GOVERNMENT plans to ramp up council house rents come close on the heels of David Cameron’s declaration of war on affordable housing at Tory Party conference.

Like most of the rest of our Prime Minister’s speech, the reality — that he would be preventing local authorities from requiring new builds to include affordable rented accommodation — was dolled up to look like its opposite, an apparent drive to make buying a home easier — though housing charity Shelter was able to swiftly point out that his “affordable” homes will be beyond the means of 90 per cent of wage-earners.

The idea was presumably to promote home ownership. Or at least to present the appearance of promoting home ownership, which has actually fallen to its lowest level for three decades as spiralling costs price the majority out of the market.

But no such goal, however duplicitous, can be cited for the Department for Communities and Local Government’s new consultation on how to further impoverish social housing tenants.

“There needs to be a better deal in the social housing sector, with housing at subsidised rents going to those people who genuinely need it,” burbles the latest (apartment) blockbuster from the people who brought you the Bedroom Tax.

This builds on a long tradition on the right of finding someone on a decent wage who lives in a council house and then vilifying them as selfish squatters taking up space that could be given to those in greater need.

It was a smear tactic often deployed against that late and sorely missed giant of our movement Bob Crow, who argued that secure, long-term rented council accommodation should be seen as normal rather than an act of state charity towards the destitute.

His principled position still stands. This is part of a Tory drive to devalue and eventually destroy this country’s social rented sector.

Families in social housing are already put under pressure to move house if a bereavement or a divorce “frees up” space, subjected to pitiless and often crippling fines if they are unable to do so, even where no smaller property exists to move to.

This latest move goes further, pushing social landlords — whether these are local authorities or housing associations — to raise rents if tenants’ household income is higher than £30,000 a year or £40,000 a year in London.

Hardly a fortune. And this is household, not individual, income — making a mockery of the Tory “make work pay” mantra that inevitably pops up in the same consultation document.

This will be a disincentive for families to have more than one wage earner, since that would force their rent up. It will put immense financial pressure on poor working couples and families.

The government says it “does not expect” rents to be “adjusted frequently,” which is either an admission that social mobility has ground to a complete halt in Tory Britain or would seem to undermine the point of the new policy.

The truth is that this will raise rents.

It will be another nail in the coffin of affordable housing, which barely exists outside the social rented sector and if these plans go through will be in danger within it as well.

Our government talks a lot about security. But there is no security for any of us in this brave new Tory world.

A job no longer guarantees sick pay, holidays or a wage you can live on.

A home is no longer a place people on ordinary incomes can expect to keep for more than a few years, whether that’s to raise a family, retire in a place you know or simply for the stability we all have a right to expect.

The Tory project must be stopped, before the rights that make life worth living are gone forever.