GEORGE OSBORNE’S address to Conservative Party conference was a masterpiece of duplicity.

The Tories were the party of “builders,” declared the number two in a government which has seen housebuilding fall to its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s while millions languish on waiting lists.

Labour had headed “back to the ’80s,” bragged a minister of the crown whose Cabinet colleagues are launching an aggressive and unprovoked assault on trade union members, are privatising public assets like there’s no tomorrow and pushing through crippling cuts to tax credits that even Tory MP David Davis has compared to Thatcher’s poll tax.

But most nauseating of all was his claim to be part of the “true party of labour.”

Business Secretary Sajid Javid showed just how much respect he has for ordinary people when he responded to an offer from Unite to accept draconian new turnout thresholds imposed on strike ballots in return for secure workplace balloting.

Rather than dignify the more than a million working people Unite represents with the courtesy of a reply, he resorted to childish taunts about their general secretary “red Len.”

But as “red Len” calmly points out, this government has presided over the longest fall in living standards since the 1870s.

Working people earn less in real terms than they did when Osborne first became Chancellor in 2010 — to the tune of almost £2,000 a year.

This is despite the British workforce labouring longer hours than any other in Europe, with the TUC revealing last year that one in five work the equivalent of an extra day a week in unpaid overtime.

Not that such sacrifices are appreciated by the Tories. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s revealing remarks about cutting tax credits to teach Britons “to work hard in the way that Asian economies work hard” illustrate the sinister motive at the heart of the government’s plans.

The Conservatives are engaged, as Charlotte Church points out, in class war. They aim to permanently shrink the state and shift that constantly moving concept, the “centre ground,” sharply to the right.

The reference to Asian economies is no accident.

The vision is of a workforce at the mercy of employers — on low pay, with no welfare state or job security to protect them in the bad times.

A workforce forced to take second and third jobs to make ends meet, which has no right to holiday pay and cannot afford to get ill.

There isn’t anything novel about it. It is already the daily reality for nearly a million British people on zero-hours contracts.

It was the reality for nearly everyone before the 1929 bankers’ crash sparked the Great Depression, mass unemployment, the rise of fascism and World War II — horrific lessons that inspired the labour movement to build a society that, to use the motto of the moment, gave a toss.

The battle lines in our society have seldom been starker than they are today. Politics is polarising between the hard-right authoritarianism of the gung-ho Conservative right and the democratic socialist alternative projected by the growing grassroots movement around the Labour Party and its new leader.

Osborne is following an extremist neoconservative course that would make Thatcher blush.

But his disingenuous drivel about helping working people cannot be dismissed. The Conservatives will do all they can to divide the Labour Party and confuse and distract the opposition.

They will be helped by those such as Lord Adonis for whom Labour was always an alternative manager of the capitalist system rather than a vehicle for real change.

The movement inspired by Jeremy Corbyn is still a minority and the Conservatives still lead in the polls.

Yet they have nothing to offer but insecurity, poverty and fear for Britain’s workers. Nothing Osborne said yesterday changed that.