My old flatmate, as I've mentioned here before, was fascinated by the question: "Which would you choose, the washing machine or the vote?" This was despite the fact that he benefited from both. But he wanted to analyse which he was keener on. They're difficult concepts to compare: it's like trying to choose your favourite out of feeling optimistic and The Simpsons.

To clarify, I don't mean a washing machine. It's not just swapping your vote for a free washing machine – not many of us would do that. And neither is it the invention of the washing machine. You're not being asked merely to live washing machineless in a world where such things don't exist so you couldn't miss them. No, you stand to permanently lose access to a labour-saving technology, which you will still observe everywhere, in exchange for a continued ability to minutely influence the democratic process. To have to scrub clothes on a daily basis until your hands go raw in order to put a cross in a Lib Dem box every four years and then get to watch them do that. I, of course, would keep the vote and righteously hand wash my pants till kingdom come. But that's because this is a hypothetical scenario and I make it a point of principle always to do the moral thing in hypothetical scenarios.

It's quite an intriguing hypothetical scenario, actually. What would have to have gone wrong with the country for us to be faced with this choice? What satanic power-mongering tempters would have given us these character-testing options? How would the British people come to be faced with such a divisive little poser?

Which brings me to George Osborne. "Just as we should never balance the budget on the backs of the poor, so it is an economic delusion to think you can balance it only on the wallets of the rich," he said in his speech to the Conservative party conference last week. I think he's misunderstood the whole balancing metaphor. The challenge for a chancellor isn't to balance the budget on something but just to balance it – to make it balance. It appears he's just been looking for somewhere to put the budget rather than achieving equilibrium within it. Backs, he's probably reasoning, are bigger even than rich people's wallets. And flatter. You can write a greetings card using someone's back as a table so, if you've got to find somewhere for the budget, better the back of a poor person than some plutocrat's nobbly wad-holder. But what if the poor person suddenly stands up? Won't the budget fall on the ground? Altogether better, he must have concluded, to have some sort of filing cabinet.

But let's leave aside how badly he expressed his banal point because he also used the speech to announce a policy which, like the washing machine quandary, is a work of pure evil. He plans to allow companies to give their employees the option of forfeiting some employment rights in exchange for shares, any rise in the value of which would then be exempt from capital gains tax. There's a small problem with this, which is that it opens exactly the sort of tax loophole he claims to be trying to close, where ageing male company directors could avoid their capital gains liability by waiving their maternity rights. And there's a big one, too, which is that it's metaphorically letting off a dirty bomb in the middle of a class war.

"You don't need those pesky rights," the chancellor seems to be saying. "You don't need cover against unfair dismissal or redundancy – that's for the sort of loser who gets unfairly dismissed or made redundant. That's not you, you don't need flexible working rights – you want to get on. You just need money, a stake in the company. Come over to the other side – join the strong: the shareholders, the rights withholders." As David Cameron put it in his own conference speech: "I'm not here to defend privilege, I'm here to spread it." But you can't spread it to everyone or it ceases to be a privilege and becomes a right. This policy, and Cameron's attitude, isn't about healing Britain's social divides, it's about recruiting more people to their side of them.

While trade unionists disliked the proposals, they didn't seem overly concerned any more than business leaders were particularly impressed. "This looks more to be said for effect than because it will make much difference," said TUC general secretary Brendan Barber while John Longworth, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, considered it "unlikely to be a game-changer". The chancellor doesn't have a reputation for being particularly effective so there's not much to be feared from his malevolent schemes.

What worries me is the "effect" that Barber reckons Osborne said this for. The chancellor must think that the country is feeling sufficiently bitter and envious that this sort of thing might work. That people might bin out on their rights just to get ahead. That managers might bribe staff into giving up such rights so that the onus on them to be decent employers is reduced. That the delegates at the Conservative party conference will believe this kind of idea is the only way to prevent a culture of unsackable wasters, perpetually dropping sprogs, from bringing property to its knees. That, for all the Tories' talk of us all being in it together and the "big society", this is still the shit that really works. If initiatives like this resonate, it shows how badly Cameron and Osborne have failed to unite the country. And, even if they just think it'll resonate, it shows they either believe they've failed or were never trying to bring people together in the first place.

Obviously this reminds me of Thatcher but at least she unashamedly presented herself as a tough bastard. She didn't claim to be making friends but to be fighting her enemies. She was divisive and proud of it. But the way the current Tories are sidling up to the same type of policy, exploiting and exacerbating the same anger and hatred as the mists of their hoodie-hugging rhetoric clear, is loathsome. I don't believe the chancellor has the country's best interests at heart. I believe he's using our collective misfortune to play political games and not even doing that particularly well.

David Mitchell's autobiography, Back Story, is out now