Tag Archives: nick boles

The Voice

Nick Clegg’s Letter from the Leader: “Smack bang in the liberal centre – the only place you can deliver real, liberal freedom”

By The Voice | Sun 24th November 2013 - 10:18 am

Tory planning minister Nick Coles’ admission this week that the Conservative brand is still tainted provides the cue for Nick Clegg to stake the liberal flag squarely in the centre ground once again. The Tories see us too statist, he says, while Labour sees us as too hard – Nick reckons this confirms the Lib Dems are exactly where we should be. And he defines his version of what liberalism is: “liberalism is about enabling everyone to get on in life”. Read his letter in full, below…

libdem letter from nick clegg

This week there’s been a lot of chat in the Westminster village about an issue close to our party’s heart: liberalism.

Specifically, on whether or not the Conservative party can be liberal. Sparked, on this occasion, by a Tory Minister and arch-moderniser, Nick Boles, conceding that their detoxification project has failed.

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 34 Comments
Stephen Tall

Nick Boles calls for National Liberal revival AKA Nick Boles invents a safe space for nice people well away from the Tories

By Stephen Tall | Tue 19th November 2013 - 8:30 pm

nick bolesNick Boles is the Conservative planning minister, one of the few Tories to take the housing crisis seriously and to risk unpopularity within his own party by making clear we need to build more homes.

He has, for instance, said ‘The sum of human happiness that is created by the houses that are being built is vastly greater than the economic, social and environmental value of a field that was growing wheat or rape’ knowing this would be crudely characterised as wanting to ‘concrete the countryside’. He has developed …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 86 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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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

After the Coalition: A Conservative agenda for Britain

By Mark Pack | Tue 11th October 2011 - 10:25 am

Collections of policy essays from new or junior MPs rarely have much of an impact or shelf-life in British politics, but however fallible their predictions for the future they can be illuminating about the current state of the authors’ party and its broad ideological direction.

So it is with After the Coalition which is very different in tone and hope for the future from last year’s Which Way’s Up? by Nick Boles. The contrast is there in the sub-titles for the two books. Boles had “The future for coalition Britain” whilst the five authors behind this volume have gone for …

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Posted in Books | Also tagged , , , , and | 9 Comments
Chris Nicholson

Opinion: What is worrying Labour and the Tories? Part 2

By Chris Nicholson | Thu 26th May 2011 - 12:55 pm

Yesterday Chris Nicholson looked at what is worrying Labour. Today he turns to the Conservatives.

What’s worrying the Tories?

The consensus view after the local elections was that the Tories had done amazingly well and so had the least to worry about. But amongst strategists there are some very real concerns. The General Election had shown that Cameron’s attempts to de-toxify the Tory brand was still work in progress. Despite all of David Cameron’s efforts enough people were still unsure about the Tories to deny them a majority. Michael Ashcroft’s recent polling shows that there is still considerable work to do …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 16 Comments
Mark Pack

Voters, not politicians, will choose the future alignments of British politics

By Mark Pack | Tue 22nd March 2011 - 8:55 am

That’s the theme of the article I’ve done for the IPPR’s quarterly journal which has a series of articles looking at political realignment, including Nick Boles making a pitch for the centre-right.

It’s Parliamentary arithmetic which predominantly determines what options are actually open to politicians. That matters far more than any personal preferences of senior politicians, so the choices that are made are shaped far more by the results of what voters do than by what politicians might prefer:

The voters have a habit of making fools of those who make political predictions, even those (and perhaps particularly those) who make long-term predictions … So enthusiastically confident predictions about the long-term future of this coalition government – less than one year old and yet to face a national electoral test of any sort – tell you more about the self-confidence of those making the predictions than they do about the likely course of future events.

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Posted in News and Op-eds | 3 Comments
Mark Pack

Which Way’s Up? The long-term future of the coalition

By Mark Pack | Tue 11th January 2011 - 10:25 am

The rapid appearance since the formation of the Coalition of Conservative MP Nick Boles’s book Which Way’s Up? is a tribute to the speed with which Biteback turns round books – recognising that the previous slothful pace of much political publishing meant books were no longer able to capture the political weather. Boles’s book, by contrast, certainly does that and attracted immediate headlines about his support for a two-term coalition and for an electoral pact.

The heart of the book, however, is about policy rather than political tactics. Boles himself has long been a Conservative moderniser – “a Cameroon before …

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Posted in Books and Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

Fixed-term Parliaments: better by standing orders?

By Mark Pack | Tue 14th September 2010 - 10:26 am

Last week Malcolm Jack, the Clerk of the House of Commons, got a little flurry of media coverage for his evidence before a Parliamentary committee considering the proposed legislation for fixed-term Parliaments. “Parts of the government’s plans to bring in fixed-term parliaments are vulnerable to legal challenge” was how the BBC reported it.

It is understandable why that got the headlines, but lurking in the detail are important questions about how Parliament operates and whether its administration is competent. Jack’s evidence, and concerns about the legislation, really fall into three parts.

First, as might be expected from an official whose …

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Posted in Op-eds and Parliament | Also tagged , , and | 11 Comments
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