SINCE THIS IS PROBABLY my last column before the official announcement of a general election, let me say what I think this campaign ought to be about. What it will be about is already quite clear.

Like every other pundit, I expect Labour to win. I differ from many others in believing that the victory margin will be narrow, probably no more than half of the 100-odd majority suggested by a literal reading of the polls. This will not be because of the Tories’ success in spreading their subliminal messages of paranoia (“Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”), but simply because so many voters now hate Tony Blair and are determined to give him a bloody nose. In a reversal of the anti-Tory tactical voting of the past two elections, many disillusioned voters will try to send the Prime Minister a message by backing whichever opposition party can do most damage to Labour in each seat.

Yet voters will vent their spleen on the Prime Minister on two conditions which raise the issue of what this election really ought to be about. The first condition for an anti-Labour drubbing is that voters perceive no serious risk of actually bringing the Conservatives to power. The second is that the election continues to be viewed as a personal referendum on the Prime Minister, rather than a judgment on the performance of the Government or the Labour Party as a whole. Do these two conditions mean that parliamentary democracy has become dysfunctional in Britain and that voters are now so cynical and capricious that they treat the Prime Minister as if an occupant of the Big Brother house? Not really.

Rather, the jarring tone of this election may reflect two more important changes in British political life: first is the broadly satisfactory condition of the British economy — evidenced by the total lack of interest, revealed by opinion polls, in issues such as unemployment, inflation and taxes. Secondly, there is the Tories’ failure to come up with any coherent alternative to the Blairite vision of a benign “enabling” government which, despite all the new Labour rhetoric on privatisation and the jokes about stealing Mrs Thatcher’s clothes, is actually expanding its reach over every important aspect of Britain’s public and private life.

Not only do we have an overweening Government determined to regulate every aspect of personal life, from hunting and religious jokes to the typefaces on private websites (in the interests of the “visually impaired”), but its ambitions seem to be growing without limit. Charles Clarke wants to imprison people without trial. Ruth Kelly wants to decide which social classes are allowed into which university. Now Gordon Brown has proposed in his Budget that the State should take over from parents the responsibility for child development, not just at the age of 5 but in the first few months of a baby’s life.

But what is the Tories’ response to all this? To whinge about immigrants and gypsies. The clearest evidence of the Tories’ ideological capitulation is their decision exactly to match Labour’s plans for public spending on health and education — and even to trump Mr Blair with promises of a higher basic state pension and total abolition of university top-up fees and student loans.

The significance of these spending commitments is not, as is often argued, that they prevent the Tories from using their supposed magic bullet — the promise of significant tax cuts. Both polling and common sense suggest that tax cuts would not in themselves be much use in wooing voters today. What the Tories need is not tax cuts but an alternative vision on how to meet the great social challenges of the future — health, education and pensions. Yet these are the battlefields they have ceded without a fight by promising simply to match Labour spending plans. The issue is not, of course, exactly how much money the Tories plan to spend in the next four years, but whether they can offer a genuine alternative to Labour.

The core idea of modern Conservatism, as reinvented by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — that state intervention, even when well-intentioned, is rarely a benign force in modern life and that great social challenges can be met by reducing the role of government, instead of increasing it — is simply not on the political agenda. And since the financing and delivery of health, education and pensions will be arguably the greatest social challenges for the ageing and knowledge-based Britain of the 21st century, the Tories’ decisions to retreat from these great swaths of policy leaves Labour in effective command of the entire political field.

Health, after all, is already the biggest and fastest-growing industry in every advanced capitalist economy. Education is the sector whose success will largely govern the nation’s future prosperity. The pensions and personal savings industries dominate the entire economy’s ownership and financial structure. Far more than the steel, coal and railway industries which so obsessed the social reformers of the early 20th century, health, education and pensions are the modern economy’s “commanding heights”.

Mr Blair, whatever his other failings, has one great achievement to his credit. After 20 years of Thatcherite reforms designed to reduce the size of the public sector and present the State as an obstacle to social and economic progress, Blairism has restored faith in government as a creative and essentially benign force.

At some point, the perennial debate will begin again between conservatives, who believe that whatever ails society, self-serving government is usually the problem, and social democrats, who insist that well-meaning government is always the solution. But until the Tories are ready to rejoin this debate in earnest, Labour will continue to win elections — and Blairism, rather than Thatcherism, will be Britain’s dominant political creed.

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