Author Archives: Andy Boddington

Andy Boddington is a Lib Dem councillor in rural Shropshire

Has Nick Boles given the kiss of life to localism?

By Andy Boddington | Fri 11th January 2013 - 3:51 pm

Announcements come out of the communities department at all times of the day and night these days it seems. Rather before most of us were awake on Thursday morning, the department slipped out a statement that may just breathe life into the flagging localism project.

Coming hours after the appearance of planning minister Nick Boles on Newsnight on Wednesday, the statement gave a firm commitment that communities will soon benefit from development on their patch.

The plan is that parish and town councils will get a sizeable share of the community infrastructure levy imposed on most new developments. At …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 8 Comments

A Christmas Carol. Stave Five: The End of It

By Andy Boddington | Sun 23rd December 2012 - 2:15 pm

LibDemVoice is delighted to bring you A Christmas Carol, a contemporary re-imagining of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, told in five staves (as Dickens called them). The fifth stave, The End of It, follows. You can catch up with the story so far here: Stave One, Mensch’s Ghost; and Stave Two, The Ghost of Avarice Past; Stave Three, The Ghost of Arrogance Present; and Stave Four, The Ghost of Austerity Future.

LDV scrooge story

As sketched by Bodz

“Osborne, you are late!” Cameron said sternly. The wretched Chancellor mumbled …

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Posted in Humour | 2 Comments

A Christmas Carol. Stave Four: The Ghost of Austerity Future

By Andy Boddington | Sat 22nd December 2012 - 8:55 am

LibDemVoice is delighted to bring you A Christmas Carol, a contemporary re-imagining of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, told in five staves (as Dickens called them). The fourth stave, The Ghost of Austerity Future, follows. You can catch up with Stave One, Mensch’s Ghost, here; and Stave Two, The Ghost of Avarice Past, here; and Stave Three, The Ghost of Arrogance Present, here.

LDV scrooge story

As sketched by Bodz

Osborne stared at the umbrella and blinked. All around him the Olympic stadium was burning and crashing to the ground …

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Posted in Humour and Op-eds | Tagged | 2 Comments

A Christmas Carol. Stave Three: The Ghost of Arrogance Present

By Andy Boddington | Fri 21st December 2012 - 8:15 am

LibDemVoice is delighted to bring you A Christmas Carol, a contemporary re-imagining of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, told in five staves (as Dickens called them). The third stave, The Ghost of Avarice Past, follows. You can catch up with Stave One, Mensch’s Ghost, here, and Stave Two, The Ghost of Avarice Past, here.

LDV scrooge story

As sketched by Bodz

Osborne was struggling to keep warm on a deserted platform at Corby rail station. He dare not sleep, for fear of imagining yet again the Ghost of Avarice Past that …

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Posted in Humour and Op-eds | 2 Comments

A Christmas Carol. Stave Two: The Ghost of Avarice Past

By Andy Boddington | Thu 20th December 2012 - 8:10 am

LibDemVoice is delighted to bring you A Christmas Carol, a contemporary re-imagining of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, told in five staves (as Dickens called them). Part One, Mensch’s Ghost, was published yesterday. Here’s the second stave, The Ghost of Avarice Past…

LDV scrooge story

As sketched by Bodz

Osborne sat on the stone bench and shivered. Mensch’s Ghost bothered him exceedingly. “It couldn’t have happened,” he moaned to himself. “There must have been something in that damned Starbucks coffee. Perhaps it is a revenge for my tax crackdown. Bah! Starbucks!”

Very …

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Posted in Humour and Op-eds | 2 Comments

A Christmas Carol. Stave One: Mensch’s Ghost

By Andy Boddington | Wed 19th December 2012 - 8:20 am

Over the next five days LibDemVoice is delighted to bring you A Christmas Carol, a contemporary re-imagining of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, told in five staves (as Dickens called them). Here’s Part One, Mensch’s Ghost…

LDV scrooge story

As sketched by Bodz

Osborne was a very grumpy person indeed. Why on earth had the Italian economy decided to implode just days before Christmas? The crisis had kept him chained to his desk long after the rest of the cabinet had fled London. “Curse Berlusconi!” he muttered as his taxi crawled through the …

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Posted in Humour and Op-eds | 6 Comments

Opinion: The escalator that’s pricing beer into insensibility

By Andy Boddington | Wed 12th December 2012 - 10:59 am

Today, upward of a thousand enthusiasts are descending on Westminster to demand protection for one of the nation’s great heritage assets. Beer.

The Labour government of old was unduly fond of price and tax escalators, which generally take the form of retail price index plus a bit more. I have always regarded this as a rather odd fiscal mechanism because it simply creates a circularity that feeds itself. Costs go up, the RPI duly rises, and costs go up again as a result.

It beats me why the coalition has decided to maintain this blunt policy. Fiscal escalators

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 10 Comments

Opinion: Could Garden Cities be Nick Clegg’s legacy?

By Andy Boddington | Thu 22nd November 2012 - 3:57 pm

It is May 2032 and I am cycling through the green leafy lanes of Coalition Garden City.

