University is that time in one’s life when you are highly energetic and enthusiastic but more especially, idealistic. Like with primary school, university is one place that moulds you for life if life doesn’t beat those ideologies out of you that is. I think we are the most impressionable at that time of our lives and you walk into the work environment with an expectation that we no longer live in a Victorian era, but a more progressive and forward thinking and altruistic world.

Now I know not everyone goes to university, so I can’t really talk from the point of view of those people but I can imagine that the minds of young apprentices or entrepreneurs are also being moulded by the people in their immediate environment, like their employers or other kinds of teachers.

Back in my university days I was a Liberal Democrat. I strongly believed in liberal values – you know, live and let live and all that. For some reason I never really identified with the Labour party. Iraq definitely had a lot to do with it, but before Iraq I just didn’t agree with many of their social policies, noble though they might have been at inception. But when it seemed like it paid more to have a broken home or to not work, I just couldn’t affiliate with such values. So I was a Lib Dem and always voted Lim Dem until Ken Livingstone pushed me to the edge and I became a Tory, plus David Cameron seemed quite appealing too.

My first job after university was at Tower Hamlets and my commute to work involved getting a train to London Bridge and catching the underground from there onwards. I had a manager that was also my friend, although we were friends first. Having become an experienced commuter looking for how best to maximise the margins, whenever I arrived at London Bridge and briskly walked along the platform and down onto the escalators, I’d insert my travel card through the barrier and stomp over to the underground section and boom! standing passengers spilling out onto the station entrance. Trickling in to avoid congestion, and it’s clear I won’t be getting to the platform anytime soon. Think quick! What are my options? Off I go stampeding over London Bridge to Bank station. Typical! More maintenance and the downward escalator is out of order. After all the rigmarole and drama just to get to work in the morning I would get really frustrated when in spite of all the hurdles, I would get to work by 9.03am and my manager would in a semi-jocular, semi-serious way point at his watch and tut while shaking his head. It was so annoying because I knew I sincerely did all I could to get in on time and ended up being just 3 minutes late.

This was one aspect of Ken Livingston’s mayoralty that chipped away at my tolerance for him and the Labour party because the cost of travel always went up each year apart from one time he was seeking re-election. Cynical? I couldn’t possibly comment.

I’m just trying to aspire!

Another thing that frustrated me was Ken’s apparent attempt in my opinion, to supress aspiration. When Ed Miliband lost the 2015 general election the commentators were pontificating on how aspiration had a lot to do with it. I was saying to myself that their analysis was a few years out of date as this was my concern when Ken was still the London mayor.

He was trying to introduce policies like the so-called gas guzzler charge which he dressed up to look like he was penalising the very rich, but in actual fact he was penalising middle class aspirational families. Families of which, the parents often would have grown up in less affluent circumstances, but had worked hard to be successful and provide their families with the little luxuries that they never had themselves as kids. What’s wrong with that? Charging £25 to multi-millionaires will mean absolutely nothing to them. If you like you can make it £500 a day and they will still drive into central London every day. What wasn’t publicised much at the time was that the so-called gas guzzlers also included family cars like the Vauxhall Meriva, but it was dressed up to look like it was only “Chelsea tractors” i.e. Range Rovers and the like, that they were targeting. If I work hard and I want to drive a nice car, what wrong with that? Why must everyone be pushed into getting a Ken approved Prius? I mean, have you seen a Prius??? Urgh!

Also, the charge was only going to extend to the more affluent West London and not Bethnal Green and Hackney in East London. So is it about saving the environment or isn’t it? It’s ok to have a gas guzzler in Bethnal Green but not in Ladbroke Grove? This sort of thing really hacked me off because the hypocrisy was just astounding.

The last collection of things that made me resent Ken Livingstone so much were things like an unbearable arrogance he displayed while in office; not just to his political opposition but to the general populace of Londoners. There was this attitude of “look I know what’s best for you, so just shut up and take it!”. I felt so oppressed and stifled and some people might think of that as a ridiculous thing to say living in a city like London but it’s no exaggeration. Plus who would want to be endeared to someone that says if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down? How disgusting! A communist and a hippy! No, I had enough. I couldn’t take it any longer and couldn’t wait to see the back of him. Boris seemed like such a breath of fresh air and as if the omens were in agreement, there was wall to wall sunshine for two weeks from the day after Boris won the mayoral election in 2008 after weeks of gloomy skies and rainy days.

That was Ken’s contribution. The other person that attracted me to the Conservatives was David Cameron. He was young and dynamic and seemed to be of the 21^st century. He was for environmental issues, he was for equal rights for all citizens, he was the first to do the no hands trick at party conference by delivering his entire speech without any notes long before Ed Miliband failed spectacularly in doing the same thing after leaving out the economy and the NHS when delivering his own party speech without notes in 2014.

I saw a lot of minorities around David Cameron and I admired the level of support he gave to Shaun Bailey during his failed bid to become an MP in 2010. He just seemed so progressive and it looked like under Cameron’s leadership the Conservative party were finally leaving the dark ages and they had a good chance of winning power. I voted conservative ever since but clearly all that has now changed with the old men in grey suits back in charge, with their dreams of a 1960s all white Britain. It’s too late chaps, that horse has bolted but it does hurt to see a glimpse of the negative UK that our parents experienced before my generation were born. That looked like something you only saw in old news reels or black & white films.

I used to think that undecided voters were just attention seekers who gave news organisations a reason to have a segment in their broadcast at every election cycle, where they played both sides of a political argument and asked them if they’ve been swayed by one side or the other. But in recent months I have genuinely become an undecided voter and am likely to nail my mast again to the Lib Dems going forward. From my perspective, I am attracted to general decency, mutual respect and cooperation. I am attracted to genuine friendships and not poker faced friendships. I certainly can’t subscribe to hate and hate is what is being peddled at the moment – and that is just putting it bluntly. Because it is being peddled by various people that have a skill of sailing so close to the edge of legality and because of what some might describe as charisma, they are allowed to get away with it but it still doesn’t negate the fact that they are simply peddling hate.

I hope that there are many more people like me out there, I truly do. I pray that there is hope for decency and reasonableness for the future. I yearn for a more sensible politics where everyone is carried along and not the extremities that are raging on at the moment from both sides of the political spectrum.

Anyway, that is where I am now. Ken made me a Tory and now the Tories have sadly shown me their “true colours”, after many years of defending them to my friends and family. They’ve exhibited a stereotype that I thought had been relegated to a different generation – mean spirited, uncaring, bigoted, elitist and definitely devoid of empathy. I just want a party that is sensible, that is reasonable, that is empathetic and that is “human”. Hello Tim? 🙂