Winter is coming. Now look, this isn't to be alarmist. Underpinning my politics is a belief

that you have to give people hope, that is a belief that the injustices that don't just

scar our current living reality, but define it in so many ways, can be overcome with determination,

courage and imagination, that all of us using our combined collective power together

can create transformative change. That doesn't mean closing our eyes to what are profoundly

unsettling, disturbing and unpleasant realities, because unless we acknowledge what we're

up against, then we won't understand how to fight back. Now, we need to be open and honest

about a crisis, a looming crisis, which is not receiving the attention that it desperately needs.

And that is that across Europe and the United States, the far right is on the march and either

in power in some form or on the brink of power. Now, after the genocidal carnage of World War II,

there was something of a consensus in what we describe as the Western world, that the far right

were beyond the political pale, that a cordon sanitaire needed to be placed around them,

and that they should never ever ever be allowed anywhere near power. Now, that protective ring,

whatever you want to call it, has been shredded. Let me just talk through exactly what were

up against. Now, firstly, it's important to say it's not just Europe we're talking about here.

The far right in the United States context, of course, surged through one of the two parties

of Republicans, what we've seen as a process of what we could describe as normalization,

that's where what you want to think of is very unusual of extreme, becomes part of the everyday,

part of the furniture, if you like, that once what once provoked horror or shock, outrage,

you barely even bat your eyes at. Now, we saw that with Donald Trump. Donald Trump, when he first

became, I guess, a contender for the Republican nominee, at the end of 2015, people listened to his

pronouncements, but kind of shocked and horrified, it didn't take it seriously. But by the end of

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