee across the Berlin wall” – OK, back to the day’s business.

And now I have a horrible feeling somewhere deep inside that it’s all going to start again, that the peace, union, freedom and stability we have had since 1989 was just a brief hiatus, that Muslims are going to be the new Jews, and that what has happened now in Britain will be the trigger for the entry into the mainstream of the Far Right in the rest of Europe.

Marine Le Pen is already calling this morning for France to hold its own referendum on leaving the European Union. Because Cameron – without a view to the consequences – made it an option for Britain, French political leaders will find it impossible to resist pressing calls for a referendum in their own country. Refusing a referendum looks undemocratic, even if you refuse it to save democracy.

Fortunately, the Maltese seem to have been largely won over by the pleasures and advantages of EU membership and the euro, and this includes many of the Labour politicians who campaigned against membership. We will probably avoid more problems for ourselves on the narrow domestic front, but that is a small mercy compared to what is probably about to unfold.

Nigel Farage was able to take what is essentially fascism into the mainstream, because he does not look like the British person’s idea of a fascist, he laughs and jokes, and he never mentions ‘ideology’ – but he is, essentially, a fascist.