A FAMOUS anti-fascist image showed nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels dressing Hitler in a Karl Marx beard.

The nazis built a mass base with populist policies that mimicked the left, combined with demagogic attacks on big business, the banks and the liberal Weimar parties, but at the critical moment, Germany's big bourgeoisie brought Hitler into office and the attacks on the bosses ceased.

The artist, the German communist photomonteur John Heartfield, used the front cover of the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Weekly) to expose the hypocrisy behind nazi populist rhetoric.

Today we have Britain's fledgling führer Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson vying to make himself the figurehead for voters who sense the Brexit vote is being betrayed.

Britain's fascist fringe is in perpetual search for an issue that connects them to a mass audience. This time it looks like they might have found one.

In the ‘30s, it tried agitation over unemployment combined with anti-semitism. This ran up against a powerful unemployed workers movement and hit the buffers when the massed ranks of the Metropolitan Police proved insufficient to force a way through East End streets defended by a local population, aroused by the Communist Party and including both Irish and Jewish workers.

A decade later, with Europe in ruins following the defeat of nazi Germany, Oswald Mosley, the failed führer of the British gentry, celebrated his release from wartime internment by proselytising for Europe a Nation.

He wanted Europe to form an integrated corporate state with pooled colonial possessions.

It soon switched its focus to straightforward racism and immigration. Mosley's Union Movement never gained serious traction and met some spectacular reverses on the streets by the same combination of forces that stymied him in 1938.

Today, the line-up is different. There really are powerful forces lining up to subvert the Brexit vote. Millions of working-class voters sense this and the fascist fringe sees an opportunity.

Along with the Corbyn-critical chorus of right-wing Labour MPs, there is a cross-party coalition that is searching for a parliamentary mechanism to reverse the popular decision to leave the EU.