For quite some time now, it has become obvious that the impact of the Coalition government upon British institutions will be unfavourably compared, for as long as such things are remembered, with the impact of a Boeing 747 on a hapless goose in its flight path. A concerted attack is being made on pretty much every part of the welfare state: schools are being ransacked by Michael Gove, determined to liberate every school from the pernicious arms-length management of local education authorities and bring them to a place of independence, subject only to the micromanagement and tyrannical whim of one M Gove Esq; Andrew Lansley has clearly been planning the best means of obliterating the NHS for many years, and is now being given an uninterrupted run at putting it into action, even at the cost of Cameron’s own reputation for honesty; Ken Clarke, supposedly on the left of the party, has been charged with ensuring that access to justice is only open to those who can afford it, and has swung all his matey, jocular inattentiveness behind that very objective; Iain Duncan Smith, who spent several years after his abject failure to persuade even his own party of his merits as leader working out who was the best proxy for his revenge and alighted without too much thought upon single mothers, has been given an excuse by that latter-day Lysenko of welfare, David Freud, to both remodel the benefits system along the lines of the Spanish Inquisition and ensure that an entire tier of the workforce will be replaced by a five-million-strong pool of indentured servants; George Osborne, like a black widow at the centre of government’s web, determined to isolate every green shoot of recovery the economy might accidentally manage to nurture and carefully, surgically, uproot it and salt the earth on which it grew – the list continues… It is tempting to assume that there is a single overarching plan unifying all of these disparate terrorist campaigns against the Britain that was built in the wake of the Second World War, and more to the point, the wake up call of realising that a nation so like our own could fall prey to its own darkest, basest impulses as easily and completely as Germany had. This author has been known to advance a number of suggestions, from the separation of humanity into a wealthy elite and a slave caste, to the preparation for an imminent disaster of which the population at large has little grasp and even less readiness.

Unfortunately, this author tends to overcomplicate things, and ascribe intent where there is only effect. For all the chaos that each of these wrecking balls will cause, every single one is a symptom or a side effect. I’m not saying that there isn’t an overarching plan to the Tory rampage, but it has nothing to do with ideology; in fact, its scope is simultaneously far pettier and much more destructive than the above suggestions, so obvious and logical that I only realised what it was this morning.

Permanent, unchallenged Conservative government. That’s what this is really about.

That’s all it’s about.

Yes, Cameron has found ideologues in almost every field to do his dirty work. It gives him deniability; he keeps the ministers at arms' length, and when it all falls to pieces, long after anyone can do anything about it, he’ll be able to merely shrug, say he wasn’t properly kept in the loop, pass the buck and demand resignations from all concerned. But to imagine that he doesn’t know what the effect of their free reined ideology will be, ideology he only tangentially shares, is to imagine that he is an utter idiot. He is not. Every strut of the ideology serves a purpose – which is why the ideologues have only been placed in areas which have traditionally been regarded as Labour’s stronghold areas. Areas where the Tories have never had anything to fear from Labour – crime and policing, defence, business – are filled with pragmatists and placeholders. And, of course, his most likely challengers any time soon will be those very same ideologues who have all been set up to fail.

But in the short term, the only thing on Cameron’s mind is destroying Labour – not just at the next election, but as an electoral force at all. The NHS is almost a guaranteed vote-winner for Labour; the only way Cameron could even come close to achieving a victory in the last election was to promise (with his fingers crossed behind his back, obviously) that the NHS was safe in his hands. Of course, it isn’t – the consensus is now all but universal that Lansley’s bill is designed to ensure that by the next election there will no longer BE a National Health Service; but that was the point. If the NHS no longer exists, Labour can’t use it to gain electoral advantage; even if Labour somehow manage to rescue victory from the jaws of victory in 2015 (rather than the certain defeat they seem determined to keep fishing for), the fact that the NHS is in the process of collapsing like a square mile of dominos whose corner was kicked over by Lansley as he turned out his office light for the last time will become Labour’s fault. Gone forever.

Consider also welfare. Labour have always, inextricably, been associated with welfare; even their best efforts to sabotage that, in the dying days of New Labour, haven’t managed to dent that perception. And whilst the trend of public opinion has been whipped in the last decade against having a benefits system at all, which clearly scared Labour into voluntarily relinquishing the position – and so losing the support of those who depend upon it, whilst gaining no ground whatsoever with those who saw it as an unnecessary burden upon the good rich folk of the nation… stupid Labour! – as time passes, recession turns into depression, and more and more people come to depend on a fast-vanishing welfare state, the subject will once again become popular… unless, of course, no party is prepared to support it – which is where we are now – and anyone who might work towards creating such a party is kept so busy with bureaucracy, frantic efforts to find non-existent jobs and arbitrary crippling sanctions, not to mention homelessness and starvation.

And the number of people depending on what’s left of welfare will increase. Workfare is already eroding the minimum-wage unskilled sector, from which much of Labour’s remaining support would have been expected to derive; it’s not a stretch to imagine than in a year or two, there simply won’t be any minimum wage jobs, as workfare has entirely supplanted them – and that as many as ten million people are in that sector of Universal Credit which used to be covered by JSA, most of them doing the same jobs as they would have been doing otherwise, but for the same amount of money they’d get in benefits. Moreover, moving them all to a unified benefit system will have the effect of ensuring that the number of people farmed out as indentured servants can never be precisely calculated; there will simply be no distinction made between unemployed, underemployed, or enslaved. And more importantly, no hope of escape.

