This should be the climate election. Instead we are in a frustrating, Farage-obsessed fantasyland | Zoe Williams

Bloviators and untruths continue to generate more news than common sense and the environment. But some parties are trying to make a difference

I’m sitting in a room with Catherine Mayer and Sandi Toksvig, who founded the Women’s Equality party (WEP) nine years ago, and Caroline Lucas and Siân Berry, departing and prospective Brighton Pavilion Green MPs respectively. In theory this is a political meeting, but it doesn’t feel like politics, because nobody appears to be lying, and everyone makes sense.

In a sane world, Toksvig would be the political insurgent, because she’s saying what everyone is thinking, and Nigel Farage would be the entertainer, because, well, people seem to find him entertaining. Toksvig talks about real people, and how their lives could be improved; how to reorder society so that it values unpaid labour, how to make policy that thinks in terms of decades, not five-year stints, how to break out of polarised debates so that you’re not endlessly repeating the same pantomime in ever baser terms. She says things that are self-evidently true, such as: “We have been brought up in an old system that is dying, and that is great. We should party at its bonfire.” Yet somehow, to make it into the news cycle, you can only say things that are untrue or irrelevant. She points out things that are ludicrous, such as: in the Conservative manifesto, the word “poverty” appears only once, and that’s in relation to international aid. It’s as if the conditions of the people living in this country do not matter to the people who seek to run it. And that’s somehow priced in to the mainstream debate, considered normal. Why would the Conservatives care about poverty, stupid? That’s not who they are.

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