NICK BOLES, the “Minister of State for Skills,” has been given the job of helping the Tories push through their anti-union legislation.

Boles is acting as the Robin to Sajid Javid’s Batman as they take on the trade union menace. Kapow!

Boles doesn’t make much impact on public consciousness, but he was actually quite a player in Cameron’s Notting Hill set. He is one of the Tory in-crowd.

On the Trade Union Bill, Boles’s job seems to be looking reasonable while Javid throws the punches.

Boles says: “We also believe in the right to strike. But this right is not absolute or unconditional. It must be balanced against the right of other people to go about their lives without undue disruption.”

Of course, if they can get all the “undue disruption” out of strikes, they stop having any effect. Strikes are by their nature a disruption. We couldn’t have got rid of previously normal things like child labour or death rates that made jobs look like a form of warfare without “undue disruption” of a rotten system.

Boles’s new laws include insisting that there can only be a strike when half the workers balloted actually vote.

He is MP for the solidly Tory seat of Grantham, where 54 per cent of the electorate went to the ballot boxes, and 54 per cent of those voters voted for Boles.

So by his own proposals, Boles is as entitled to be an MP as a striker is to strike.

But hang on a moment. Nick also says that “in some important public services we believe that it is right to introduce another threshold.” In these “important services,” there will have to be a 40 per cent “yes” from all those eligible to vote.

So if you consider being an MP an “important service,” then Boles needs to stand down. Because of low turnouts in Tory Grantham, he was elected by just 35 per cent of eligible voters.

Boles suggested that trains and schools were “important services” that should go under the 40 per cent tariff. So if he thinks being an MP is as important as being a train driver, or a teacher, then he doesn’t have a mandate.

Because he is a moderniser, and all digital and networked and so on, Boles says that “angry social media posts” about strikes prove his point. As if there weren’t “angry social media posts” about his own government.

Boles justifies the 40 per cent tariff because “NHS strikes led to cancelled operations” last year. He complains about strikes closing fire stations or schools. But this disruption lasted a day.

With his below-40 per cent mandate, Boles’s government will close hospitals and schools and fire stations forever.

Boles says: “As a ‘one nation’ government, we want to work with a modern and accountable trade union movement.”
But he seems personally drawn to unaccountable power.

The Notting Hill set he was part of was a group of “modernising” Conservatives that included David Cameron and George Osborne. He shared a flat with Michael Gove. Boles founded the think tank Policy Exchange, a key organisation for the “Cameroons.” But Boles’s government career has not moved as quickly as his friends and flatmate. His progress was interrupted by a serious illness, and also perhaps by a lack of — and this is an unpleasant sentence to write — the charisma of Gove or the appeal of Osborne.

So he made up for lack of position by taking cash from the unaccountable, undemocratic centres of power.

In 2012 he went to the Bilderberg Conference, a secretive conflab of the rich and powerful. Nick Boles told one of his constituents there was nothing to worry about because “The Bilderberg Group is a long-standing organisation which arranges conferences between politicians and businessmen from the US and Canada and Western Europe,” that this wasn’t at all creepy and was just “designed to enable leading figures from the different countries to get to know each other and exchange views on important current topics” — for Boles, only “politicians” and “businessmen” count as “leading figures.”

Boles’s ticket to the unaccountable conference in a luxury hotel was paid for by “the American Friends of Bilderberg,” the directors of which include Henry Kissinger, James Wolfensohn and Richard Perle. So the pals who paid for Nick’s jolly Bilderberg trip are the man behind the bombing of Cambodia, the man who led the World Bank at its worst and a leading promoter of the lies behind the Iraq war.

In 2011 Boles supplemented his MP’s pay with a “payment of £5,000 for [a] speaking engagement from Serco” — that’s £5,000 for just eight hours’ work. Serco is one of Britain’s leading privatisation firms. Boles presumably thought it paid such fantastic rates because “I’m worth it.” But to any reasonable person it looks like them buying the friendship of one of Cameron’s mates. Serco had good reason to suck up to the Prime Minister’s pal. The firm was thrown into some pretty bad privatisation scandals soon after giving Boles cash: it scammed money from the NHS by faking results on its out-of-hours service in Cornwall. Then Serco had to repay £68.5 million because it claimed cash for “electronically tagging” prisoners who were actually in prison, or in some cases even dead.

From 2010 to 2012 Boles also moonlighted from his MP’s job with another £45k-a-year post at the “institute for government.” This does show Boles is a “One Nation” Tory, as the Institute for Government is a think tank set up and funded by New Labour bigwig Lord Sainsbury. It’s based on the cross-party consensus between Blairites and Cameroons, the one that says there is “One Nation,” one that is dominated by corporations: Boles’s and Sainsbury’s Institute for Government looks at how to run a country by asking privatisation firms like A4e. The Institute for Government has got a lot of influence in the Civil Service, purely on the basis of Sainsbury’s cash.

So there you have it, the Tories’s “nice guy” in the anti-union battle knows all about “below 40 per cent” support and “unaccountable” power — from personal experience.