“THE fairest way to reduce welfare bills is to ensure that benefits are not rising faster than the wages of the taxpayers who pay for them,” Chancellor George Osborne smirked yesterday when announcing Tory plans to freeze working-age benefits for two years.

This disgraceful plan to devalue jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, tax credit and local housing allowance rates — among other things — by holding them deliberately behind inflation follows years of pain for Britain’s most vulnerable.

Mr Osborne’s phrasing makes one thing clear — voting Tory is not going to get you a pay rise, if the only way to make benefits grow slower than wages on his watch is to freeze them entirely.

The disingenuous Chancellor claims that wages are falling behind social security payments. But the reality is that both have fallen in real terms since the Con-Dem coalition took office.

If he wants to be fair to people in work, where is a commitment to end the public-sector pay freezes imposed on millions of Britain’s workers?

If he wants to make work pay, why doesn’t he raise the minimum wage?

The truth is this insidious and thoroughly Tory wheeze has nothing to do with fairness. 

Half those affected by these cuts by any other name are in work, making Mr Osborne’s false distinction between people who pay for social security and people who receive it entirely moot.

If the government ensured that bosses paid their staff a decent wage, many of these in-work benefits wouldn’t be necessary anyway.

Sadly the Tory propaganda machine, boosted as it is by the billionaire-owned mass media, has far too much success in dividing the working class along the lines Mr Osborne has drawn.

The fact that many working people receive social security has not dented the power of Conservative “scrounger” rhetoric.

Nor has the fact that millions of working-class people know what it is to be unemployed, especially since the coalition has shed around a million public-sector jobs since coming to power.

Studies have shown even those most dependent on social security, such as the long-term unemployed, can be made to rail against the benefits received by others.

The only beneficiaries of the politics of envy peddled by the likes of the Chancellor are the people he serves — his party and the bankers, spivs and speculators.

That makes Labour’s addiction to “austerity-lite” and the similar, if less wide-ranging, freeze on child benefit paraded by Ed Balls peculiarly self-defeating.

The dog-eat-dog ideology of Thatcherism must be challenged, not indulged, if Labour is to win next May.

The party should be pointing to the real reason so many of us are struggling to get by — the super-profits extracted from our labour by the wealthiest and the colossal drain on public funds caused by outsourcing contracts to the private sector.

It should offer working people hope of a real alternative — a Britain owned and run by all of us, not the cosseted few.

Labour was quick enough — and correct — to point out yesterday that Mr Osborne’s speech revealed a Tory Party only interested in helping a tiny minority milk the rest of us for everything we’ve got.

Now it must explain how it is any different.