Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Cameron's Tories are on a roll, but do they promise business better days than Labour?

Barely conceivable a year ago, it now looks more than likely that the next government will be Tory. If a week is a long time in politics, two years, which is the maximum Gordon Brown can hold off before calling an election, is an absolute age, and in theory there is still plenty of time for recovery.

Governments have climbed back from the sort of drubbing witnessed in this week's Crewe and Nantwich by-election but it is rare. What's happening is plainly more than just a mid-term wobble. Whatever the reasons – the economy, the dithering, the tax-turns or simply political fatigue – the wheels seem to have come off the Government's wagon.

David Cameron's main task now is simply to ensure that he and his party do nothing wrong, and, though it is still a long wait, power will eventually slip painlessly into their hands.

What does the return of the Tories mean for business? On the whole, business and the City have done well under Labour. In the early years of the Blair government, public policy leant over backwards to support these constituencies. There were some worrying straws in the wind – such as the windfall profits tax on utilities and the Chancellor's raid on the dividend income of pension funds – yet the economy seemed to thrive, the macro-economic reforms were well received, and, far from taxing the rich until the pips squeaked, the tax system as it treated the super-rich became one of the most benign in the world.

The 10 per cent rate of capital gains tax that caused such a stink when it was removed was actually introduced by Labour in an effort to encourage business start-ups. Tax breaks create constituencies of self-interested beneficiaries, making them extremely difficult to take away once they have been given.

For business and the City, it was this act of reversal in last autumn's mini-Budget that helped to crystallise a growing sense of disillusionment with the Labour Government. Business and finance will always seek to court the party it thinks will win, and with the Tories, the natural party of business, the process of courtship comes easily now that their political credibility has been restored.

Yet beyond some vaguely pro-business platitudes, it is as yet quite difficult to know where exactly the Tories stand on key areas of policy affecting business. Some good ideas have been aired by George Osborne on economic policy, but frankly nothing which is going to set the world alight, or even markedly differentiates him from what Labour has been doing.

This may be because there are no new big ideas to be had when it comes to governments and the economy. What's demanded instead is competence, and on this front Labour seems almost wholly to have lost its grip.

Mr Osborne instead promises more independence for the Bank of England, independent monitoring of the public finances, more efficiency in public spending and so on, but there is nothing to compare with the Thatcherite rhetoric of rolling back the frontiers of the state or the "ultra low-tax economy" that many business leaders aspire to.

There was a lot of talk a year or two back of green taxes to replace more traditional ones, but, if these ideas were ever a runner, they seem now to have faded into the background. On non-doms, Tory proposals are now virtually indistinguishable from Government policy, which is hardly surprising as it was the Conservatives that originally came up with the idea of a flat-rate tax for non-doms.

There's no commitment to reinstate the 10p tax rate, or indeed the 10p rate of taper relief for capital gains tax. These things may be contributing to Labour's downfall, but the Tories are not so stupid as to try and bring them back.

On corporation taxes, there's an ill-defined promise to bring them down, and an inclination, though not a commitment, to take foreign income out of UK tax altogether in an effort to stem the threatened exodus of companies to overseas tax havens.

Regulation; less of it. Nuclear power; more of it. Transport; no third runway at Heathrow (or at least that's Boris's policy) and bring back Routemaster buses. It's all pretty vacuous stuff, really.

On Europe and the euro, the policy seems to be to say as little as possible, even though big business is still overwhelmingly in favour of joining the single currency. Yet with William Hague – the Tory leader who fought the 2001 general election on a platform of save the pound – still a prominent member of the Tory frontbench team, the assumption has to be that the Conservatives remain broadly eurosceptic.

In any case, we'll hear nothing about the euro until the economic case for joining becomes so overwhelming that it can no longer be ignored. The Tories once tore themselves apart over the euro. Mr Cameron daren't risk such a schism again.

All this lack of commitment is perfectly sensible political strategy for a party of opposition. It demonstrably works too, having been deployed to great effect by New Labour in the run-up to the 1997 general election. There's no point in making promises you might later have to break, or indeed of proposing a radical agenda which though it might please some is bound to alienate others.

Occupying the middle ground has long been Labour strategy. Mr Cameron now attempts to claim it too, but to greater effect because of disillusionment with an apparently tired Government heading into much more difficult economic waters. What business can expect from the Tories once they are in government is anyone's guess, but, like the electorate, its love affair with Labour ended quite a while back.

One thing at least seems certain. Mr Osborne has promised to match Labour's spending commitments at least for the first two years. That's going to make immediate tax cuts for business virtually impossible, especially in a period of constrained economic growth.

My advice for business is don't expect too much. Mr Cameron cannot credibly promise to restore health in the public finances while both spending as much as Labour and cutting taxes on business. The numbers just can't be made to add up.