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.
The WEP is led by Mandu Reid who, in a world with rational priorities, would be a much bigger household name than the Reform UK chairman Richard Tice, because she stands for regular people poleaxed by the cost of childcare, which is a huge number of us, while he stands for the interests of the millionaire class, which is almost nobody. But the rational world is not the one we’re in.
The headline purpose of this meeting is the announcement that the WEP is endorsing Berry for Brighton Pavilion, and that the two parties have a shared policy platform. It took a load of consultation with the electoral commission to get this off the ground, because the rules around political parties are such that they are not supposed to endorse each other, even if they are driven by the same motive, towards the same goal – a more equitable nation in which we don’t all fry – and that goal will only be possible with radical cooperation across every party line. But rules are rules. Can’t break the rules of stupidity. Consider the risks. We might end up having a constructive conversation about the future. Imagine how boring that would be.
In a reasonable world, Labour would be happy for the Greens to keep Brighton Pavilion, because most of them – MPs and members – love Lucas, quite openly. It would be bizarre not to. For the same reason, they love Berry, and let’s be real, they’re going to win most of the other seats anyway, and yet they have to fight this one like the devil, and say mad things, such as (Lucas recalls, laughingly, a speech by the otherwise reasonable Labour peer Steve Bassam): “If you don’t cut off the Greens now, they will grow.” In what crackerjack system does a party that cares about the environment need to extinguish another party that also cares about the environment, just with a bit more urgency?
This should be the climate crisis election, with Berry as the maverick outsider, shuttling from one news interview to the next, speaking truth to power, explaining that this really can’t wait, and every other issue people care about will either get worse or become irrelevant if we don’t hit net zero, and every other hope people have for the future, from sustainable growth to a high skilled economy, will be made possible by this transformation. Instead, we’re in this fantasyland, with Farage trying to make it the immigration election, speaking nonsense to power, power indulging him.
So, for an hour, in a shabby hall in central London, in a room full of women (but men would have been allowed in too. I don’t really hold with a gender essentialist view of political values, but never mind, I can cooperate!), the conversation made sense. Then back into the world, where nothing does.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
