Johann Hari

A leader describing himself as a "compassionate Conservative" is on the brink of victory. He has shown his party has changed. He puts his black and Asian supporters out front. He promises to "unleash" the potential "of volunteers to ... change our country". This time, he says, his party "will be different". It is the year 2000, and his name is George W Bush. It's no surprise to discover that George Osborne said in 2002 that "we have much to learn from Bush's compassionate conservatism". They are following the Bush script to the mis-spelled letter.

Most parties offer only scattered clues to the electorate about what they will do when they get power, buried in baskets filled with cotton wool and fluffy bunnies to distract us. Read Thatcher or Bush's pre-election speeches and they're pleasingly fuzzy. You have to infer the big, swooping changes they will make from the small tilts in direction offered in policy documents - and Cameron's small policies are surprisingly revealing.

Revealing Policy One: Today, 1,600 British people are killed every year just doing their job, putting us behind many poorer countries for workplace safety. They are people like Michael Adamson, a 26-year-old electrician who went to his job one day and was given a massive electric shock because his employer hadn't bought a £12 piece of safety equipment. The average fine for killing one of your workers is £2656.

Yet David Cameron is promising to dismantle the very weak protections currently in place, and replace them with a system where corporations will be able to "organise their own inspections", carried out by a team of their choice. Cameron's people justify this by pointing to made-up stories in the right-wing press claiming health and safety inspectors spend their time stopping children playing conkers. UCATT, the astonished construction workers' union, has been protesting outside Tory HQ, with members dressed as the Grim Reaper. Michael Adamson's sister, Louise, who is a lawyer, says:"Cameron's proposals are outrageously dangerous. They will end with a lot more people dying. It takes the very light touch regulation that gave us Lehman Brothers and Enron, and applies it to workplace safety. This time it's not money you lose, it's lives. This isn't about conkers, it's about people like my brother, who could have been saved for £12." This policy suggests Cameron instinctively puts corporate profits ahead of the the safety of ordinary people - a dangerous habit to act out in Downing Street.

Revealing Policy Two: Today, most serious crime in Britain comes from cross-border criminal gangs - whether it's jihadism, human trafficking, or paedophile rings. Until recently, the police had to rely on a slow, confusing tangle of different agreements with each individual country in Europe when trying to track these criminals - and many hardcore criminals escaped as the police waded through bureaucratic treacle. So Europe's police forces, including Britain's, proposed a single, simple procedure called the European Arrest Warrant: one swift standard for serious crime. It has been a superb success story. It meant we busted some of the worst paedophile rings and jihadi cells in the world, and are now shutting down the Costa Del Crime, where British gangsters fled for decades to Spain beyond the reach of our extradition agreements.

But David Cameron's Conservatives oppose the warrant, calling it "over-reach by Brussels". Of course he wants to catch jihadis and paedophiles; but his hostility to European co-operation trumps that desire. He chooses dogmatic Europhobia over pragmatic British needs - and we should assume he will continue to.

Revealing Policy Three: Most British people now acknowledge that heroin addiction is an illness. Yes, it begins with a bad choice by an individual, but it can rapidly become a ravaging sickness beyond their control. Sadly, even the very best rehab in the world fails for 80 per cent of addicts, who soon relapse. So what do we do with the 250,000 people who can't stop? Over the past two decades Britain has followed Europe in giving these people steady, clean medical prescriptions of the substitute drug methadone. Wherever this policy is introduced, burglary and robbery rates fall dramatically, as addicts stop stealing to feed their addiction. As the former deputy drugs tsar Mike Trace told me:"These prescriptions are the secret reason why crime has fallen so much under the current government."

