"With the exception regarding those who apparently support the Conservative Party it would seem."

Quite bloody right too.

Actually, I was a Young Conservative for a while and was even on the committee of my local branch. I was only 16 at the time and we had moved away from where I grew up and my dad sent me down the pub it met in to meet new folk. It was good because we as long as we had butties we could drink, so I stuck with it until two things happened. One of the speakers was a chap from Shelter who sat down and proclaimed his socialism at the start of the meeting; by the ned of the evening I was a total convert to Socialism, I;d never met anyone I agreed with more. Around the same time I was attending an English Literature O Level evening class to re-take the one I had failed, and the teacher was another devout socialist. She was brilliant, and as we read through Bernard Shaw and Dickens I realised I was on the road to Damascus.

Eventually I left as the behaviour of some of the other (privileged) YC's was utterly appalling, our Tory MP was a total crook and the local senior association branch was basically an afternoon tea club for rich old scrotes. I'm glad I did it though as I got a really good grounding in politics and saw how it worked at grass roots level.

That was over 30 years ago, and I've never been in a party since, and I now think party politics is becoming increasingly irrelevant and has been overtaken by a changing world as people become increasingly disillusioned with the many shortcomings of the system.