Politics is back – by which I mean real politics when people with actual differences of opinion are up to a fight for public support and the approval of the electorate. The centre ground, once decreed to be the only territory on which elections could be won, is now a no man’s land, a demilitarised zone, an empty space evacuated by the serious parties in preparation for a genuine fight to the death over fundamental beliefs. After those two starkly contrasting party conferences, we know that what will be on offer at the next election is a choice not just between rival sets of government policies, but competing philosophies of the good society and radically differing ideas of how government should encourage virtuous b_ehaviour.

In two equally astonishing leaps, the party leaders have embraced diametrically opposed positions on the role of government and the responsibility of the private individual. Ed Miliband’s Principle of Together is nothing less than the old model of socialist communality in which the desires of the individual must always be subsumed under collective need, and the state is the distributor of economic fairness. David Cameron’s vision is of a country in which personal responsibility for oneself and one’s family is paramount, in which hard work is rewarded and self-determination is a social ideal. This isn’t just a political or economic disagreement: it’s a profound ethical parting of the ways.

By accident or intention, everybody has effectively accepted that the ceasefire is over. The entire national conversation about how we should be governed no longer needs to be held within the confines of soft Left consensus. The Tories will talk unashamedly of free market, low-tax low-spend, small government Conservatism, and Labour will unequivocally endorse big government, state-sponsored collectivism. Political discourse has not been as visceral as this since the 1980s. There will be an urgent and meaningful debate about the principles which determine the conditions in which life is lived. Isn’t that wonderful?

For the first time in a political generation, you the voter – whom this is all supposed to be about – will have a chance to make a real difference. Instead of a phony war between political leaders who were marketing themselves as slightly improved versions of each other, there will be two radically opposed conceptions of what government is for, and what responsibilities ordinary people should be expected to assume. If you are old enough to remember, you may say that we have had this argument before: the general election of 1983 put the choices as starkly as they could be put, and the country made its judgment so decisively that Labour had to re-invent itself to get back into the discussion. True enough. Yet here we are again, being offered a re-run. And what makes it particularly interesting is that it may not turn out the same way.

Maybe the country is made of different stuff than it was back then. Perhaps it has been softened up by Labour’s extension of welfare dependency into the middle classes and by the remarkably effective media assault on market forces. Nor do the times seem quite so desperate: the lights are not going out and the nation is not being regularly held to ransom by lawless trade unions. Yes, it could end differently this time. But at least we will get to talk about it. There will be a chance once again to debate the most important social questions of our time and to bring the democratic process back to life.

What that means is that everybody’s voice will matter. The most pernicious aspect of the “centre ground” mentality was that it was, ironically, so illiberal. It narrowed the acceptable limits of political possibility to a tiny range of received opinions. Anyone who could not subscribe to that set of premises or social attitudes was simply beneath consideration. Either you agreed with the consensus or you were not fit to participate. (Or as one particularly enthusiastic proponent put it, you are so out of touch with modern life that you might as well go away and die.) Bizarrely, the centre ground merchants became, in the end, so mutually affirming and autocratic that they seemed not to notice how ugly their certainty had become.

Never mind that the tenets of the orthodoxy were in fact mutually contradictory – the promotion of gay marriage being at odds, for example, with respect for ethnic minority cultures, or the regard for women’s rights clashing with the rules of some religions – and so could not actually be enforced with any consistency. Politicians all had to make the same untested incoherent pledge to a vague liberal niceness. It was the sympathetic intention that mattered – not the logic or the fact that the programme was actually impossible to implement. It is on the practical implementation that these two competing world views will be tested. The Miliband option offers little so far in the way of detail except for commitments to yet more public spending while at the same time accepting the need (more or less) to cut the deficit.

But the Tories, even hamstrung by coalition, have begun to show the country what their approach might mean. Iain Duncan Smith has argued from the start that his welfare reforms were not just designed to cut government spending. His case has always been that welfare dependency is more than a waste of money: it’s a waste of life. It is human potential that is being squandered as well as taxpayers’ wealth. That is a microcosm of the brave new Conservative pitch: the clearest practical justification of the claim that the Tories are now the real party of compassion and social justice.

As I say, the country may not be ready to buy this. It may not see the economic or moral sense in allowing people to keep more of what they earn in the first place, instead of taking a large portion of it away, and then handing it back to those the state believes to be deserving. It may have become convinced that people do not necessarily know what is best for themselves and their families, or that, left to their own devices, they will make only self-serving, anti-social choices.