ONCE AGAIN the political village has been arguing over questions of no importance, while events of real importance have been happening unnoticed before our eyes. Last week all the talk in Manchester was about a Blair-Brown feud that never happened, while the real story — the irredeemable split between Tony Blair and the Labour Party over foreign policy — went unreported.

This week’s excitement at Bournemouth has been all about the Tory battle over tax cuts, which again turned out to be a total non-event. Meanwhile, nobody seems to have noticed one of the most extraordinary events in recent British politics. The Conservative Party has not just moved to the left, abandoning Margaret Thatcher and leapfrogging Tony Blair and Gordon Brown on to what David Cameron described as the liberal, progressive mainstream of British politics. No, the Cameron project appears to be far more audacious. He is trying to turn the “new Tories” into an unashamedly statist, high-tax, anti-enterprise party, with ideals that owe less to Blair or Brown than to Nye Bevan and Michael Foot.

To judge by Mr Cameron’s big speech in Bournemouth, reinforced by the evident sincerity evinced by his Shadow Cabinet colleagues, the media shouldn’t be banging on about why he hasn’t committed his party to tax cuts. The media should be asking the opposite question: “When are you going to announce the details of the enormous tax increases you are so clearly itching to impose?”

If Michael Foot’s 1983 election manifesto is now remembered as “the longest suicide note in history”, then Mr Cameron’s speech yesterday could be described as the “longest shopping list in history”. And what would inevitably follow if Mr Cameron became prime minister would be the biggest tax demands in history.

Consider just a few of the spending pledges made yesterday by Mr Cameron in a single speech: to lavish on the National Health Service whatever funding is needed and an absolute moratorium on spending cuts or hospital closures; more border controls and policemen; more support for faith schools; more prison building; more drug rehabilitation services; more defence spending, not just on body armour but also on military salaries, pensions and schools; more subsidies for childcare; more money for social workers and occupational therapists; more special schools. My list of the spending commitments in that one speech could go on and on — and I haven’t even started on the previous day’s promises from Mr Osborne, such as subsidising pensions with even more generous tax relief.

It may be objected, of course, that I am taking Mr Cameron too literally. He was not, after all, delivering a budget speech, with concrete policy decisions, but presenting a prospectus, designed to offer the country a broad sense of the Tories’ new aspirations. Yet this was exactly what made the speech — and this week’s entire conference — so alarming. Nowhere was there any sense of priorities, of the limits to government resources. Never did Mr Cameron hint, for example, that somebody would have to pay for such charming notions as a new childcare subsidy that would be paid not only to professional carers but also to grandparents.

Even more disconcertingly, for what was supposed to be an expression of the new Tory ideals of decentralisation and limited government, there was hardly a single example of government self-restraint to balance the dozens of new state initiatives.

This is not just a matter of taxes. The Tories constantly denounce the red tape and over-regulation supposedly stifling British business and making it internationally uncompetitive. Yet they have promised a panoply of environmental taxes and regulations that would be hugely costly to business and for which there is not the slightest possibility of gaining international support at least outside the EU.

Even more disturbing, the Tories have endorsed all sorts of other regulatory initiatives that would not only interfere with personal life and private business but would also be totally self-defeating. Take the proposal that all mothers, regardless of their children’s age, should be able to demand flexible working hours. This — like the rules governing sex discrimination, disability discrimination and, no doubt, age discrimination — is just the kind of well-meaning regulation that feeds the job-destroying epidemic of lawsuits. Yet instead of calling for the removal of such counter-productive laws, the Tories now seem to believe that the State’s interference with the freedom to make labour contracts has not gone nearly far enough.

What about decentralisation and bringing Government closer to the people, Mr Cameron’s other “big ideas”? In his speech he made only two specific pledges to limit government: he promised to repeal the Human Rights Act and he made a “clear commitment” that “there will be no more pointless reorganisations in the NHS”.

The first of these self-denying ordinances was immediately negated, however, when Mr Cameron announced that he would replace the Human Rights Act with a “British bill of rights”. As for the pledge to avoid further NHS reorganisations this was contradicted by his previous sentence, when he declared that the whole ethos and management of the NHS had to be changed as a matter of urgency to ensure that the limitless resources which the Tories were pledging to the service would be “money well spent”.

If this is what Mr Cameron sounds like before he even gets stuck into “substance”, heaven knows how much a Tory government would cost once his “policy commissions” have done their work. Instead of meaningless semantic arguments about Tory promises to “share the proceeds of economic growth between improved public services and lower taxes”, British businesses and taxpayers had better prepare themselves for a very different prospect: If the Tories keep their lead in the polls, large tax increases will be inevitable whoever wins the next election.

The real danger is not a Tory victory; that remains unlikely. But with Mr Cameron campaigning stridently against “Labour health cuts” and for more “government leadership” in every aspect of British life, how can we expect Gordon Brown to show the necessary self-restraint?

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