IT IS a measure of the poverty of ruling-class ideology when a Tory prime minister uses the language of the left to win support for his government’s profoundly anti-working class policies.

Yesterday David Cameron spoke of “helping everyone to achieve their full potential,” adding that “there is nothing progressive about racking up debts for our children to pay” and that “the right track is to recognise the causes of stalled social mobility and a lack of economic opportunity.”

“Recognise those causes,” he said, “and the solutions follow.” Except that the causes he identified — family breakdown, debt, addiction, poor schools, a lack of skills, unemployment — are not causes, but symptoms of Britain under the policies of his government and under capitalism in its phase of general crisis.

Cameron’s “solutions” cannot therefore be solutions at all. At best they are sticking plasters and placebos. At worst they will exacerbate the problem by intensifying the attack on working people and their families.

“We need,” says Cameron, “to move from a low-wage, high-tax, high-welfare society to a higher-wage, lower-tax, lower-welfare society.” Well, millions of workers would welcome higher wages. But they won’t get them out of the altruism of their employers, nor indeed from a government that refuses to boost the minimum wage or to outlaw zero-hours contracts while capping pay rises in the public sector and seeking to make effective strike action by workers near impossible.

He talks about ending the “merry-go-round” of workers paying income tax and then getting back tax credits. The left has long argued that the austerity policies of his government have made such welfare payments even more needed, as the number of working poor has ballooned.

But we can be sure that Cameron and George Osborne have not undergone a conversion on the road to Damascus. What Cameron’s speech signals is the government’s intention to achieve its £12 billion welfare spending “savings” by cutting back on in-work benefits.

And, as some sort of justification of this, Cameron makes the crass claim that increasing the state pension increases child poverty because of the way that the latter is measured. But then this Eton-educated toff has no experience of what real poverty is.

When Cameron talks about “intolerance of government failure” over “sink schools” and “long-term unemployment among hard-to-reach individuals,” it is clear that he means to force through the takeover of schools by business interests and step up the benefit sanctions on the unemployed.

If he was really interested in moving to a lower-tax society then he could make a start with cutting VAT from its current level of 20 per cent. That is a major contributor to the 43 per cent of income that the poorest 10 per cent of households pay in tax, compared to the 35 per cent paid by the richest.

And if he wanted to avoid racking up debts for our children he could abolish student fees, and make big business and the wealthy pay for the budget deficit, reinstating the previous higher level of corporation tax and closing down tax havens under British jurisdiction.

But then Cameron is really only interested in a lower-tax society for the very wealthy and the big corporations. His policies are the continuation of those which have led to increasing inequality from the Thatcher government onwards, with the richest 10 per cent of households now owning 41 per cent of all wealth.

There is an alternative to these Tory policies, and it is represented by the genuine language of the left, by the People’s Manifesto of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, and by the aspirations of all those who took part in the anti-austerity demonstrations at the weekend.