Editorial: For as long as immigration and Islamic extremism increases in Europe, the 'hard right' backlash seems set to grow

Gert Wilders, the Dutch long-standing critic of Islamic extremism, has topped the poll in general election in the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, immigration into the UK is at its highest level, as it is in Holland.

That second fact helps explain that political trend that leads to the first.

Mr Wilders has won the largest number of votes in the Dutch election, albeit less than a quarter of the ballots cast overall in a multi-party electoral system. He and his party are dismissed by fashionable opinion as ‘far right’ but ‘hard right’ is a better term – far right is best reserved for explicit white supremacists such as the British National Party.

While there are individuals and organisations that fluctuate between those two categories of the right, to dismiss as ‘far right’ and extremist all such parties is to miss what is happening across Europe, in which many millions of people in some of the most advanced democracies in human history, including France and Germany, are fed up with massive immigration that is radically changing the cultures of their countries – some of the most sophisticated cultures that have ever emerged in the world.

Whatever his flaws, Mr Wilders is a brave voice in the sense that it has been dangerous to speak about Islamic fascism since the Fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1989, as the murder in Holland of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh showed 20 years ago.

The UK has just found that 745,000 net immigrants came to this, an already densely populated country, last year, 150,000 more than first thought. Does anyone doubt that this causes massive strain on services?

Even a Tory party, nearly 14 years in power, has been unable to control numbers.

Meanwhile, week after week we see Hamas supporters on the streets of our cities, as other European nations are seeing. As long as this continues, a ‘hard right’ backlash seems set to grow.