Conservative and Crass.

David Cameron has gone public with his hope that the fall in oil prices will encourage employers to pay their workers more.

Laugh? Not quite, more of a sardonic smile. I still might have fallen off my chair, however, if I weren’t so much of a control freak.

David Cameron is an arch Conservative, and Conservatives are pretty conservative. In this context it’s reasonable to equate ‘conservative’ with ‘capitalist.’ And what’s the prime tenet of capitalism? Maximise profits. Get as much as you can get; pay as little as you can get away with.

Ed Miliband made his own capital out of Cameron’s latest foray into the naively absurd. In a major speech he said: ‘People will be choking on their cornflakes.’ He’s probably right, but at least that should reduce the competition for jobs.