Luke Bozier: Boris should fight for London to be open on Sundays

Luke Bozier is Co-founder of menshn.com and consultant on entrepreneurship & digital communications. Earlier this year he left Labour to join the Conservatives.

London is unlike any other city in the UK. It's big for starters, global, and has a distinct culture and lifestyle unlike any other British city. It's a very diverse place, more liberal, and has longer work hours than most of the country. So it should be run like the special place that it is. Life in London should be as flexible as lifestyles in London are diverse.

London competes with New York and Paris, not Glasgow and Leeds (no offence, Glasgow or Leeds, you're both wonderful places). We want our capital to be a place where international businesspeople, foreign students and visitors feel at home, as well as being a great place to live in for Brits of all stripes.

A prime example of how I think London should have special status over the rest of the nation is with Sunday trading laws. Can you believe that until 1994, opening a supermarket on a Sunday was illegal anywhere on these isles? Me neither. Margaret Thatcher tried in the 1980s to smash this rather 20th century paradigm, but was held back by the Parliament of the day.

Luke Bozier: Working class Tory? This is what it means.

Luke Bozier is Co-founder of menshn.com and consultant on entrepreneurship & digital communications.

A lot of people reckon the Tory party is a plaything for a particular slice of the British elite. A gilded group who were born to rule. At the moment, that perception isn't exactly unfair; David Cameron and George Osborne, for their strengths, both come from a background of privilege unrecognisable to most Brits, even relatively wealthy Brits.

That gilded image goes far beyond the two men at the heart of the Tory party; the perception runs deep that us Tories are about protecting privilege and helping our friends. It's a perception we don't have to accept. Actually it's a perception which keeps us from our full potential.

As an article in last week's Economist pointed out, it's been around fifty years since a Tory leader from a privileged background won an election. All of the Conservative prime ministers of the last 50 years have some sort of claim to a working class background. The people of Great Britain respond to the Conservative Party when it is a party that recognises and understands the aspirations of people who aren't from the upper echelons of society.