Rugged Individualism

Nick Boles, the leader of the unofficial National Liberal Party, has been laying out a bit more of his manifesto. Aside from re-naming a chunk of the Conservative Party and then governing in coalition with the rest of the Conservative Party, Nick Boles also wishes to help Britain's young people to help themselves, apparently because Britain's young people do not want help. Clearly, Nick Boles is eminently sane.

Rather than doing anything nasty to landlords, or perverting market forces into lowering property values, Nick Boles thinks Britain's first-time buyers should be given plots of public land and left to get on with it. The Government has already set aside a dozen such plots but Boles, evidently eager to prove his Cabinet-worthiness, thinks the scheme should be radically expanded without undergoing the inconvenience of a pilot project. It certainly seems a handy way to get rid of all those public forests which the Government was so desperate to offload some time ago; presumably we can look forward to a National Liberal administration handing out chainsaws and ordering people to embrace their new-found freedom in a self-constructed log cabin.