Osborne sends boys up chimneys – but offers them shares in the sweeping company

George Osborne knows how to stick pins in his enemies. Using the phrase ‘Workers of the world unite’ to introduce a wheeze that will allow employees to swap employment rights for shares in their employer got well up the noses of the left. ‘There are so many holes in this it deserves to sink without a trace,’ said Mark -Serwotka of the Public and Commercial Services Union, no doubt hoping to restore his good name after his calls for public-sector workers to use the Olympics as an opportunity to strike. ‘Remember this lot were quite content to put small boys up chimneys,’ typed one Guardianista with a loose recollection of the last Conservative manifesto. Osborne has ‘as much knowledge of economics as a stick of rhubarb’, declared Paul Kenny of the GMB in a sweeping dismissal of the Chancellor’s entire party conference performance.

Even the CBI was only lukewarm, it has to be said, greeting rights-for-shares as ‘a niche idea… not relevant to all businesses’.