Iain Duncan Smith has been put in charge of Tory drugs policy by Cameron, and has dismissed this approach as "methadone madness". He says that addicts live an immoral "half-life" and government policy should be to force addicts off substitutes and direct them towards voluntary abstinence groups like Narcotics Anonymous. Doctors and charities who work with addicts are incredulous. Danny Kushlick, of the drug charity Transform, says:"If the Tories acted on their current rhetoric, what would actually happen is clear. If they can't get the drug from the doctor, you'll have hundreds of thousands of addicts getting it on the street. You would see a huge increase in street heroin use, and everything that goes with that - burglary, shoplifting, prostitution, homelessness, and far more HIV and Hepatitis C infections as the level of injecting went up. It would be a public health and crime disaster, in place of sensibly reducing harm." Cameron's policy suggests he prefers finger-wagging moralism to a calm study of consequences.

Revealing Policy Four: Cameron says he is demanding spending cuts not because he has a theological belief in a small state, but because they are necessary to pay off the deficit - but this claim is undermined by the fact that he wants to strip funding from state programmes that actually save us money. Look for example at SureStart, the network of 3,000 children's centres across Britain built under the current government. They are based on a fascinating series of discoveries. It has been proven that most poor children fall behind in language skills and stimulation long before they ever walk through the school gates - and they never catch up. The first few years of life are crucial for the formation of a child's mental abilities. Get them early and give them intensive encouragement, with expert advice for their parents, and you can change their life.

This isn't speculation. In 1964, they launched the first SureStart-style project in Michigan - and Dr Lawrence Schweinhart and a team of academics has been monitoring the kids ever since. Did it work? Well, they were 50 per cent less likely to become teenage mothers than their siblings who weren't put in the programme, and by the time they were 40, they were 46 per cent less likely to have been to prison and 26 per cent less likely to be on welfare. Their incomes were 42 per cent higher. So for every £1 you spend on it, you save the state £7 further down the line. Yet Cameron, on becoming Tory leader, dismissed SureStart as "a microcosm of government failure". Now he says he will keep it in some form, but already he says huge chunks of its budget will go to other things, and few expect it to survive long. If he can't keep the single best policy for reducing inequality - one that costs less than nothing in the medium term - what shreds of progress can survive his rule?

You don't have to scrape off much of the glitter and gloss to get to Cameron's less-than-fluffy Bush. Who really wants this cocktail of market fundamentalism, Europhobia, and haranguing of the vulnerable for the next five years?

 ...by clicking here. We argued about housing, immigration, faith schools, and more.

In last week's Spectator, a blogger called James Delingpole wrote an article claiming I somehow support gay-hating Islamists, or make excuses for them. I wrote this letter as a response:

In his most recent column, James Delingpole suggests that "even as the wall is pushed on top of" me by anti-gay Islamists, I "will be squealing with [my] last breath that it's all the fault of Western imperialism and white heterosexist Islamophobia." 

I found this slightly odd, since I am so critical of Islamic fundamentalists that I have received a substantial number of death threats from them. I worked undercover at the Finsbury Park mosque after 9/11 to expose Islamists; I have debunked Hizb ut Tahrir as a bunch of theocratic fascists on live television; and after I wrote an article criticising the 'Prophet' Mohammed for having sex with a pre-pubescent girl when he was 53 years old, there was a three-day riot by over 3000 people in Calcutta calling for me to be imprisoned or killed. At no point did I blame "Islamophobia" for this lunatic behaviour. On the contrary: I was highly critical of the people who put this case.

Out of interest, what risks has James Delingpole ever taken to oppose Islamic fundamentalism?

 ...by clicking here. We argued about inequality, arresting the Pope, and more. The audio of the Cambridge debate will follow soon too.

When did this switch from an election scripted by Charles Saatchi to one painted by Salvador Dali? If I had told you a month ago that Gordon Brown would be despatching naval warships to Spain, David Cameron would be jostling with a man dressed as a chicken and down to 30 per cent, and Nick Clegg would be identified alternately as "the most popular leader since Churchill" and a Nazi, you would have called for Nurse Ratched.

But something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.

