Opposition to immigration - predominantly of the ‘I’m not a racist, but …’, variety – is an important component of the package, and that fact has not been lost on politicians.

In particular, the Tories have frequently attempted to capitalise on such sentiments, a strategy explicitly recommended by current health secretary Andrew Lansley in his 1990s days as a policy wonk. But as demonstrated by pronouncements by Jack Straw and (somewhat more overtly) by Phil Woolas, Labour has not always been immune from playing in the dirt.

Remember also the various attempts to talk up Britishness witnessed under New Labour. Thankfully, Gordon Brown’s flag-waved rhetorical calls for a ‘national day’ seem to have quietly been dropped.

Given such a starting point, nobody should be surprised at the claim that half the population would ‘consider supporting’ an anti-immigration soft nationalist party, as demonstrated by the findings of a poll conducted for Searchlight. Why wouldn’t they?

But don’t forget, there is plenty of difference between hurriedly telling a pollster how you might vote when faced with a range of hypothetical options, and actual practice at election time.

The UK Independence Party is, to all intents and purposes, the kind of formation to which the question refered. Its best performance has been the 16% it picked up in the 2009 European elections, a low turnout affair that gives full scope to ‘send a message’ voters.

That fell to around 3% in the subsequent Westminster contest, although that still made them the fourth largest party in terms of vote share. I guess much of the difference is accounted for by the harsh realities of first past the post. AV could bolster UKIP’s support, but is unlikely to extend it dramatically.

The moral of the Searchlight survey is not that tomorrow belongs to the far right, as Ed West in the Daily Telegraph patently seems to hope, but that the political system as current constituted is doing a good job of containing such pressures as things stands.

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This embarrassing fact came to light on the death of Swedish nationalist leader Per Engdahl in 1994. The subsequent publication of his private correspondence revealed that his early supporters included Kamprad, who was a member of the far right Nysvenska Rörelsen grouping from 1942 and 1945.

I remember being slightly surprised at the time. I mean, Sweden is supposed to be about Abba and Volvo and pigging out on smörgåsbord, not virulently anti-semitic nationalism. For the non-Marxist left of my generation and the one preceding it, ‘the Swedish model’ was a theoretical lodestar.

While Sweden always has been capitalist, it is at least arguable that in the postwar years it represented the closest approximation that the world has ever seen to a democratic socialist society.

Yet the far right has all along been a constituent current of Swedish political life. Neo-Nazis have murdered trade union leaders, and author Stieg Larsson – who has found posthumous fame with the Millennium trilogy – spent the last 15 years of his live in fear of fascist violence.

Last weekend’s general elections saw Sverigedemokraterna, known in English as the Sweden Democrats, enter the Swedish parliament for the first time, picking up 20 seats. Broadly equivalent to the British National Party, Sverigedemokraterna is an anti-immigrant and openly nationalist formation, and some elements within it have track records on the overtly fascist right.

Among those elected on its ticket is Björn Söder, who believes that Sweden finds itself on the cusp of Islamic revolution, as if 2010 Stockholm is somehow comparable to 1979 Tehran:

Yes, Sweden is being Islamified right now. We’ve taken up countless examples of how Sweden is adapting to Muslim demands and we’re seeing how mosques are popping up like mushrooms from the ground in Sweden and all over Europe. It’s not necessarily the case that we’ll all become Muslims, but that we will have to obey Sharia,” Söder said.

Campaign advertisements included one that depicted dozens of burqa-clad women barging in front of a white pensioner to claim state benefits. There are, in fact, perhaps 300,000 Muslims in Sweden. In a population of nine million, that’s around 3%, broadly similar to the 2.8% figure usually cited for the UK.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the term Islamophobia is a wrongly-grounded neologism. But these examples do genuinely come close to irrational fear of Islam. I may have to reconsider the point.

Sverigedemokraterna’s success highlights a real issue for supporters of proportional representation, a category in which I include myself. Such is the degree of anti-immigrant feeling across Europe that any PR system with a reasonable threshold guarantees ugly racists a parliamentary presence.

Far right parties are currently in government in Italy and also sit in the parliaments of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, the Netherlands and Slovakia, as well as in the European Parliament.

Contemporary euronationalism is, of course, not directly analogous to classical fascism, a doctrine that is historically compromised to the point where its rehabilitation as a mass movement is almost certainly not viable.

Sverigedemokraterna MPs notwithstanding, I suspect Sweden will remain the entirely agreeable, laid back and slightly dull place I have always found it to be. Fun, in other words, but not for the whole weekend.

But we shall not know euronationalism’s true colours until it takes office somewhere, and a protracted economic downturn that fuels discrimination directed against Muslims could be propitious to just such a development, especially in countries with a native fascist tradition.

