THE monopoly media are always keen to paint Ed Miliband as an outdated relic, howling "back to the '80s!" every time he inches to the left of the "modernising" new Labour project that hijacked the party in the 1990s. 

For some reason David Cameron's repeated appearance in soiled Margaret Thatcher hand-me-downs does not provoke similar mockery.

Thatcher's Right to Buy has had terrible consequences for Britain. Our social housing stock has been decimated - nearly two million are now on council house waiting lists.

The massive discounts given to tenants to buy the homes they rent short-changes councils and housing associations. Decrees that they should be replacing housing stock lost in this way have proved impossible to implement - since the policy was renewed by Cameron and George Osborne in 2012, 26,000 homes have been sold but just 2,298 news ones started.

As construction union Ucatt points out, this means that councils are replacing just one in every 11 homes they lose. A third of those bought have ended up in the hands of private landlords, who charge far higher rents than housing associations or councils.

The societal shift that has seen housing as a social need replaced by housing as a commodity to be speculated on has caused prices to soar. This is driving even workers on above-average salaries out of city centres. Few young people now anticipate ever being able to buy.

It means that Britons spend, on average, over 40 per cent of their net income on housing - a higher proportion of the family budget than in any other European country. 

That may be in repaying oversized mortages, but increasingly - and ironically - it will be in the form of extortionate rents, since prices are now so high the number of homeowners is falling.

A housing bubble may have precipitated the 2007-8 bankers' crash, but that does not bother the Conservatives, who now wish to extend Right to Buy to housing associations. Nothing could be better guaranteed to worsen Britain's housing crisis. 

As if that wasn't enough, the Tory manifesto revives Thatcher's war on trade unions. 

Banning strikes in "essential public services" unless 40 per cent of all those eligible to vote take part is a deeply dishonest and anti-democratic wheeze.

Its aim is obvious - to outlaw strikes altogether.

The Tories show no such concern for democratic legitimacy when it comes to their own MPs, only 15 of which - of 303 - received the support of 40 per cent or more of the electorate in their constituency.

They have repeatedly snubbed calls from the TUC and individual trade unions to bring in secure online balloting, or allow workplace ballots, which would make for the higher turnouts they would supposedly like to see.

Britain's workers already suffer some of the most draconian labour laws in the developed world. The Tories have further eroded our rights by bringing in crippling employment tribunal fees, undermining health and safety in the workplace and forcing people to work longer before we qualify for full employee rights.

Now they plan to decapitate our only means of resistance by effectively banning industrial action. This is a challenge the labour movement cannot afford to ignore. 

Public opinion is on our side. Polls show that not only do old Tory standbys like Right to Buy no longer command electoral support, the whole "enemy within" propaganda directed at trade unions has lost its once poisonous potency.

In a country of yawning inequality, with millions on the breadline and the imbalance of power between bosses and workers starker than it has been for a century, unions are more needed than ever.

It's time for a counterattack - one that not merely turfs the Tories out of power but forces Labour to break the chains that shackle us.