On Friday I started a new job. I won’t say much about my work, as I didn’t before because of the trouble people seem to get into when they blog about their place of work. Saying that, though, I’ve never felt there’s been much bad to say about my employer but hey ho.

Anyway, the reason I told you that is because it now means that rather than driving 15 minutes along the A27 I need to drive for nearer 1 hour 15 minutes including a stretch of the M25 — a round trip of around 90 miles. On Friday too, I started car sharing to reduce some of that burden, petrol etc. (note no spurious mention of the environment). And today was the first journey with only one of the sharers.

I am painfully aware that I can turn on speech/lecture mode very easily and I make serious efforts not to initiate or prolong political conversations. So it was reassuring today that the conversation on the way home was about things that I think ought to concern young, male 20-somethings:

• House prices
• The tax we pay for social sponges
• The war in Iraq vs. the lack of war in Zimbabwe
• The general wetting-down of England
• The worrying increase in religious belief

If the journey had lasted longer, I would expect it to move to the state of the BBC, how Channel 4 are so much better at programming, the worrying rise in uncontrolled internal movement in the EU.

And it turns out that us right-wingers are far more compassionate than the so-called lefty do-gooders. While we believe in Grammar schools which help people achieve regardless of social backgrounds, while we believe that social housing is a gift to the lazy and relatively scant help to the hard-working, while we believe that government money would be better spent (or not raised through taxes) on services that people need rather than on yet another campaign to stop people hurting themselves with alcohol (it’s their body for Christ’s sake), while we believe in free trade with poorer countries not spurious Fair Trade, and while we believe in helping those in genuine need (like the victims of 2005′s Tsunami)… While we believe those things, the left do not.

The Left believes that Fair Trade (helping a few farmers get a non-market driven — and still low — price for their product) is the answer to global poverty. It believes that we should give aid to Darfur rather than tanks to stop the genocide; It believes that the government should look after each individual even down to the nitty-gritty of their lives; And it believes that any different lifestyle that does not result in dreadlocks or prayer (or both) is to be stamped out by the state.

So when the UK Independence Party is laughed at by the BBC (and for obvious, and understandable, reasons), let’s remember that they are the ones who are against Social Housing being FORCED on developers (building on their own private land remember), they are the ones against high taxation and they are the ones who recognise genuine fairness.

When I joined the Conservatives in 1996, it was because I could see that their ideology was based in fairness, merit and (increasingly at the time, though completely thankfully now) genuine equal rights. I still believe that is what the membership believes in and, sadly, UKIP are completely ineffectual at every level, so I remain a Conservative.

But this is a call to those who believe in ideology and fairness: stop using politics as a method of achieving power, and start using it as a tool to convince people of your ideology and stand for election on principles.