Which Way's Up? Paperback – 10 Sep 2010

Nearly two years in after a week of utter incompetence, it is easy to forget that the enthusiasm that led to the coalition and the aim of creating a centre-right vision that had the effectiveness of Blair's transformation of Labour into a Party pf Government. Nick Boles sets out a short and coherent list of objectives for a liberal-minded government: some are obvious, some are inspired and some are crazy.

Reading this you understand why the coalition gave Cameron the opportunity to switch the Tories from the nasty party to a popular voice that would resonate with most of the British people. Despite Unite doing the coalition the immense favour of foisting the most lkeable but least competent leader of the Opposition for thirty years on Labour, the coalition seems rudderless and actually incompetent as it focuses on ways to upset public servants rather than deliver the changes set out by Boles.

Read it, it is short, think about it: if New Labour still existed PM in waiting Balls would do a lot worse than start here.

Conservative MP Nick Boles's book Which Way's Up? 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 anyone had heard of David Cameron" in Jonathan Freedland's words - and was a founder of Policy Exchange. In this book he sets out five areas where he believes Liberal Democrats and modernised Conservatives share policy objectives and so can forge a long-term political arrangement.

Intriguingly, the five are areas which many of the left also use to talk about the prospects of centre-left or progressive political agreement. The importance of personal freedom, offering more opportunities to those born into poverty or other disadvantage, the need to protect our environment, a desire to give local communities more power and a belief in the importance of restoring Britain's finances based on cutting the deficit and reviving both investment and exports are five themes that could just as well come from a new Progress pamphlet or an Evan Harris speech.

On immigration Boles does present a set of policy ideas - including ways round EU rules and introducing an equivalent of the American daily pledge of allegiance in schools - which are distinctive - but then they are also ones that many Liberal Democrats abhor.

Yet in most areas what Boles paints as grounds for Conservative-Lib Dem coalition could also be the grounds for other cross-party agreements, if Parliamentary arithmetic (either in Westminster or in devolved bodies) allows or requires it. His vision is certainly one of a much different Conservative Party from that of the past, but he fails to present a compelling case as to why it must be the Conservatives that the Liberal Democrats agree with in future.

His belief in the need for Conservatives to be different from their past comes out particularly strongly when he argues that modern Conservatism must be concerned with social outcomes in a way that 1980s Thatcherism was not. Nor is Boles's description of markets a traditional right-wing one - "free markets are neither God given nor the inevitable product of evolution. They are institutions, created by man, and based on a wide range of artificial interventions in the natural way of doing things".

On public services, Boles argues that, "The key distinction is between those responsibilities that involve services delivered to a whole community and those that involve services delivered to individuals or households. Where a service is delivered to an individual or a family, we should strengthen the relationship between them and the institution that serves them, giving them the power to choose and the institution the freedom to compete."

The implication of this approach in areas such as health and education is one that many Liberal Democrats disagree with (think free schools) - though the unspoken challenge in Boles's book to them is to come up with a better alternative vision than simply one of `if a Tory is saying it, it must be wrong' or 'the answer to everything is to give more powers to councils'.

Overall, although Boles's book is about a future of Conservative-Liberal Democrat cooperation, in many ways its most important message is how even Conservatives now want to be judged on levels of social equality and mobility. It is not a Labour or a Liberal Democrat MP but a Conservative one who writes,

"There are parts of Glasgow in which nearly 40 per cent of children grow up in homes where there is no adult in paid employment and male life expectancy is lower than in Gaza. When you consider this and set it against the life on display in the streets of Notting Hill and Alderley Edge, it isn't surprising to learn that income inequality in Britain is at its highest level since comparable statistics began in 1961. But that doesn't make it any the less shocking."

The debate over methods for and success at tackling this state of our country has been and will continue to be fierce, but that Conservatives such as Boles willingly offer up this area as a major criteria for judging the government is in itself a major sign of changing politics.

Nick Boles, a nothing nobody hubristic Conservative MP, has attempted to expand the long ridiculed notion that people are hard wired to work? Based solely on his own inactivity as a turnip gasher and the wet dream rubbish that is conservative work policy I.e. blame the unemployment for being unemployed. Sort of sums up anything this droid has to offer. If mankind is hard wired to work, what’s happened to the royal family Conservatives and MP’s in general, Captins of industry etc etc who do little or nothing every day except ‘fiddle’ their expenses. I mean what job ‘pays’ for a complete home including furniture fuel, rates etc simply because these poor lambs couldn’t possibly use a hotel? Or coin in, unearnt Benefits to the detriment of the honest hard worker. Mankind is not hard wired to work, they are hard wired to family, home and children, fun and pleasure? Work is simply an evil which offers nothing in the way of real satisfaction to the individual, and is simply another means of robbing the employee by the employer. After all it was once said that if work achieved anything, the rich would coin it in for themselves to the exclusion of everybody else.
If you want to read about the real world of work try Marx, anybody except this ‘fool’