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When the Women’s Equality Party launched two years ago people broadly divided into two groups. The first ran towards us with joyful calls of “at long last”; the second turned their backs and folded their arms with the warning: “You’ll only split the vote!” Now, as we field candidates in our first general election, both camps have raised their voices again — and I’m glad of both equally.

I am delighted to have so many brave and creative people campaigning with us for change. People who are alive to the transformative potential of a fairer economy and more equal society; who know that this is about more than quotas for parliament or choice of footwear in the workplace. It is about fundamentally restructuring the way things work for the benefit of all.

A single rate of pension tax relief would help 90 per cent of workers. Affordable childcare would give thousands of pounds back to families and billions back to the economy. Investment in social infrastructure would create more jobs than the same investment in construction. And having the Women’s Equality Party in parliament would ensure that women do not pay the price for a hard Brexit, as they did for austerity.

I am equally glad that others are challenging us for taking up space because the strain on the system of us elbowing in is precisely what’s needed to highlight the failure of the political system to make space for us. The Greens did it when the hole in the ozone layer had gone ignored for too long, and got a similar reception. The threat of climate change is now widely understood.

But change is nearly always experienced as loss, at least in the immediate. It means facing up to the fact that in the seats WE target neither the incumbent nor opposition is willing to take on our policies; that they still see women’s equality as somehow separate from the economy, immigration and healthcare. And it means they woefully underestimate the threat that the populist far-right poses to women’s rights.

That is a whole lot of soul searching, particularly for the left, which thinks it has a monopoly on women’s equality. So they politely tell us to go and make that point somewhere else. But we’re not making a point. We’re making a change. And we’re doing it by being a political party for people who want a different kind of opposition.

I’ve been accused this week of being a vote-splitting outsider in Shipley, where I’m standing against the sexist in chief Philip Davies. Outsider? You bet. Women always are in politics. Splitting the vote? As if. When the Conservatives are heading for a landslide on the scale of Labour’s in 1997, when Labour is briefing internally that sitting MPs with majorities of 10,000 are on watch to lose their jobs, and when Labour categorically rules out allegiances again and again — well. It’s not the presence of WEP that is heralding a Conservative tsunami.

Let’s be honest: this is not the year that Labour can win. The sooner we all face up to that the sooner we can get on with strategies to hold the incoming Conservative Party to account. I am excited by the conversations that our party is having with other progressive politicians in Shipley as much as I am excited by the conversations I am having with local people in Shipley who will support me as I campaign for affordable childcare, sufficient school places and a living wage for local workers, challenge the building of an environmentally unfriendly incinerator plant in the Aire Valley and oppose the development threat to Milner Field.

Splitting the vote suggests that the other parties — primarily Conservative and Labour — do not have to earn our votes. We must hold our nose and pick the least worst. It is the incumbency logic that sees the same old white men returned to parliament every five years.

I refuse to let this be an election about least-worst scenarios. Tactical voting is a race to the bottom, where the two big supermarket chains can keep lowering their prices instead of improving their products. And the logic follows that in five years’ time you will be met with exactly the same choices, unless of course one of them goes bust.

This election is a chance to diversify our parliament: to elect more politicians from smaller parties with distinct values, who are willing to work collaboratively together for the good of their constituents and the country. Now that is something worth voting for.

Sophie Walker is leader of the Women’s Equality Party