THOSE cynics who asked why the EU needed to designate this year as European Year against Racism and Xenophobia got their answer this week in Vitrolles and yesterday in a coroner's court in London.
Fascism is alive and kicking - literally and metaphorically - on France's southern coast where a fourth town fell to the control of the racist National Front last weekend.
And in his verdict on the death of Stephen Lawrence (I8) in 1993 in south London, the coroner, Sir Montague Levene, left no doubt about where the blame lay.
"What we have established in this inquest," he said, "is that a group of white youths killed a young man in cold blood and for no other reason, it would appear, than that the colour of his skin was black."
The victory of Jean Marie Le Pen's party is a European phenomenon whose significance should not be lost on democratic forces throughout the EU. Although France is the only country where major towns - Marignane, Orange, Toulon, and now Vitrolles - have fallen under the majority control of the extreme right, in recent years the electoral successes of the National Front have been replicated in Italy and exceeded in Austria in percentage terms.
In Italy, the Allianza Nacional, born out of the some time terrorist MSI, captured 16 per cent of the national vote at, the general election, on a par with the NF's vote in France, and in Austria Joerg Haider's "Liberals", the FPO took 27 per cent in the last municipal poll.
Until then the strongest electoral showing of the neo fascist right for decades had been the 29 per cent achieved by the Flemish nationalist, Vlaams Blok, in Belgium's second city of Antwerp.
In such cases the growth of the far right's vote beyond the scale of fringe politics has been aided by an attempt to present a new clean cut image, the Gucci style of former communists being mirrored by Armani suits on the right, the language of hate, muted by euphemisms. But have they really changed?
It has also been accompanied by, a gradual, but significant, loss of the pariah status such parties once had. There was a time in the early 1980s when even to sit in the same room as such groups would have been inconceivable. Now, anti fascist activists note with concern, such scruples are regarded as posturing.
Nowhere more so than in Italy where the leader of Allianza Nacional, Gianfranco Fini, is now talked of as the real leader of the opposition, sidelining Silvio Berlusconi who brought his party into government. The man, who only a year ago described Mussolini as Italy's statesman of the century, now routinely attends the congresses of the former communist, PDS, and its leaders attend His.
Mr Haider, too, presents himself to the world as a model democrat but lets the guard slip all too often - he has praised the employment policies of the Third Reich, paid tribute to the Waffen SS, and denounced the "corrupt" parliamentary system.
Elsewhere in the EU the far right is largely confined to the electoral fringe. In Germany, Franz Shoenhuber's Republikaners picked up 12 per cent of the vote in the country's richest state of Baden Wurttemberg. Gerhardt Frei's German People's Union has seats in Hamburg, but none of the groups has representation at federal level.
But racist attacks against foreigners persist. Last year in Brandenburg local people paid skinheads to burn down a house that was to be used as an immigrant hostel. Anti immigrant rhetoric by mainstream politicians has also significantly increased.
There has also been a resurgence of neo Nazi activity in Sweden, and a Danish link was found to a spate of letter bombs sent recently to prominent British figures involved in racially mixed marriages.
Two weeks ago the Irish Commissioner, Padraig Flynn, launched the European Year against Racism, for which he is responsible. The Commission will support projects in the member states aimed at reconciliation and developing awareness of racism. It also hopes to create a central European "observatory" to monitor racial incidents, but agreement on the latter has been held up by a dispute with the British over its refusal to allow the centre to be run by the Commission.