To understand what these forces are, you have to start with a fact that is usually kept obscure: Britain is a country with a large liberal-left majority. Eighty-five per cent of us say the gap between rich and poor should be "much smaller", and a majority would get there by introducing a maximum wage that caps the incomes of the rich at £135,000 a year.

Fifty-eight per cent support a dramatic increase in the minimum wage. Fifty-eight per cent want to ditch Trident – an act of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Seventy-seven per cent want to bring the troops home from Afghanistan now, or within a year at the latest. Fifty-three per cent say people come out of prison worse than they go in, and would rather spend money on more youth clubs than on more prison places.

Across most policies, our views are to the left of all three parties. (These statistics are all from Mori, Ipsos or YouGov polls.) And Brits hold these views even though they are constantly told by the media that they are marginal, impossible, or mad.

Ah, you may say, but that's just what people tell pollsters. They vote for the polar opposite: look at Thatcher's victories. But look again. At every election where Margaret Thatcher stood, 56 per cent of the British people voted against her, for parties committed to higher taxes, higher public spending, and lower inequality. The media declared this to be a "landslide" endorsement of her programme of deregulation that continued for decades, and has now crashed the global economy.

Yet in this election, one of those distorting forces – the media – has been bypassed for an electrifying moment, and the second force, our dusty 18th-century voting system, may break entirely on election day.

The British media is overwhelmingly owned by right-wing billionaires who order their newspapers to build up the politicians who serve their interests, and marginalise or rubbish the politicians who serve the public interest. David Yelland, the former editor of the Sun, bravely confessed this week that as soon as he took his post, he was told the Liberal Dems had to be "the invisible party, purposely edged off the paper's pages and ignored". Only a tiny spectrum of opinion was permitted. Everyone to the left of Tony Blair (not hard) had to be rubbished – even when their policies spoke for a majority of British people.

The TV debates, then, were a very rare moment in which a slightly more liberal-left voice could speak to the public without the distorting frame of pre-emptive abuse and distortion. The window of permissible opinion was opened a little – and people responded with a wave of enthusiasm. It could've been opened wider still – to the Greens, say – and found a receptive audience too.

The reaction of the right-wing press to briefly losing the ability to frame how politicians address the public has been a frenzied panic worthy of Basil Fawlty. They have "revealed" Clegg is a paedophile-cuddling, Gaddafi-licking foreigner and crook who wishes we had lost the Second World War. But now – for a change – people can test the smears against what they see and hear with their own eyes, unmediated, on TV.

Rattled, the right-wing press now demands Cameron start publicly thumping the table and articulating the agenda he whispers to them behind closed doors, and can be uncovered in his policy documents: big cuts in public spending, big tax cuts for the rich. But Cameron sees the polling and the focus groups, and he knows the public loathe his real agenda. That's why his performances in this campaign are so stilted. Once Cameron is forced to address us directly, without being bigged-up by the Murdochracy he has promised to feed and fatten, he withers under the weight of his own deception.

For a moment, the media demonisation of the liberal-left was switched off in favour of equal time and open access – and it revolutionised our politics. If this happened day in, day out, how would our national conversation change?

The second force that badly skews Britain to the right is – I'm sorry – a coma-inducingly dull subject. Even as I mention it, I have to start guzzling Red Bull – but we are now seeing plainly why it matters. At the moment, we have a 19th-century voting system system called First Past the Post (FPTP) which tosses out perverse results – and might be about to produce the most perverse of all.

It is based on a crude principle. An MP is elected if he has more votes than his nearest competitor in his constituency – even if he has nothing like a majority. In many places, they get only 20 per cent of the vote, and still win. These weird distortions only get worse as you get to the national level. Nobody ever adds up the votes at the centre and makes sure the seats in parliament resemble the votes we cast: in 2005, Labour got 100 per cent of power with only 35 per cent of the vote.

