“Hugo, do you want to get some B roll of us wearing our woke suits?” Amaar Shahzada says, grinning.
We’re huddled by a hedge on Clarence Road in Harborne. It’s the sort of handsome, manicured street where some of the front doors are framed with columns and the gardens are a wash of green. It’s late afternoon and there’s a chill in the air but the group shows no sign of wearying. I’ve been watching Shahzada and Hugo Rasenberg shoot a Conservative campaign video with Andy Street. The former mayor has just left and we’re planning to head out door-knocking. But I can’t let Shahzada’s request go unchecked.
“What,” I ask with genuine puzzlement, “is a ‘woke suit’?”
“Non-traditional menswear,” Rasenberg answers for him. “I can’t stand wearing a crisp suit.” I glance at his navy jacket and matching trousers and realise they are a bit baggy, while he wears his shirt tie-free and open at the neck. It is a look that says: fiscally responsible by day, pint in hand by 5.15pm.
“The problem as a young baby-faced candidate,” Rasenberg muses, “is if you wear a business suit you look like you've just stolen it off your dad.”
Optics are important to this pair who are a part of a cohort of spritely new Tory candidates standing in the local elections on 7 May. They’ve come up through the party’s youth wing, the Young Conservatives, and are hoping to inject some fresh blood into the Birmingham group by winning at the polls in two weeks time.
Which is all well and good, but I can’t stop turning over the obvious contradiction in my head. Over the past decade and a half, the Conservative Party has done more to disadvantage young people than almost any other party, with the coalition Conservative-Liberal Democrat government tripling tuition fees in 2010, the Conservatives getting rid of education maintenance grants in 2017 and the Conservative-led push for austerity leading to 603 youth centres closing within just five years. So why would anyone born after the millennium offer to campaign on their behalf?
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