The Conservative Party leader, Mr William Hague, has denounced New Labour as a threat to Britishness, and the Prime Minister as a threat to Britain.
In his most outspoken attack to date on the government's "modernisation" programme, Mr Hague accused Mr Tony Blair of "constitutional vandalism". This, he claims, risks a backlash of English nationalism, "the physical dismemberment" of the United Kingdom, and its submergence in a federal European state.
In a keynote speech to the Centre for Policy Studies in London last night, Mr Hague claimed Labour "simply do not understand the country they are governing", and accused ministers of indifference, if not contempt, for what they had inherited.
Mr Hague accused Mr Blair of courting greater European union and the emasculation of parliament; increasing the power of the state and undermining the British spirit of enterprise; and indifference to institutions such as marriage and the family.
Cross-referencing the government's plans for devolution, its proposed abolition of the hereditary peerage and its openness to electoral reform, Mr Hague conjured a nightmare image of a Prime Minister "holding a dagger" to the heart of Britishness, and a Blairite agenda which would ultimately make people strangers in their own land.
Using highly-coloured language, Mr Hague told his audience: "For the Prime Minister is in effect holding a dagger at the heart of what it is to be British. If he is left to carry on unchecked, he will drive it right through that heart."
He continued: "People will wake up and find themselves living in what feels like a different country. People did not elect a Labour government because they wanted to make Britain into a foreign country. But the impact of the Blair agenda will make people strangers in their own land with an alien voting system and parliament, and an over-mighty state.
"Without knowing quite how, some of the things which really matter to us and help shape our sense of what it is to be British will have been lost."
That was why, Mr Hague claimed, "the Third Way is a threat to the British Way; New Labour is a threat to our Britishness; and our Prime Minister is a threat to Britain."
And that was why, he insisted, he was also confident about the Conservative Party's future: "For we can shed the image that are nothing more than a party obsessed with economics, and take our rightful place as the champion of the British Way."
Mr Hague told his audience it was not inevitable that the Westminster parliament would become irrelevant as powers were transferred to Brussels or down to devolved parliaments and assemblies; that Britain would lose its identity or independence to a European super-state; or that globalisation would swamp British industry and see jobs lost to overseas competitors.
"They are all political decisions," he said. "There are no trains leaving stations, motorways without exits or ships set on particular courses."
The British people through history had always, through good fortune and courage, been able to choose their own destiny, Mr Hague said.
And the Conservative Party would help them do so again provided it offered a principled and real alternative to New Labour.
The Conservatives would become confident advocates of change, confronting head-on the West Lothian question and restoring "the balance in our political institutions that has always been Britain's political strength."
They would be honest with the people in resisting further transfers of powers to outdated European institutions. And they would not be neutral about the institutions and individuals that sustain a free society.