Nigel Hastilow: Why I am not voting for UKIP

Some of my best friends are Ukip supporters. I think Nigel Farage is the most honest of our political leaders.

But I'm not going to vote for him, I'm going to vote for David Cameron.

I don't like Dave and I am no friend of the Conservative Party. At the last election I was so unhappy with them I actually voted Liberal Democrat, to my shame.

This time the Tories have not run a successful, attractive or passionate campaign.

Some of their promises lack credibility – where, for instance, do they think their £8 billion a year extra for the NHS will come from?

They have provided no credible detail about the £30 billion of cuts they insist are necessary. Nor do we have a clue what taxes they will increase.

They claim they won't increase taxes – but does anyone seriously believe them? Even with spending cuts, they still have to balance the books and start repaying the national debt.

The debt itself, by the way, has doubled while Mr Cameron has been in Downing Street and he's still borrowing billions a day.

Despite it all, though, I shall be voting Conservative and hoping they get enough votes to end up in power without a coalition.

Admittedly that isn't very likely. If the polls are any guide – and they can't all be wrong – it looks as if the Scottish Nationalists will be propping up Prime Minister Ed Miliband by this time next week.

Nobody can seriously doubt Labour would grab the chance of power even if it meant supping with the SNP.

Mr Miliband has not, definitively and for-all-time, ruled out some sort of "arrangement" in which he becomes Nicola Sturgeon's tame poodle.

You can't blame him, I suppose. If he'd stab his own brother in the back, he's hardly likely to have any compunction about cosying up to a woman who plans to destroy the United Kingdom.

After all, on a scale from one to 10 where would you put Ed's patriotism? Maybe two or three, I'd suggest. Certainly not much higher.

The prospect of the fratricidal Ed in Number Ten has certainly helped concentrate my mind. Try as I might, I can't find a way round the argument that, in almost every constituency, a vote for Ukip is a vote for Labour.

There are maybe three seats in the whole country where Ukip has a realistic chance of winning. Everywhere else it's a protest vote and most of the protesters would otherwise back the Conservatives.

Admittedly Ukip is winning support from Labour as well but for every one ex-Labour voter the party gets, it probably wins three or four from the Tories.

Suppose Ukip took the Midlands seat of Dudley North, one of its top 10 target seats, from Labour. The odds are Ukip would also do well in nearby constituencies. If that happened, Labour might lose Dudley North but it would win the other three, giving a net gain of two and helping put Mr Miliband into Downing Street.

It's a time-honoured British tradition that we elect Labour Governments at times of economic prosperity when we can afford to let them wreck it. Then we elect the Tories to put things right again.

The problem is the Coalition still hasn't fixed things properly. They've made a good start, especially given the rapid decline of unemployment.

But this week's GDP figures show a pretty feeble 0.3 per cent increase in national income over the first three months of this year.

The economy hasn't recovered yet. It's too early to let Labour loose on it again.

It's hard to imagine, even without the influence of the National Socialists of Scotland, the recovery would be safe in the hands of Eds Miliband and Balls.

They will spend too much, tax too much and waste too much. Their plan to squeeze more money out of foreign billionaires living in London – the so-called "non-doms" – is already leading to a slowdown in the housing market.

That alone could bring a slump in prices which wouldn't just hit the wealthy of Kensington and Chelsea but would spread out across the whole country. Just that could be enough to bring the roof crashing down on economic recovery.

Then there's Europe. If Britain is ever to get a referendum on our membership of the EU only the Tories can provide it.

They've said they will and, despite David Cameron's broken promises on the subject, they won't be able to renege on that commitment this time.

Escaping from the EU is the only reason Ukip exists at all. So it would be perverse to vote to do down the only party actually in a position to offer Britain a way out.

The only logical course of action for a Ukip supporter is to vote Conservative.