DAVID CAMERON warned us all in his Tory Party conference speech that he is just halfway through his war against Britain’s working class.

No longer does he feel the need to feign humanity for the victims of his government’s policies.

Cameron feels liberated, having announced that this five-year term will be his last, to take off the kid gloves, lace up his boots and ram through policies that favour rich over poor.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell mocked the Prime Minister’s claim that he leads a “one nation” administration last week, telling the Labour conference that Cameron governs for the 1 per cent.

Never was this emphasised more clearly than in his announcement that local councils will no longer be empowered to require house-builders to include affordable rented accommodation in new developments.

Cameron has effectively abandoned the five million people waiting on council waiting lists by telling construction companies that they can build “affordable” properties for sale under the government’s Starter Homes initiative instead.

But, as homelessness charity Shelter has pointed out, even these homes would require first-time buyers to have an annual income of £50,000, rising to £77,000 in London.

Cameron knows that his new policy will not dent the homeless total.

It will simply reduce growing numbers of low-income families seeking a permanent home to hopelessness, realising that they are condemned to a life in the private rented sector, with the prospect of ever-rising rents and short-term rental contracts.

Tories, Liberal Democrats and New Labour in government have all connived to reduce council housing stock through individual right-to-buy sales and mass transfers to housing associations or arm’s length management organisations.

Cameron’s government has taken this a step further by extending the right to buy to housing association tenants.

Many housing associations vowed resistance, threatening to sue over a breach of property rights, while the House of Lords voted in July for an amendment outlawing coercion to dispose of housing association assets in a way “inconsistent with their charitable purposes.”

Despite that, the National Housing Federation, the umbrella body for housing associations, has knuckled under, proposing a “voluntary” scheme, which was readily accepted by government yesterday.

Cameron had the gall to tell his well-heeled audience in Manchester that “a generation of hard-working men and women in their twenties and thirties … waking up each morning in their childhood bedrooms … should be a wake-up call for us.”

Who does he think bears responsibility for that? It can’t be him, can it? He’s only been Prime Minister for five years.

Cameron’s insistence on leaving the housing crisis to the market, with a little help from his Starter Homes gimmick, is deceitful.

Market forces have failed to provide a roof over everyone’s head. Where they have succeeded is in profit levels for landowners, construction companies and property speculators, especially the subsidy junkies of the private rented sector.

When Margaret Thatcher became PM in 1979, housing benefit cost £1 billion a year. It is now £25bn, rising and finding its way into the pockets of buy-to-let landlords assisted by the government to maintain their vice-like grip on the lives of low-income tenants.

Labour criticism of the Tory housing record has to be accompanied by specific pledges to finance a massive council homes drive. Otherwise its criticism will be justifiably ignored.

Cameron does not have a divine right to remain PM until May 2020.

Rising mass opposition to his class war policies could see his government sent packing long before then, but there must be a clear policy alternative.