AN INATTENTIVE voter observing last week’s media frenzy over a gaffe by Howard Flight, the now sacked Conservative Treasury spokesman, might have been deceived into thinking that serious debate over tax and spending was taking place. They would have been mistaken.

The reality is that the furore over the hapless Mr Flight, and his summary defenestration at the hand of Michael Howard, had everything to do with the suppression of any such national debate and nothing to do with the big issues facing Britain.

The affair of Mr Flight is a disheartening symptom of what now seems doomed to be an almost vacuous confrontation between the main parties between now and May 5.

The probable absence of a more intense and enlightening national debate in the weeks before polling day — one that might offer the electorate a real choice — is all the more surprising given present trends in public-sector provision in Britain at present.

Britain is not yet a decisively high-tax country, but it is on a path heading back that way. For most of the previous decade, tax as a percentage of national income hovered in a range between about 33 per cent and 37 per cent. By the start of this decade, however, the tax burden had climbed into the high thirties, as Gordon Brown increased taxes by a total of £26 billion to finance a rapid expansion of state spending.

Today, the Chancellor’s projections envisage the Government’s revenues, as measured by current receipts, rising to 40.5 per cent by 2008, and remaining there to mark the highest tax burden for more than two decades.

These figures, of course, do not take into account any post-election tax rises, which most independent economists believe will be needed to curb a large structural deficit in public spending.

However, the rising burden of taxation is not simply a matter of the size of the bills, but also of the increasing complexity of what is, for most, an incomprehensible tax system.

The standard manuals of the British tax profession, Tolley’s tax handbooks, now consist of more than 11,000 indigestible pages. Last year’s Finance Act was the biggest yet, with 328 sections and 42 schedules.

David Martin notes in a recent pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies, that the average size of Finance Acts since 1988 has been double that of those in the preceding two decades.

Remarkably neither this increase in the complexity of the tax regime, nor the increase in the tax burden and the plausible threat of more increases, has provoked the sort of public attention and political debate that one might expect. Why should this be so?

A key factor seems to be that Labour’s bold second-term gamble on trying to shift the terms of electoral debate decisively in favour of a tax-and-spend strategy seems to continue to pay off.

Despite ministers’ substitution of well-intentioned rhetoric for reforms in the state sector, the public seems content to wait to see whether Mr Brown’s billions deliver meaningful improvements in services.

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