The real question is whether its racism genuinely does stop at repatriation.

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Broadly there are two potential responses from the left. The first is to attempt physical confrontation, as happened in the face-off between the English Defence League and Socialist Workers’ Party-led Unite Against Fascism campaign in Bolton yesterday.

There are conflicting reports about what happened. Socialist Worker was quick to proclaim the day ‘a huge success’. Sure. What else could it possibly have been, comrades? But even discounting the perennial police tendency to downplay the numbers on leftwing mobilisations, most media accounts suggest that the EDL had significantly more support.

If matters had come to a serious scrap, there is little doubt as to which side would have got a pasting. For all the streetfighting man belligerence of the UAF leadership – and two key SWP figures were arrested on the Bolton demo – there is a real question as to whether or not the far left is actually capable of putting a tough guy strategy into practice.

Trying to do so may be counterproductive, anyway. Rather than bus white student lefties into northern mill towns en masse, the real task at hand is to get local people to turn up in large numbers wherever the EDL decides to march. Many people will understandably not show their faces if violence is virtually guaranteed.

And of course, the EDL, which includes all too many seasoned football hooligans, is absolutely up for a ruck. The promise of a spot of bit of a barney on the day will only come as an added attraction to the layers it seeks to influence.

The second approach, typified by Searchlight-sponsored Hope Not Hate, centres on such comparatively unglamorous tactics as the organisation of anti-racist pop concerts, and the hard graft of canvassing in areas where the British National Party has a good chance of securing local government or even Westminster representation.

Sections of the far left criticise HnH as ineffectual at best and craven cowardice at worst. But at least it is not being distracted by an outfit that remains – for now, at least – thankfully a sideshow. It is also quite clear which of the two campaigns is having the greater impact.

This is not an either/or choice. Clearly, there could be times ahead when reruns of Cable Street or Lewisham will be on the order of the day. Progressive organisations will probably have to reconsider their security measures. But in the meantime, my donation ahead of the election will going to HnH.

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Unsurprisingly, the decision has upset some on the left, who argue that the profession should be added to the list of jobs covered by what amounts to a slowly-expanding backdoor Berufsverbot. I would counter that support for a softly-softly version of the German system, which excludes members of outfits deemed extremist by the state from public sector employment, is essentially misconceived.

Let’s look at some of the considerations here. Is such legislation somehow OK if it applies to sensitive positions only, keeping the fash out of the classrooms and the cop shops while still allowing them to Sieg Heil to their heart’s content while emptying our wheelie bins?

Or perhaps all this is no skin off our nose if such restrictions apply to the far right alone, while exempting Trot social workers and local government officers?

The most obvious objection is a basic point of civil liberties. If a political party is legal, then a liberal democracy has no business restricting the employment prospects open to its adherents.

Supporters of a ban ask how a child facing racism in the playground could possibly turn to a BNP teacher for help. But this is simply a microcosm of what is set to become a society-wide issue.

If you were an Asian family facing constant racist abuse from a gang of sink estate thugs, would you turn to a BNP councillor for help? Would you lobby your friendly fascist London Assembly member or MEP for assistance with your plans to build an Afro-Caribbean community centre or a new mosque?

These difficulties will be exacerbated when the BNP secures Westminster representation, as it soon undoubtedly will. Now that the far right has an electoral base numbering hundreds of thousands of voters, these are genuine problems than cannot be ignored by the tokenistic targeting of individual supporters.

Any ban would amount to bespoke legislation designed to tackle a problem of minor proportions. The list of BNP members published on the internet last year contained the names of just 15 teachers.

If the object is to stamp out racism in the classroom – and that is entirely laudable – then it has to be recognised that racist sentiment is not the sole province of the BNP. Is it admissible for an Islamist believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to teach Jewish children, for instance? Why not legislate against that eventuality, too?

What about UKIP teachers? What about the Conservative Party’s grassroots golf club bigot tendency? And yes, I have even come across unpleasantly racist people in the Labour Party.

Moreover, any ban based on organisational affiliation would be almost impossible effectively to police. Who decides which parties and factions are blacklisted? Fringe political groupings come and go, and cliques of Hitler worshippers form and disband with the same regularity as their analogues on the far left.

How will the rules deal with a fascist teacher who isn’t in the BNP and signs up with some newly-formed whackjob six member neo-Nazi outfit that nobody has ever heard of instead? What about cases where people sidestep the regulations by not taking out a party card, but otherwise think and act just as a BNP member would?

But the biggest danger of all is that the BNP revels in portraying itself as the outsiders that the Establishment is desperate to silence because it ‘tells the truth’. Feeding that narrative is a sure way to enhance the racist right’s popular support.

In short, discipline racist teachers for racist words or deeds; disciplining them for their politics alone would be a serious mistake.

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