The celebrated childrens author and Oxford don C S Lewis was not a great fan of sport. He felt it brought out the worst in people, encouraging an ethos of agressive competition where a spirit of communal co-operation would serve us better.

Difficult perhaps to share his views entierly on this, but you have to admit - he may have had a point. Take for example the relationship between the game of football and the far right political parties. Why is it that the extreme right parties like the National Defense Legue, The National Front and the British Nationalist Party find such rich pickings in terms of recruitment in the devoted atendee's seen every Saturday afternoon crowding the stadiums of our national sport. I think the chief reason is that the football crowd provides just the right potent mix of nationalism, hyperexitability and (I hate to say it) low mentallity that is ready and primed to be worked on by the often very clever manipulators behind these organisations.

A week or two ago I wathched on Chanel 4 the interview given by BNP chairman Nick Griffen to presenter Kieth Allan (ex Comedy Store and father of the eponymous Lilly) at the EU headquaters in Brussels where Griffen serves as a MEP. This was not a repeat of the reprehensible 'Question Time' hatchet job performed on Griffen by the BBC, but still it was pretty clear that Allen did not attend the interview without some pretty stong preconceptions of what he was going to find (no wonder the man is leary of giving interviews). They started off pretty warily, trying to be nice but circling round each other like dogs ready for the attack and Allen, in the spirit of trying to make an easy intro into the thing, asked Griffen about his musical tastes. We learned that as a youngster he had embraced the punk movement but that now his music of choice was folk music of which he was an ardent fan. Allen was suprised - the term 'folk music' itself seems to conjer up images of bearded liberals sitting around in smokey real ale pubs and tapping their feet to the sound of Ralph McTell  strumming at his accoustic guitar, not exactly your raging skinhead NF's choice you might think. Wrong! What Allen failed to get, as would most of us, was that Gfriffens referal to 'folk' was a direct link for those who could see it, with the origins of the very Nazi Party itself.

In between the two World Wars, during the time of economic colapse and near chaos caused by it's loss of WW1, there arose in Germany what were known as the 'Volkisch' movements, whose ideals were the re-establishment of national pride by reference to teutonic folk-lore and the romantic presentation of germanys great past in terms of the ethnic purity and quasi-mystical superiority. The term 'Volk' itself has it's translation in 'people' but more specifically in terms of racialy pure people of white and pure blooded nordic origins. It was from one of these 'folk' societies, namely the Thule Gesselschaft, that came the founder of the DAP, Anton Drexler, which later went on to evolve into the NSDAP - or to you and me the Nazi Party. The populist movements of the Volksch societies proliferated and central to their core values was this extreme nationalism that ultimately found it's expression in the horrors of the Holocaust. No great similarity there you may say with our own benighn british folk movement - but you may be missing the point. The close connection in the lyrics of our own folk ballads with tales of gallant knights, the Authurian legends and of a time when the english were english is not a million miles removed from the connections between the Teutonic knightly past of Germany and the Volkisch societys of the inter-war years. This was a point certainly not missed by Nick Griffen.

So her we are on the eve of the 2012 Olympic Games. We will see and no doubt be part of a huge outpouring of nationalisic fervour as we will our athletes on to win gold after gold and take thier deserved place on the top of the podium. But let us not forget one other person who understood the significance of triumph in this our most spectacular (and politicised) of sporting tournaments. The nationalism of the sports field is not a million miles away from the nationalism of the battle field and Hitler knew it. So as I unpack the goods in my shop, the bars of chocolate, the cans of drink and the boxes of cerial all bedecked with Union Jack's in preparation for capialising on this fervor generated by the great contest to come, forgive me if you will, a little shudder.