This was the people of Hackney’s response to David Cameron’s PR nightmare of a poster, and it may seem harsh, but his apparently tentative grip on his own policies does seem to reflect an airburshed toff rhetorically surfing every negative Labour wave rather than a genuinely progressive politician standing up for what he believes in.

This time last year shadow business secretary Ken Clarke gave the first indication of the Tories’ fickle fallibility when he was pinned down on the scrapping of inheritence tax for everyone bar millionaires – a policy that George Osbourne announced to great fanfare at their 2007 Conference and which gave them the eleven point polls boost that forced Gordon Brown to reconsider an early election. It was considered a masterstroke, to the extent that Alistair Darling incorporated the plans into his pre-budget report. But then up stepped Ken Clarke to dampen the Tory bonfire with his own gouty wee:

“That’s an aspiration we have retained because inheritance tax hasn’t moved in line with inflation. But I don’t think we are going round any longer saying that this is something we are going to do the moment we take power…We are going to have to consider when we get in what we can afford to do.”

So, not an actual policy then, just an ‘aspiration’. Still, to be fair, I have to say that the current economic client has also scuppered my ‘aspiration’ to fly over the local council estate in a diamond jetpac & suit of gold armour distributing continental quilts stuffed with fifty pound notes and free hand jobs to the over-16′s (although I’d just like to specify that I, myself, would not be executing said onanistic freebies. That would be perverse. I would be offering vouchers redeemable at the nearest prostitute.)

Was Ken Clarke an idiot? No, he was a realist. Osbourne & Cameron were the idiots for thinking they could make policy out of a popularist pipedream. Then, barely days into 2010, Cameron himself – in a kamikazi act of reverse alchemy – downgraded a previous commitment to a mere aspiration when he said that tax breaks for married couples would only be “something within a parliament I would definitely hope to do.”

Swiftly realising this screamed U-turn, a panicky Tory central office then rushed out another statement offering a more concrete commitment. Stressing that recognising marriage in the tax system was something he felt “very strongly about”, Cameron said it was “something we will definitely do in the next parliament”. Do we really want a Prime Minister who doesn’t even know his own non-existent policies to the point of having to correct himself?

And then last week I caught this infuriating but combative exchange on Radio 5 live between Labour MP John Mcfall, Conservative MP Justine Greening, and Lib Dem Foreign Affairs Spokesman Ed Davey.

Is it me or was Justine Greening genuinely trying to score political points by promising to try really hard to nix the planned National Insurance hike if they can afford it? Is that responsible politics? Or is it deluding the public? Tax cuts are surefire vote winners. Promising to make them when you know you can’t afford them is flat fraud.

But surely Cameron’s tubthumping campaign to fix ‘Broken Britain’ is built on firmer foundations? It would appear not. This week the BBC’s home editor, Mark Easton, pinpointed a problem with Cameron’s insistence that there’s been a ‘significant’ increase in violent crime (notably gun & knife crime) under Labour. When Mr Easton asked him for evidence he coughed up this email:

Those figures do look shocking, but, when you look at the actual document Cameron’s cited, you can’t help noticing that he’s overlooked this massive caveat:

So, comparing pre & post 2002 figures is worthless. Well done Dave. And it’s not as if the National Crime Recording Standard is even a government ruse to massage the figures – if anything, it makes violent crime look worse. Since 2002 Police forces have been obliged to record all incidents of violent crime, however trivial, whereas before they could be selective. The number of ‘violent crimes resulting in injury’ subsequently more than doubled by 2005.

Fortunately, one crime indicator that hasn’t changed in nearly three decades is the British Crime Survey (BCS) which asks 47,000 people about their experiences of crime over the last year. Here are their figures:

Hardly the terrifying trend the Tories want folk to see. And it gets worse for Cameron. By purposefully targeting gun & knife crime, Dave’s aiming at the country’s quivering Daily Mail underbelly. Shame, then, that his claim of a 58% increase in guncrime since 1989 is just plumb wrong. Here are the true curves:

So, how ‘Broken’ is Britain? We’ve just come out of the worst recession for decades without any significant social unrest. Labour introduced a more accurate & critical statistical system and they still appear to have crime under control. Shame that probably won’t placate the public, if this sample from Victoria Derbyshire’s phone-in on the latest crime figures last Thursday is anything to go by.

These people ‘know for a fact’ the figures are fixed but refuse to be specific. They claim the stats are inaccurate but don’t bother reporting crimes. They want the government to carry the can for their unshakeable distrust and they will vote David Cameron into Number 10 because distrust and disillusionment is apparently all he’s got.

I’m not delusional. I know both Brown & Cameron are career opportunists, and neither have racked up a stack of respect points in the roomy household over the last year, but the winner, by a clear margin, still ain’t Dave.

Don’t vote Tory. There’s a facebook page with the same request here. It’s barely got a thousand fans and needs hundreds of thousands more to stop the Tories walking away with power, so join it. And if you really don’t want to vote Labour there are other parties.

Just don’t vote Tory. You know it won’t feel right.