Politics has come to mean parties, elections and the news. But the word comes from the Greek polis, meaning the community: the people who share a place and have to work out how to live in it together. Parties and elections are part of that. They were never meant to be the whole of it. The real work sits underneath, in the ordinary, difficult business of a group of people deciding how they want to live.

As a public opinion researcher, I noticed how often findings were used to refine the message rather than test the plan. People were asked what they thought, and their answers became a guide to which words would land. The assumptions behind the plan were rarely what was being examined.

Something similar was happening for voters. Voting guides that claim to show where parties stand mostly rely on what parties say, and are rarely checked against what they have actually done.

Most of us don't take part in politics so much as watch it happen, decided elsewhere, by others, and handed back to us as a story. Which is fine until you want to disagree with the story, and find you have nothing to disagree from.

That's what Clarion is for. Not to tell you what to think, but to give you a clear enough account of your own principles that you can judge what's being done in your name, and compare it with what parties have actually done.

Rebecca Hall, founder