There is something remarkable about this new town that sets it apart from Cumbernauld and Cwmbran, even from fabled Letchworth and iconic Milton Keynes. I am on my way to interview the Mayor of Coalition Garden City to find out how this town of 60,000 people achieved the highest happiness ratings in Britain.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 10 Comments

Opinion: Lord Patten should not go

By Andy Boddington | Tue 13th November 2012 - 8:36 am

Lord PattenVultures are circling above Lord Patten’s head – he must not resign.

George Entwistle may or may not have made a good director general of the BBC. He took over from the maverick Mark Thompson, who had wreaked havoc across the BBC with his Delivering Quality First cuts. Entwistle might just have provided a steady pair of hands to guide the BBC and rebuild its confidence after the Thompson era. But coping with the Savile crisis proved beyond him and his fate became inevitable.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 2 Comments

Opinion: Making a Pickle of the politics of planning

By Andy Boddington | Thu 8th November 2012 - 11:14 am

Eric Pickles is a great populist and masterful at landing a political punch. During Monday’s debate on the Growth and Infrastructure Bill, he was being pressed by Hilary Benn. Will he, Benn demanded, name a lagging planning authority that might be brought into special measures under the bill? “I am very happy to name the worst, which is Hackney,” Pickles told MPs with evident glee.

Poor Labour controlled Hackney, named and shamed as the worst planning authority in England. Except it isn’t – by far. The furious mayor of …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 16 Comments

Opinion: Parish pump politics and apple pie undermine Police Commissioner elections

By Andy Boddington | Sun 4th November 2012 - 9:50 am

Sometimes having a microphone thrust under your nose instantly crystalizes your thoughts. As you hear yourself speak, you realise you have strong opinions when a moment before you didn’t know what to think.

On Thursday night, as I left a Police and Crime Commissioner hustings in Shropshire, I was struggling to gather my thoughts. A reporter from BBC Radio Shropshire, gloriously named James Bond, thrust a microphone at me. “Andy. What did you think of the candidates?”

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 14 Comments

Opinion: Heseltine is calling for return to cap in hand culture

By Andy Boddington | Thu 1st November 2012 - 12:24 pm

I take my hat off to Michael Heseltine for producing a report on growth that has passion, commitment and vision. It is far cry from the usual dry as dust, Treasury reports that obsessively tinker at the economic margins. Alas, despite its punchy prose the Heseltine report is flawed.

There is a lot to celebrate in this report. Heseltine condemns a dysfunctional Whitehall for neutering local leadership: “As Whitehall has taken more powers so its distrust of local decision makers has increased. At the first sign of trouble, further powers are wrested back to the centre.” But like Eric Pickles, he does not trust

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged | 6 Comments

Opinion: Mr Quelch muscles in on localism

By Andy Boddington | Tue 23rd October 2012 - 3:50 pm

“Fellows near Mr. Quelch’s study window heard a sound from within—the rhythmic sound of a cane on trousers.”

Just who, I wondered, as I watched the House of Commons Select Committee hearing held last week, does the speaker remind me of? Then, as he spoke about using sticks against the laggards, an image from decades ago slipped into my mind.

Oh crikey! I realised that am listening to Mr Quelch, the merciless form master who beat Billy Bunter and his ill-behaved companions at Greyfriars with jolly regularity in the weekly Magnet. I swear that Nick Boles is Quelch reincarnated.

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Opinion: Lord Matthew Taylor must recognise that planning is for everyone

By Andy Boddington | Thu 18th October 2012 - 2:54 pm

There was near universal welcome for the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) when it was launched last March. Environmental groups moaned about details. Developers grumbled that they had expected a greater relaxation of rules. But planning is about solving spatial conflict in our very crowded country. The NPPF is not too bad at doing that.

Lord Matthew Taylor has now been given an equally demanding task. The broad structure of planning is controlled by policy statements, but the devil is in the detail.

…

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Posted in Op-eds | 4 Comments

Opinion: Regional planning – it mattered not one jot

By Andy Boddington | Mon 15th October 2012 - 4:53 pm

It is a general rule of life that the longer a document is, the less it matters. I have just read all 1,374 pages of the Strategic Environmental Assessment for the revocation of the South East Plan, published last week. Does this document matter? Not one jot, except for one important lesson, which I’ll come to in a moment.

Everything regional is out of favour at the moment. Quite rightly, too. When I lived in Oxfordshire I did not feel that I belonged to “the South East”. Now I live in Shropshire, I do not for a moment

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 11 Comments

Eric Pickles: are you a cigar-chomping Commie?

By Andy Boddington | Tue 9th October 2012 - 2:45 pm

Dear Eric

You always give a fine performance. Yesterday you told us with passion how you became a Conservative. It was a nice story, but does your claim to have a developed a “burning dislike of oppressive state bureaucracy” match the reality?

Do you remember localism? You did not mention it yesterday. The great localism project, you might recall, was launched on the twin platforms of the Big Society and Open Source Planning. The Big Society has slipped through the cracks of the political stage, but you enshrined localism in the Localism Act 2011.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 7 Comments
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