THEY'RE coming down. Our taxes will fall once the Tories get back into power. So Michael Howard suggested in Harrogate at the weekend. Now we have to decide if we are prepared to swallow that one.

After years in the electoral doldrums, the Conservative Party has perked up. Howard is a fleet performer, smart and incisive, if a little smarmy for sensitive tastes.

The coup he staged for leadership of his party got the blood flowing round the old corpse again. A redundant political party is once more twitching with life. Personal preferences aside, this is good for politics, giving Tony Blair some proper opposition.

We will be hearing a lot about taxes before the next General Election. Mr Howard set up his market stall in Harrogate, indicating that he would offer some tremendous two-for-one bargains in the future, a prospect spoiled only slightly by the fact that his stall was empty.

We shall have to wait for the goods.

The political salesman in Howard spun a few soundbites, chief among which was: "Let the sunshine of choice break through the clouds of state control." Perhaps there will be more meteorological snippets where that came from... "Let the snowfall of state control melt in the sunshine of freedom." "May the fog of officialdom be lifted by the breeze of free choice."

It is possible Mr Howard switched on the television during his stay and saw that jaunty weatherman off Look North having fun with the weather and thought he would give it a go. If he takes to wearing bright jackets, we will know that this is true.

The Tory way for the next election will be to talk up the individual at the expense of the state, allowing, for example, people to use "passports" in health and education that could be spent in the private sector.

Mr Howard believes we are standing at a crossroads. "One road leads to an ever bigger role for the state. Higher taxes. Higher government spending. The other road leads to a country in which people pay less tax and have more control over their lives."

Something in this ought to worry us. It's all very well flourishing the old tax bribe, a favourite trick of Tory conjurers. This always is attractive, much in the way that standing under a free sex/beer/ice cream banner would also raise the spirits.

But let's look at health and education. A person has a fixed amount of money to invest on these important areas of life. Either the money is taken at source in the form of a tax, to be spent on schools and hospitals for everyone to use, or it is left with the individual to spend as they see fit.

If that individual is very wealthy, they will sign up for this one, feeling they have no connection to the state, or to other people, whom they mostly only see as a blur through the windows of their Jaguar or whatever.

The average person, which is to say most of us, will be faced with either paying money as a tax - or forking out for private hospitals, insurance schemes or private schools.

So while the low-tax argument may seem attractive, it would not leave us with more money to spend. We would pay the same or, in all probability much more, to secure for ourselves what the state previously provided.

Besides, sometimes we need the sort of big state that Mr Howard disparages - a state that can look after the old and the sick, the poor and neglected; we need to pay taxes at a level that can maintain an essential welfare net.

The trouble with Mr Howard's low-tax free-for-all is that it invites a selfish scramble in which the better off will rush to the top of the pile that used to be called society.

The problem New Labour has in all this is that few people believe anything has got better in the past seven years. Anyway, the machinery of politics doesn't like a popular government. The gears only work properly once an administration becomes unpopular and everyone, newspapers, television, the Opposition, can join in the kicking.

How long ago it now seems since Tony Blair came frisbee-ing into Downing Street on his halo.

Updated: 10:34 Thursday, March 11, 2004