In the midst of one of the greatest financial crises to strike the world since the Great Depression, the Tories have announced that David Cameron would allow the minimum wage to “melt away” if he became PM — meaning that millions of first-time job entrants and young people would be exposed to the sort of rampant exploitation which has caused the current crisis.

Senior Tories made the admission in a newspaper report, and were quoted as saying “(T)he minimum wage won’t be scrapped but it will be allowed to wither on the vine.”

Bizarrely, Cameron’s logic is that the minimum wage rate increase “cannot be allowed to continue to rise annually in line with the rate of inflation” — in other words, that young people in particular who are the beneficiaries of the minimum wage, will not be compensated for any hyper inflation. Such market vagaries are highly possible, given the Tories’ multi-millionaire city bankrollers, who have already created the credit crunch disaster now engulfing much of the world.

The Tories originally opposed the introduction of the minimum wage, using the flawed “logic” that it would lead to “massive job losses”. Of course, nothing of the sort happened, and the only job losses which have been incurred were caused by the expansion of the EU and mass immigration – policies which the Tories wholeheartedly endorsed.

* At least Cameron knows how to protect his own: He has announced that he will not sack his embattled party chairman Caroline Spelman. The Tory leader will delay a decision on her fate until a sleaze probe is over — Spelman is facing allegations she used taxpayer-funded parliamentary allowances to pay for her nanny.