Ghost of civil war still haunting us

I was in Catalonia last weekend at the Spanish Civil War battlefields, making a film about the great Jack Jones who was wounded there.

Staring at the bleak hills many of the International Brigade volunteers died on brought back the scale of the courage of these young idealists who felt it their duty to stem the rising tide of European fascism in the 1930s before governments did.

Men who were disowned by our politicians for defending democracy against a Hitler-backed Franco, when that is exactly what they should have been doing.

As the strong vote for Marine Le Pen reveals in France, and the rise of racism in this country shows, fascism is an evil that is never too far away from the surface.

We owe it to the 2,300 British volunteers who went to Spain and the 500 who never came back to strangle at birth any far-right attempts to resurrect it.