David Cameron yesterday sought to convince those few people that still follow the ramblings of politicians that the Tories are now the party most committed to "social justice" and the fight against poverty. Considering how little New Labour seems to care about such trivial maters, it wouldn't take much for the Tories to trump them.

Slagging off an easy target, Cameron said that the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, had created a welfare and tax credit system that was "well intentioned" but so flawed that it had "increased poverty rather than reduced it", trapping millions into an existence of dependency on benefits that discouraged them from making a "new start".

Setting out the broad thrust of his “poverty-fighting agenda”, the Conservative leader criticised Mr Brown’s “top-down, centralised” approach to assisting the poor, arguing that Labour “means well but fails badly”.

The Tory policy to reduce poverty would be to scrap the welfare system so that poor people feel more encouragement to get minimum wage part time jobs or simply die off and thus reduce unemployment, poverty and burdens on the health care system.

"The gap between life expectancy for the rich and the poorest in our country is now greater than at any time since Queen Victoria," he said proudly - perhaps referring to the success of policies enshrined by the Thatcher era and followed by all successive government of any hue ever since.

But poor people cost money under New Labour and Cameron spelled out how the Tories would use the state far less. The aim would be to off load the cost onto families and the voluntary sector - and divert the profits to the private sector. In doing so the Tories would create "a second chance" for profiting from the dregs of society and remove the burden from the government and allow them to cut taxes in order to make the rich a little richer, again.

Now, wasn't there meant to be and irishman in this joke?
Oh yes, Bob Geldof !!! ha ha ha