The present political divide has similarities to that which existed in the period up to the 1914-18 war when a Liberal Government was confronted with a reactionary English nationalist Tory Opposition. The Liberal Government of those days had many maddening faults; but it was far preferable to the Bonar Law Conservatives.

I have never been any kind of socialist, not even what Tony Blair sometimes calls a “social-ist“. I was not even one when I was an official of the Cambridge University Labour Club. Nor, on a different level am I particularly enamoured of the influence of spin doctors such as Alastair Campbell over the Prime Minister (so well illustrated in the play Feelgood).

But a change to the Conservatives would be a leap to something far worse. They now stand for all that is most nasty minded in British public attitudes: a simulated hatred of foreigners, a mean minded punitive attitude to immigrants escaping either from oppression or poverty and hoping to find a better life. Their main approach to crime is to promise even more prisons than Jack Straw has done. All this goes with an intolerant attitude towards minority, unconventional or non-traditional life styles.

Of course Labour leaves much to be desired in all these matters. The present government has turned the clock back on many aspects of penal reform and would-be immigrants are deprived of the chance of doing proper work. But in all these matters the main Tory criticism is that Labour has not gone far enough, indicating that the party would intensify all its most illiberal features. Although Labour did not stop the sale of arms to dubious regimes under previous Tory contracts, it has at least taken some - still inadequate - steps to restrict future arms sales. And it has stopped the iniquitous habit of tying foreign aid to commercial interests.

I have yet to mention the euro. The case for and against joining this new currency seem to me to be half a dozen of one and six of the other. But the Conservatives do not confine themselves to arguments about the single currency or the operation of the EU. They use these issues as an excuse to bang on the xenophobic drum and talk about Britain "becoming a foreign country".

The English themselves are a mongrel nation who have thrived by absorbing wave after wave of immigrants from the Danes and the Normans to the Hugenots and onwards. As for the United Kingdom: this is in historical terms a recent grouping which came into existence with the abolition of the Irish Parliament in 1808; and it is a matter for the inhabitants whether the constituent countries whether they stay together, go their own way or merge in a wider grouping.

In some past elections, I have been torn between dislike of the illiberal features of Toryism and my support for a competitive free market economy. Not now. All the Conservatives have to offer are bribes to obvious interest groups such as motorists, clumsily combined with promises of general tax cuts to be financed by administrative economies - the last refuge of the political speech writer who knows he does not have a coherent story to tell.

Of course there have been far too many fussy regulations and tax complications introduced by Labour - mostly as a result of the Fabian error of looking for “market failures“ on a case by case basis without assessing the overall impacts of the total package. But this has been more than offset by a highly desirable redistribution in favour of poorer people and children as well as the expansion of the in-work benefits pioneered by Keith Joseph. And we have the promise of at least the elements of a capital stake for all. And this has been accomplished without any increase in the genuinely disincentive marginal tax rates.

Why then do I not go for the Liberal Democrats? Very simple. Although they have dutifully attacked the illiberal and authoritarian tendencies of both main parties, they have very much underplayed this element and have put all the emphasis on spending even more of the taxpayers’ money. Indeed, as Matthew Parris has pointed out, they resemble nothing more than unreconstructed Old Labour of the 1980s. In the unlikely event of there being in your constituency a Lib-Dem candidate who looks like a genuine Gladstonian Liberal or modern libertarian, and you can vote for him or her without any risk of letting the Tory in, by all means do so. But this will be rare. Barring a miracle the Tories will suffer a well-deserved defeat after a campaign as unpleasant as it is pathetic. But I must do my tiny bit to make sure that the miracle does not happen.