WHEN it comes to prizes for innovative political thinking, let no-one stand in the way of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

The injustice and unpopularity of zero-hours contracts has finally penetrated his skull, but he has the perfect answer - rename them flexible hours contracts.

He's got a firm grip on political history. After all, who remembers the poll tax since Margaret Thatcher's Tory government insisted on passing it off as the community charge?

Who indeed? Apart from the hundreds of thousands of people who couldn't or wouldn't pay this regressive tax that charged millionaires and people on their uppers the same flat fee. Mass resistance to it saw the Iron Lady retire in a cloud of rust.

Who, for that matter, ever hears about the bedroom tax in the face of the Tory and Liberal Democrat assertions that it should be called the spare room subsidy? 

No-one should be surprised by the inability to call a spade a spade from someone whose idea of standing on his own two feet is to live cost-free in a multimillion-pound 16th-century house and estate, courtesy of his wife's family.

To call Duncan Smith out of touch is to render a disservice to all residents of Planet Zog.

Speaking of whom, Ukip leader Nigel Farage has obviously still not cleared his head after he succeeded in uniting the audience at Thursday night's televised "challengers' debate" against him by smearing them as part of a left-wing conspiracy.

His call for a minimum wage cap to discourage people from coming here to look for a job is characteristically half-hearted and namby-pampy.

It wages were to be abolished altogether and everyone forced to work an 84-hour week punctuated only by a good lashing every dinnertime, how many Bulgarians and Romanians would regard Britain as a worthwhile place to seek work?

Despite the efforts of this privately educated City trader to pose as the anti-Establishment voice of working people, he remains backwoods Tory he always was.

For him and his ilk the minimum wage was an unwarranted state intrusion into market forced that allowed, as his hero Thatcher put it, workers to "price themselves into jobs" by undercutting the going rate.

Holding down the minimum wage, imposing zero-hours contracts and making use of long-term unpaid internships are all methods by which employers can boost their profits through intensified exploitation of workers.

Ed Miliband's pledges on these issues do not go as far as the demands of trade unions and anti-poverty campaigners, but they are a step in the right direction.

We can be sure that a government that contains any combination of Tory, Liberal Democrat and Ukip will set its face like flint against ending such means of enriching bosses to working class detriment.

Miliband's decision to run his election campaign on an unambiguous contrast between policies that benefit working people against the Tories' concern for the rich elite, worried by income, mansion and inheritance taxes, was a positive choice.

David Cameron has been intent on shoring up the Tories' base in recent weeks in the face of a feared erosion of that vote by uber-Tory Farage.

Cameron's panicky promises to protect and extend the wealth of the haves lies behind his chickening out of debates that he can't control.

That's an additional reason why Miliband should persist with his demand for a face-to-face debate.