They are messing with our heads. Here is the press release in full from the Conservative Party’s website.

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has announced plans to give public sector workers the right to form employee owned co-operatives to take over the services they deliver.

This will empower millions of public sector workers to become their own boss and help them to deliver better services.

"Today we are setting out our plans to give power to public sector workers who are fed up with Gordon Brown’s top-down control of their working lives", he said. "This is the biggest shift of power from government to people since the right to buy your council house in the 1980s".

The new right to form employee owned co-operatives will apply throughout the vast majority of the public sector – including JobCentre Plus offices, community nursing teams and primary schools.

Employee owned co-operatives will continue to be funded by the state so long as they meet national standards, but will be freed from centralised bureaucracy and political micromanagement.

They will be not-for-profit organisations – any financial surpluses will be reinvested into the service and the staff who work there, rather than distributed to external shareholders.

"Just as we are winning the argument on the economy and how to deal with the country’s debts, the Conservatives now offer the best hope for users of public services and the people who work in them", Osborne added.

Then you have a look at the fuller version of the policy document and they give the game away. “This is the most significant shift in power from the state to working people since the sale of council houses in the 1980s, which gave millions of people across Britain greater freedom, security and control over their lives.” The destruction of social housing provision has been one of the most catastrophically bad public policy decisions eve made. Due to  the virtual freeze on council house building for twenty five years young working class people are obliged to rent from the private sector and any council estate now has, depending where you are, twenty or thirty percent of the properties owned by profiteering letting companies. Round this way, for sure.

The "scum-sucking pigs"as Labour MP David Wright referred to the Tories in a moment of lucidity are on an offensive to win over the sort of person who, until not so long ago, would have chopped off their right hand rather than vote for them. We know this because David Cameron said so when he launched the "Never voted Tory before" campaign. I’ve paraphrased slightly.

If it were not fact the fact that they are disingenuous, lying Tory class warriors out to shaft the working class you could be forgiven for finding some of what’s on their stall quite appealing. they say, among much else that:

We will:
• Create a powerful new right to become your own boss.

• Enable shared ownership.

• Create the freedom to innovate. They would simply be contracted by a relevant government department to deliver the desired outcomes – no more bureaucratic
government process targets dictating how to achieve them;

• Allow staff co-ops to bring in the best expertise.

• Give staff co-ops the freedom to grow.

• Ban profiteering.

All that’s missing is a pledge to offer free herbal tea and a badly knitted jumper to every co-op member. Of course the only possible reason that the Tories have flagged up this idea is that they think it’s a good way to make them appear less hostile to public sector trade unionists who wield a lot of votes and know that a bloody big axe is being sharpened by both Labour and the Tories. This gives them a slight tactical edge. Should the plan ever be implemented, an idea as likely as me being asked to captain the French rugby team, the Tories would use it to devolve responsibility for cuts and pay freezes to local office level and pass it off as proletarian democracy.

The scary thing is that the Tory proposal is likely to be popular among many public sector workers. Anyone who works in education will go on at some length about the amount of ridiculous scrutiny to which New Labour subjects them and a hallmark of the party’s approach has been to substitute workers’ initiative and clients’ input with infinite targets and monitoring. The Tories are using the deep deep resentment against this technique rather cleverly and Labour does not have a meaningful answer to it.