Amid the millions of words written on the two subjects preoccupying everyone since last autumn - the contrapuntal collapse of the world financial system and of Gordon Brown's Government - the single most important issue has remained almost unmentioned.
The elephant in the room, ignored by most commentators and politicians, perhaps because it is too disturbing to their settled world view, is what will happen to British politics once the Labour Party completes, with Mr Brown's help, the longest assisted suicide in history. What will be the consequences for Britain's political balance if Labour is permanently eliminated as a serious electoral force?
I will not bore you with statistics about vote shares since the days of Ramsay MacDonald, but draw your attention instead to a more recent event: Prime Minister's Questions yesterday and the clash over public spending plans between David Cameron and Mr Brown.
To every attack from Mr Cameron, the Prime Minister tried the same desperate defence: he bellowed promises to increase government spending and “invest in the future” - in contrast to the “massive cuts” in “vital services” secretly planned by the Tories. But like a trapped animal flailing around in a hunter's net, Mr Brown became more entangled with every word he spoke.
To see what I mean, ask yourself a simple question: whose votes can Mr Brown hope to win with his promises to increase public spending year after year after the election, despite the financial crisis and the immense deficits run up by his Government? To convince anyone about anything Mr Brown first has to overcome an enormous hurdle - he has to be believed. Who is going to be naive enough to think that Mr Brown could spend money in the next parliament which his own Chancellor says he will not have?
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Maybe such promises will impress people who believed Mr Brown's hand-on-heart statement last Friday that he never dreamt of replacing Alistair Darling as Chancellor, or his equally heartfelt declarations that he was brimming with new ideas, or that he always intended to compensate the poor for the abolition of the 10p tax band, or that he never plotted against Tony Blair.
However, for the 85 per cent of voters who did not support Labour in last week's elections, Mr Brown's spending promises will merely confirm that nothing he says is to be believed. But suppose for a moment that millions of people in Britain are still naive enough to believe what Mr Brown is saying. Even if the Prime Minister's credibility could somehow be restored, the Labour Party would then face a much greater challenge - and the failure to rise to this challenge probably means that Labour is historically doomed.
This challenge is simply stated: how many voters want the public sector to be permanently exempted from any of the cutbacks, redundancies, pension reductions and other savings that most organisations in the private sector are enduring? I believe that cutting public spending in the middle of a deep recession would be damaging to the economy; but I suspect that almost everybody believes that government spending should be cut back sharply once the recession is over.
Indeed, even many public servants now accept that some government programmes will have to be eliminated or privatised and that public sector pensions and employment conditions will gradually have to converge with the norms of the private sector.
An ideology of ever-expanding government is unlikely to command majority support among British voters in the years ahead - especially as the tax implications become clearer. If so, then Labour will not only lose the next election, but will be relegated to permanent irrelevance because of the new philosophy of government now embraced by Mr Brown.
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The operative words in the sentence above are “new” and “now”. For in the past few months, while all attention was focused on bankers' bonuses and parliamentary expenses something of epic importance has happened almost unnoticed in British politics: the Labour Party has fatally misjudged the historic significance of the global financial crisis.
Labour concluded that the financial collapse would be taken by voters as a sign that globalised capitalism is in its death throes, or at least in profound crisis, and therefore that the pendulum of politics would swing to the left. As a result, the party's most influential leaders have effectively abandoned Mr Blair's “new Labour project”. From the outburst of public revulsion against “greedy bankers”, they concluded that the key to electoral success now lies in widening, rather than narrowing, ideological debates.
Instead of presenting themselves as more competent and sensitive managers of a market economy than the Tories, Labour leaders have reverted to their old dreams of building a new kind of society that is fairer than any that capitalism could ever produce. This is in many ways an exciting project. And one day it could inspire millions of supporters with far greater enthusiasm than Mr Blair's timid and consensual “project” ever did. But this new, ideologically divisive, Labour Party is unlikely to attract enough support ever to win a general election.
That, I know, is a bold statement, but the experience of history is pretty conclusive. In the past, economic crises have normally shifted politics rightwards, since the longing for stability and continuity normally trumps rage against capitalist injustice. Most voters want to see things restored as far as possible to the way they were before.
This trend was strongly confirmed across Europe in last week's elections. Right-of-centre governments everywhere gained ground, while left-of-centre governments generally struggled. Even more significantly, for Labour, explicitly left-wing parties that were out of government - the French Socialists, in particular, but even the relatively moderate Italian social democrats - were all pushed farther towards the electoral oblivion which has beckoned them since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
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During the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s the Liberals were replaced by the Labour Party as the main left-of-centre party. Under Mr Brown's leadership, a similar fate may now await Labour.