Wife Swap (Channel 4, Sunday) is television you either love or hate. For those who haven’t had the pleasure the premise is simple: take two couples of wildly differing lifestyles and attitudes and send the wives to live with the other family. For the first week under the ‘rules’ of the host household and for the second with the host household operating to the strictures of the guest ‘wife’. A recipe for conflict, tears, tantrums and occasional violence – all essential elements of the reality TV genre and all masquerading as social experiment. This week’s show paired an ultra conventional pair (male dominated, dog loving, perfectly cleaned house, string of businesses, Doncaster) with two environmental zealots living a ‘green’ lifestyle in rural Wiltshire.  The whole thing ended in chaos after green geezer took offence when his guest ‘wife’ not unreasonably observed that the green household was more than a little mucky and eco-wife dug up the lovingly tendered lawn of her host (who’s reaction was admirably calm).

It is fair to say that this pair of sprout lovers (who nonetheless found a justification for running two cars, one a 4×4) were not exactly the finest advert for a carbon friendly lifestyle. In fact they exhibited all the tolerance of alternative viewpoints of Oliver Cromwell on crack.

Were this tendency toward intolerance restricted to this pair of patronising oddballs that would be all very well. Unfortunately eco-bigotry is commonplace in the environmental movement. Because of this the most effectively political opponents of the Green Party are its own members. To gain power in the 1990s Labour had to shed its image as a party of badly dressed college lecturers to look a bit more like bank managers, the Liberals have struggled since their merger with the SDP to look less like the local folk club and the Conservatives, so long the preserve of Man at C&A and trying to, well, lighten up a little. In a world where appearance is, if not everything, certainly quite a lot, it is hard to see the Green Party getting anyway beyond the odd council seat in student sleeper areas while they look as if they have stepped out of a time warp into the Oxfam shop and use their baths to make compost.

Inevitably the overwhelming majority of ordinary folk will find the couple from Wife Swap and their Green party allies a little odd and will reject the neo-puritan lifestyle they seem intend on forcing on the rest of us. Hard luck for the Greens. Worse for the rest of us, because by proposing the impossible and the unacceptable the eco-Militants let the big parties off the hook.

A great example is the shambles of a debate about alternate weekly refuse collection. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue, the two great parties of state are not covering themselves in glory. In Reading the Conservatives campaign against alternate weekly collections, while their chums in Bracknell introduce alternate weekly collections and their chairman of the Local Government Association, Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart sings its praises. Meanwhile as Reading’s Labour councillors introduce alternate collections as their Basingstoke buddies pledge (in opposition of course) to resist the change over their dead bodies. The Prime Minister, no less, concludes that there “must be a better way” with no suggestion of what it might be, while an agency of his Government (WRAP) acts as chief cheerleader for alternate collections.  Liberal Democrats, despite their green rhetoric in opposition, frequently prove indecisive in office.

The British public are unlikely to trust their future to the lunatic fringe who wear their wellies in their living rooms. To make progress on important environmental issues the big parties need to show some leadership rather than allow their candidates to trot out anything that gets a few votes.