This was a serious, record-breakingly expensive, 26-part documentary series, telling the story of the Second World War through interviews with soldiers, civilians, bureaucrats and concentration-camp survivors. I was too young to watch it then, but I remember the haunting music and my family’s reaction to it – especially my granddad, who had been injured in the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940.

I finally saw The World at War in its entirety during a rerun one Christmas period during the early 1980s, as did many others of my generation. It had a lasting impact on us. During this time, there seemed to be a collective education about the Second World War and its horrors, as well as about the horrors of fascism. Central to those horrors were the gas chambers, the concentration camps and the industrial-scale killing of Jews in the Holocaust.

As a consequence, since the end of the Second World War, far-right extremists and fascist movements have tended to be on the fringes. Throughout Europe, ordinary men and women – some who had lived through the war and others, like me, who were generationally affected – learned tactics to oppose the far right.

This included protesting against them and exposing them in debate. The aim was to never let them march or speak unchallenged. Working-class youth, ethnic minorities and especially the Jewish community were instrumental in opposing fascism and the racist far right, who were still idolising Hitler and the Nazis.

The UK was, as a country, proudly anti-fascist. Our relatives had lived through the Second World War and had passed the story down to us, urging us to oppose fascism in all its forms. However, during the 1970s and 1980s, the far right started to mobilise again in the UK, especially groups such as the National Front and the British Movement.

Sensing the political and social upheavals at the time due to recession, mass unemployment and immigration, the remnants of the British fascist movements meted out violence on particular communities. Ethnic minorities, homosexuals and those they saw as ‘race mixing’ were targeted.

They also targeted another group – white, working-class youth – to recruit and spread their ideas to. This is how I first encountered the National Front in 1982, when I was 13. Leaflets were being handed out at a youth club and those giving them out encouraged us to attend a meeting about politics. I came from a political household – my mum was a trade unionist – so I took the leaflet home and asked her if I could go.

She immediately knew what it was and who was behind it, but for me, these ideas were foreign. The literature had words on it I had never heard of. The group positioned itself as ‘anti-Zionist’ and ‘against cultural Marxism’. My mum then took me to a Young Socialists meeting, where I learned what these terms really meant. Far-right conspiracy theories insisted that cabals of bloodthirsty Jews were trying to take over the world through secretive groups. ‘Cultural Marxism’ was the ideology they would supposedly deploy.