The Conservatives have become the true workers’ party

The party conference season has showcased two very different visions of Britain. Jeremy Corbyn speaks of the country as one giant Victorian-style workhouse. We are living in zero-hours Britain, apparently — a land where workers subsist on starvation wages and cannot even rely on those. So this is why Labour proposes a great upheaval, mass nationalisation, the confiscation of private property and — as of last month — the abolition of private schools. Corbyn would plunge Britain into a socialist experiment more radical than any seen since the 1970s — but the abject failure of the free enterprise system, he says, demands no less.

In Manchester, a Conservative chancellor announced his intention to ‘end low pay altogether’ by lifting the National Living Wage to £10.50 an hour within the next five years — one of the highest rates in the world, let alone Europe. This can be done because years of progressive Conservative reforms have pushed unemployment to a 45-year low and income inequality near a 30-year low.