A Tory government will mean the end of the minimum wage

If the Conservatives were still in power and the NMW had never been introduced, a typical low-paid worker would now earn £1-60 instead of £5-80 an hour.

Miles of newspaper colums and multiple television hours have been so far dedicated to anything from Sarah Brown's toes to Nick Clegg's great-great-aunt. There have been debates about tax, cuts, immigration and education, the NHS and Trident.

One crucial subject, however, has been notable by its absence. The Conservatives know that they would shoot themselves in the foot if they spoke out on it (Chris Grayling may have taught them a lesson) and Labour are too much in disarray to clock it. We're talking about the minimum wage.

In an interview with the Observer in 2005, David Cameron implied that his and his party's long-term extreme opposition to the minimum wage had been wrong. "It turned out much better than many people expected, including the CBI", he said.

But those few words are hardly reassuring against a sea of Conservative hostility that started in the 1990s and continues to this day.

Introduced in April 1999 and hailed as one of New Labour's best policies, the minimum wage was designed to rescue workers from slave-like wages - as little as 35p an hour. I remember vividly hopping from agency to agency in 1997 being offered a selection of jobs that would pay up to £2 an hour, meaning guaranteed poverty and hardly an incentive to punctuality, motivation and professionalism.

Ideologically, the Conservatives see nothing wrong with rock-bottom wages. They would moan about "a lifetime on benefit" but they would also fight tooth and nail to preserve the scandal of companies profiteering on borderline slave labour.

Glaze-eyed, they would recite from their ideological hymnsheet that the-market-regulates-itself (I suppose like bankers regulate their own bonuses), that it's-a-consensual-agreement (of course- a desperate casual worker has the same negotiating power than a multinational company), and that you can always find a job that pays better if £1 an hour doesn't suit you (but then they'll moan that migrants "have stolen all our jobs").

In 1999, like true Prophets of Doom, the Conservatives repeated that a NMW would stop foreign investors from setting shop in Britain, meaning higher unemployment and the collapse of businesses. One of their MPs said: "The minimum wage would condemn hundreds of thousands to the dole queue".

Of course that never happened. More jobs were created after the minimum wage was brought in. Over one million people, the majority of which women, benefitted instantly from a pay rise and were able to see a little improvement in their living standards. Still shitty wages, but clearly better than before.

Yet the Tories' Parliamentary record is there for all to see. They were hysterical when the minimum wage was implemented. They frothed at the mouth each time it was raised to catch up with the inflation.

The inflation-rate calculators say that, if the Conservatives were still in power and the NMW had never been introduced, a typical low-paid worker would now earn £1-60 instead of £5-80 an hour.

But there's more. The Conservatives may have done it on the quiet because it's electorally suicidal, but they campaigned to water it down as recent as 2009. Christopher Chope MP introduced a Parliamentary Bill calling for a "minimum wage opt out". He remarked that it should be "a basic human right" for people to be paid less than the minimum wage.

Senior Tory sources disclosed last year that a Tory government would allow the minimum wage to melt away. "We need to find ways of helping British business to remain competitive. The minimum wage won't be scrapped but it will be allowed to wither on the vine".

In October 2009, this was confirmed by an article in the Telegraph which called on David Cameron "to do more than slow the growth of the minimum wage – he needs to commit to putting it into reverse", repeating the old mantra that "[i]n the depths of a recession, it acts as a real barrier in getting people back to work".

Ominously, at the final Leaders' Debate on Thursday, David Cameron repeatedly stated that a Conservative government would cut down on "business regulation".

You've seen how ferociously the Conservatives are opposing a 1% National Insurance rise on employers.

Can you really picture the same people raising the minimum wage each time the inflation goes up? If, like me, you've experienced the depression of being paid as little as £2 an hour, remember that on May 6.