WHEN David Cameron says: “Our plan is working, but there’s still much more to do,” he’s not joking.

The Conservative coalition government’s fundamental policy goal is to continue the trend that has prevailed since 1977 — a widening gap between haves and have-nots.

It has worked tirelessly to help the rich through personal and corporate tax cuts while hamstringing the poor by means of pay freezes, attacks on state benefits and cuts in vital services.

Landlords and major property owners can bask in the warm glow of knowing that their assets have appreciated at an above-inflation rate while working people condemned to the private-rented housing market see ever-greater chunks taken from their take-home pay.

The Prime Minister is self-congratulatory about how many people are working, although the trend for greater totals has risen constantly since the Black Death.

Higher population levels always tend to generate greater numbers of people in paid work, even if official figures are questionable given the plethora of reality-massaging schemes deployed in recent decades.

To boast of economic recovery when output has only just touched levels last seen in 2008 as the private banking crisis brought on a recession is also a bit rich.

Labour frontbencher Rachel Reeves is correct to point out that the real value of workers’ pay has fallen by an annual £1,600 since 2010.

However, she is wrong to castigate the government for “failure to act on low pay.”

Tory and Liberal Democrat ministers have acted vigorously over the issue, fighting with all their might to ensure that it remains at rock-bottom levels to suit employers.

It’s not just through statutory pay freezes and holding down the minimum wage that the coalition has helped its capitalist friends.

The government also subsidises employers and landlords by handing out £25 billion a year in working-tax credits, housing benefit and council tax reduction to compensate for the lousy pay and exorbitant rents suffered by low-paid working people.

These are portrayed as handouts enjoyed by individual workers, but the true benefit goes to the capitalist class.

Nor is that the limit of state subsidies to the tiny capitalist elite that dominates society, as University of York social policy senior lecturer Kevin Farnsworth has illustrated.

His research indicates that direct corporate welfare payments, from subsidies and grants to tax benefits and cheap credit, amount to almost £85bn a year.

Neither the TV programmes that obsess about claimants’ supposed luxury lifestyles nor the MPs whose self-enrichment through dodgy expense claims put the record of so-called “benefit scroungers” to shame are interested in this corporate feather-bedding.

Both parliamentary front benches regard state aid to private industry as unexceptionable even during open season on benefits for the working poor.

Labour’s condemnation of the annual leeching away of spending power for working people means little if it is unconnected to the reality of life for those untouched by the recession.

FTSE 100 executives’ average income rose 21 per cent last year to £2.4m. They are paid 120 times the average worker’s salary — up from 47 times in 2000.

This weekend’s Britain Needs a Pay Rise TUC march and rally in London should attract tens of thousands of people who are fed up with state-imposed poverty.

Anyone questioning where the money to raise workers’ pay might come from should be pointed in the direction of the tax-dodging beneficiaries of inherited wealth, boardroom money-grabbers and corporate benefit junkies.