A storm is coming...

My children sometimes look up at me and say: "Daddy, what does a Tory government look like?" Gazing down at their gentle faces, their eyes full of wonder, it is hard to tell the truth and pour the poison into their innocent ears.

It is hard to gaze down on them because my eldest boy is taller than me and his brother is not far behind.

I find standing on the kitchen table helps, but my wife has been discouraging these tabletop lectures.

There is another reason it is hard to explain.

"A Tory government will rule for the rich and try to force us to pay for the crisis. Working people get pay cuts to pay for bankers' bonuses," I say.

They reply: "No Dad, tell us what a Conservative government looks like - we know all about Labour."

A decade of wasted opportunities and wasted lives under Labour makes it easy to think a Tory government will not make much difference - especially when, as Roger Bagley reported in Tuesday's Morning Star, Gordon Brown launches a bidding war with the Tories, a Dutch auction where the winner cuts the public sector most.

But I think there are two significant differences between a Tory and a Labour government.

The first is all about the electors, not the elected.

The higher David Cameron's vote, the more confident his gang will feel about slashing and burning wages and conditions.

They will wield the machete more confidently if they think much of the electorate believes somebody should feel its blade.

If millions of fingers mark their crosses next to the Nasty Party, then that party will feel ready to be very nasty.

Labour politicians might be ready to carry out similar cuts, but they know the vote for them means the electorate does not agree with those plans.

How trade unionists and campaigners resist these cuts makes a huge difference, but the election sets the scene.

The second reason is that Labour still has a biological relationship with the trade unions. The link has not worn away yet.

Labour has been embarrassingly keen to show off its new corporate chums, like a middle-aged bore with a trophy wife.

The unions have been treated like an embarrassing uncle with "funny" habits or a grandparent with a touch of flatulence - they get invited around for the Xmas meal, but they are stuck on the edge of the table and hustled out the house somewhere between the Queen's speech and the big blockbuster movie.

But they were invited.

And this has left some marks on the government, such as the minimum wage and increased social spending.

The Tories do not have these links and this changes how they rule.

A strong Tory government elected by millions of voters is going to be more aggressive than a weak Labour government that was forced, to some extent, to articulate the feelings of working people.

We need to think now what a Tory government will look like.

It is a bit like that scene in the Terminator movie, where the Mexican kid warns Sarah Connor: "Viene tormenta!"

There is a storm coming and we need to know which direction the robot destroyers from the future will attack us if we want to beat the Cameronators - or at least survive in our underground bunkers.

Number one is, of course, cuts.

Labour has increased spending on education, health and welfare.

The numbers of nurses, doctors and teachers went up.

Labour under Tony Blair undid a little of Thatcher's damage by taking on more staff.

Blair and Brown spent a lot of time sticking new Labour flies into this extra social ointment - academy schools, foundation hospitals, privatisation and so on.

And you can bet that a Conservative government will hang on to many of these ugly additions, maybe with a little rebranding.

But they will reduce the level of ointment. A Tory government means a jar of flies.

Of course Labour increased expenditure during a boom and it is now considering cuts in a depression.

Right now former Labour advisers are getting new jobs as advisers to the Tories so they can advise that a lot of other people will lose their jobs. But the Tories will cut deeper and faster.

Right-wing think tank Reform recently called for a million public-sector workers to lose their jobs.

The "Reform" wonks honestly say that teachers, nurses and other front-line staff must go.

The Morning Star outlined a few of the links between the Tories and Reform on Wednesday, but I want to focus on one.

Sir Christopher Gent sits on the Reform advisory board. Gent is also a long-standing, £100k Tory donor. He bunged another spare 11 grand to Cameron this September.

Cameron likes Gent so much that he put him on his new "economic recovery committee" to advise the potential future PM on how to run the economy.

The Reform website describes Gent's business career - but misses one job.

From 2003 until its collapse, Gent was a director of Lehman Brothers. One of the bankers behind the current crisis wants to slash nurses' jobs to pay for his mess and he has Cameron's ear.

Regulation is the Tories' second target, especially the regulations Labour was forced to pass by its union backers.

I don't think the Tories can easily repeal the minimum wage. But they can refuse to raise it.

Worse, I think they will "suspend" it as some kind of "emergency" recession measure. They could argue that youth unemployment means the under-25s should be exempted.

The CBI wants to get out of recession by tearing up workplace conditions, arguing: "A more flexible workforce should evolve with some firms that might mean a smaller core workforce and a larger, so-called flexi-force."

The Tories will be keen to tear up already weak laws on union recognition and temp workers to make this happen.

As Unite organiser Ian Woodland asked, will the flexi-force get flexi-mortgages? Flexi-bills perhaps, only to be paid when the flexi-boss pays the flexi-money?

Maybe the flexi-force will have flexi-employment rights.

So a Tory government will want to bend us and twist us to become their flexible friends.

We are going to need to grow a lot of backbone in 2010.