But most of the time, this disproportionately benefits the right. Why? Because the British right is unified behind the Tories, while the people who prefer a more social democratic Britain are split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Under Proportional Representation, this isn't a problem: the split left would come together and form a coalition – and the Lib Dems would be able to block Labour's worst policies, like Iraq. But under FTPT, the divided liberal majority more often loses and has to watch a right-wing minority rule. That's why the Tories in the twentieth century repeatedly got power despite being opposed by a majority.

This system is about to snap. Now the vote is pretty evenly split between three parties, FPTP can't function: nobody knows what freaky result it will throw out. Maybe Cameron will be rejected by 65 per cent of us, but still get 100 per cent of the power at the end of it.

Maybe Brown will come third in the popular vote, but still be the largest party in parliament. Maybe Clegg will come first in the vote, but get barely a third of the Tories' seats. Shouldn't this be the last election fought under rules designed for Lord Salisbury's day?

In Britain today, the liberal-left are not just a silent majority: they are a silenced majority. But in this election campaign, the forces shutting them out and breaking them up have been exposed, for a flickering moment. Do we want to go back?

For this year's Green Awards, I picked the Best UK politician, and best international politician.

Best UK politician: Caroline Lucas

Since 1997, Britain's emissions of warming gases have actually risen – and if you factor in the emissions from goods now manufactured for us in China, they have risen dramatically. Very few politicians have been honest about the crisis we face, or demanded the swift transition to an economy powered by the power of the sun, the wind and the waves. Working on the inside, the Environment Secretary Ed Miliband has a strong claim to this award, often trying to drag other government departments towards radical low- carbon approaches. But he is, in the end, too tainted by ineffective compromises, and by his sometime promotion of false solutions like the myth of "clean coal", to clinch it.

The politician who has most inspiringly proposed solutions to the climate crisis is in another party and another parliament altogether. Caroline Lucas joined the Green Party 20 years ago when it had a shabby office and almost no full-time staff. She has played a key role in leading it now to the brink of a historic breakthrough – her probable election in Brighton Pavilion next month as the first Green to the British Parliament.

In the European Parliament, without playing down the potential catastrophe of global warming for a second, Lucas has always proposed an optimistic and inspiring vision of how dealing with this crisis can also solve our other sicknesses. She has pioneered policies that can make Britain a more equal and fulfilled society, where instead of maniacally consuming ever more meaningless stuff, we find meaning in each other, and in the common cause of saving the biosphere. In a properly democratic electoral system, this vision could spurt ahead: in France, the Green party beat the Socialist party – the equivalent to Labour – at the last European elections.

If nothing else, there should be one great moment in the 2010 election: were you up for Lucas's win?

Best international politician: Mohammed Nasheed

In a catastrophic year for the climate crisis, were there any heroes? At Copenhagen, world leaders gathered to peer at the swelling evidence that we are close to irreparably trashing the planet's biosphere – and they offered a glib shrug. From the US to the EU to China, nobody offered to cut carbon emissions by the levels scientists say are necessary to stay this side of the climate's Point of No Return. Since then, there has been a regression into denialism across the world. The search for wise leaders in this is difficult, but a handful of politicians will be remembered for trying to do the right thing.

The most inspiring leader was Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. He has bled and nearly died for his island nation in the Indian Ocean. In his peaceful resistance against the islands' dictatorship, he was jailed and tortured – only to become its first democratic president in 2008. Yet it looked like it could become a sunken victory: the low-lying Maldives are drowning as sea-levels rise. By the end of this century, at current rates, they will be an Atlantis. "We are on the world's front line," he says. "And, in a sense, its only hope." To alert the world, he even staged a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear.

Nasheed has not only offered a warning, however; he has offered an alternative. Within 10 years, his country will become the first ever carbon-free country, running entirely on renewable energy sources. He warns that we all have to make this transition – and fast. "The last generation of humans went to the moon," he says. "This generation of humans needs to decide if it wants to stay alive on planet earth."