As British voters head to the polls for local elections, Peter O’Brien is pleased to welcome Dr Aaron Winter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. He offers a stark diagnosis of Britain’s political drift: Dr Winter argued that the real story was not simply electoral volatility, but the gradual normalization of far-right narratives within mainstream politics itself. Labour’s attempts to neutralize the far right by echoing parts of its rhetoric have not weakened extremist currents but legitimized them. “We’ve seen this strategy fail again and again and again,” he warned.