Tories all tied up in their own red tape

But some of Mr Redwood's reported remedies cut through the vast padding of New Labour bureaucracy to threaten what looks like bedrock.

The entire 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act is, it seems, up for grabs. We may quarrel about some of the more recent regulations made under this act. We may boo the officials who use it to ban school playtime which it doesn't actually cover. We may mock the heavily remunerated "fear industry" of lawyers and officials who have helped to make health and safety dirty words.

But this act is the fundamental basis of people's physical protection at work. And even thinking about its "repeal", which is what has been reported, hands Labour a moral high ground it simply doesn't deserve.

While this Government has been devising new ways to shield us from falling conkers, it has horribly neglected the core functions of protecting workers' lives. Deaths in the British construction industry rose by 31 per cent last year alone. Seventyseven building workers died in 2006, more than the number of British soldiers killed in Iraq.

Even though we'll hear plenty of ministers condemning the evil plans of the Tories over the next few days, they have themselves been following the Redwood agenda by stealth.

The budget for the Health and Safety Executive has been frozen in several of the past five years. The number You can't silence of inspectors and inspections has been slashed. The focus now is on "advice and support for employers".

What the Tories should have done is promised a bonfire of the unnecessary bits of health and safety, and a strengthening of the rest. "Triangulation" it's called, positioning yourself between and above the two extremes: a political tactic practised to enormous effect by pre-1997 New Labour.

Instead, with a certain inevitability, the Tories are going for the blunderbuss approach. This could be the day which, despite all the denials, seems to come for every Conservative leader, the day when he retreats to the Right's very own workplace safety zone of red tape, Europe and tax cuts.

It's all so unnecessary. The Brown silence a squaddie honeymoon will probably fade, and the Tories remain in better shape than they've been before. Labour has nearly 20 seats with majorities of less than a thousand and 41 with majorities of less than five per cent.

Cameron remains the Tories' biggest asset. Their biggest liability remains ... the Tory Party, with its extraordinary capacity for panic, self-delusion and political nostalgia. This could be the moment when we find out which direction the beleaguered leader will turn..

You can't silence a squaddie FOR THE British in Basra, the spectre of the last helicopters lifting off the Saigon embassy roof draws ever closer. The withdrawal, when it comes, will not be pretty, but the Ministry of Defence thinks it has the answer: a ban on servicemen speaking, writing or posting on internet chatrooms. However bad it gets, runs the theory, at least the public will never find out.

Not for the first time, the MoD demonstrates its complete lack of understanding of the British soldier. With true fighting spirit, squaddies everywhere have seen the ban as a challenge and testimonials, solicited and unsolicited, about the MoD's cosmic uselessness have flooded into every defence journalist's inbox..