POLITICIANS of all parties are urging us to get out and vote in the General Election. They tell us we must not be "apathetic".

Well, I believe the best response to some people is always fervent apathy. They tell me to vote, but they don't give me a reason for voting. In whose favour should I cast my "X"?

New Labour are after my vote of course, but on their record they are unelectable. To vote for Blair a third time would be damn near a criminal act. They said they would not raise taxes. But there have been 62 tax rises since 1997. They promised before the last election they would not raise national insurance contributions. These were put up straight after the 2001 election. The excuse was that all these increases in taxation are being used to improve schools and hospitals.

But the Government's own figures show that four out of ten school-leavers can barely read, write and count - and that's after 11 years of "education". The hospitals are filthy and waiting lists are constantly massaged to accord with Government "targets". New Labour has done nothing to curtail violent crime and the universal culture of thuggish behaviour. There are now 29 shootings in Britain every day, crimes involving knives have increased and chief constables complain that they can't cope.

We look for good government and all we get is a constant parade of new initiatives, announcements, soundbites, spin, smoke and mirrors.

Why not give the Tories a chance? You must be joking. I would vote for the Conservative Party if they ever showed any signs of conserving anything. Instead, they chuck away our history and national institutions like crazed international socialists. The Tories signed up to every one of the EU treaties fostering "ever closer political union".

The EU is an explicit atheistic dictatorship - the resurrection in the west of the old USSR. Will the Tories bring us out? Of course not. They will sign up to everything laid before them. It was Maggie who joined us to the crippling European Exchange Rate Mechanism - the preparation for full monetary union. It was John Major who called patriotic Tories who spoke against the EU "bastards".

If the Conservatives win they will pour money into the failed education and health services as if they were socialists on a tax and spend binge. They say they believe in private property but they have no plans to abolish the unjust inheritance tax.

My father-in-law has just died at the age of 85. He worked all his life and paid income tax and national insurance. On most things he bought he paid purchase tax or VAT. Yet, even in death, he must pay again. I can understand that the vicious socialists with their politics of envy would delight in making him pay again of course. But that people who belong to the party inspired by Burke, Wellington and Lord Salisbury should keep this unjust tax on the statute book is a crime against good faith and reason.

The Liberals are, as usual, a maelstrom of incoherence and adolescent enthusiasms. That leaves the water-melon party, the Greens: green on the outside but red on the inside. I'm not going to vote, but it's not out of apathy, I can tell you. It's out of rage.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.