But why will this affect Labour? Well, two reasons. For one thing, people on benefits tend not to vote (unless they’re pensioners – hence the ridiculous proposition that someone aged 64 is a drain on society who must be forced to find a job, but the same person a year later is a valuable member of society to be rewarded for a lifetime of devotion to hard work), and the votes they aren’t casting would have tended to go to Labour. Whether that’s sensible or not is moot at this point, for reasons I’ll come to later, but there it is. And secondly, the effect of the welfare reforms, in the short term, will be to push people who are likely to vote Labour out of expensive areas of the country and into increasingly crowded, increasingly desperate ghettos, preserving the leafy suburbs for those who can vote Tory with a clean conscience, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never have to come face to face with the disastrous effects of the social policy they’ve advocated.

I could continue – the same pattern is being repeated with every area that might directly or indirectly affect Labour support. The policy on Scotland is the most interesting. Obviously, the Conservative Party operates under an historic commitment to the principle of unionism – and yet, Cameron appears to have done everything within his power to push Scotland away from the union, or at least into the welcoming arms of Alex Salmond. Why? Because Scotland is a Labour stronghold, and Labour are also implacably opposed to Scottish independence. Cameron’s insistent refusal to contemplate a three question referendum will scarcely hurt Salmond, but neatly triangulates Labour’s support away; Labour would stand four-square behind a devo max option if one existed, but without one they must stand with the status quo, forcing Scotland to choose Salmond if they want any hope of self-government. In the process, Labour’s 40 Scottish seats would also fall to the SNP in 2015, possibly even allowing a Tory majority government to buy Scotland off with home rule in 2016 and get those seats out of Westminster for good. Again, it’s not about Scotland – it’s all and only about ensuring that Labour are no longer a viable electoral force.

I say again, this is unbelievably petty behaviour. And it’s no good at all to reflect that Labour has felt much the same way about the Conservatives for the last 15 years, or that the Conservatives have been heading this way for three decades; a calamity has befallen our parliamentary system. Somewhere along the way, the parties have forgotten that they are supposed to have the same interests at heart – the good of the entire nation, not just the parts of it that voted for them – and come to see each other as not merely wrong, but an enemy to be annihilated.

The first rule of the fanatic: when you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy.

Labour became obsessed with the Tories, but after 18 straight years of Tory rule that was somewhat unsurprising; they had almost completely lost confidence in their own ability to press their arguments, even in the very principles they had come into politics to press home. Somewhere along the way, they began to believe that they had to become just like the Tories if they were going to get anywhere near power again; that made them attractive to people for whom Thatcherism was a dogma too far, and those people who might ordinarily have been the centre-right wing of the Conservatives found themselves the mainstream of Labour, and found in Tony Blair their archetype.

It turns out that deals with the Devil are rarely formulated to the advantage of the mortal party.

But the Tories, deprived of 13 years of their birthright by a Labour party determined to steal all their best clothes? This warranted revenge. This warranted any action, even the destruction of the British Isles itself, to prevent such a travesty from ever again coming to pass. The aristocracy the party had disdained from Heath onwards were embraced once more, to restore the Party to its Manifest Destiny; remember that these are not people who suffer crises of confidence. These are people for whom the notion that they were born to lead, to own, to order, to direct – to dictate – was drummed into them from their earliest days, in an environment of isolation from the parental tenderness and support which might have dissuaded them from a life of unthinking entitled sociopathy. We are theirs by right; they know this in every fibre, and how dare we question them? In their eyes, we have abused our power to choose our own government, and like errant fags they will beat us into submission and deprive of the power to make the same mistake again. And if we suffer, even if some of us die – that is the price of our error. They can’t help this; it is nature’s way, as they saw every time they went hunting. They are the riders; the useful simpletons who do not trouble themselves with thought when advocating policy are their hounds and horses; Labour are the crafty foxes who must be stamped out – and us? The poor, sick, disabled, unskilled, disadvantaged, underprivileged?

We’re the fieldmice they trample into the dirt as they track their quarry.

What defeats me, though, is why the Liberal Democrats have elected to go along with this catastrophe. I am aware that as many Lib Dems as Tories see Labour as a party that is no longer fit to govern and should never again be allowed to hold power, but as far as I was aware most of them felt exactly the same way about the party they now permit to dictate their future. Do they believe that in the absence of Labour, they will once again reclaim their historical position as the default opposition – that with Labour out of the way, it is only a matter of time before they once again have the chance to govern alone? If so, they’re living in dreamland; after 2015 they will be a footnote in history, barely meriting a mention, and the history of the Liberal Party will end – as, frankly, it did – in 1922, with the fall of Lloyd George. Perhaps they simply aren’t aware of what the Tories are doing, or more likely, just don’t believe that any party could so callously disregard the national interest in favour of ensuring its own agenda? God knows, but I fear that’s a popular position – and just 35 years ago, it would have been unthinkable. Remember what I said about pensioners voting more than any other group? They grew up in a world where both parties were committed to common principles in the national interest and regarded each other with a generosity one affords to one’s well-intentioned, if somehow sadly mistaken, peers – and if even some people of my generation don’t understand that that world no longer exists, how can those who remember fighting for its creation?

But there it is. Every institution that has defined British life for the last seven decades is going to be shredded because the Conservative Party want to ensure that their right to rule the country is never again threatened.

As far as I am concerned, there’s a name for that.

Treason.