When I saw people predicting that George Osborne was planning a giveaway budget – that he was going to fritter away a few billion at the 11th hour to make people vote Tory – I found it rather sweet. It was familiar, you see – like the smell of Vicks. Not actually pleasant, but it brought back memories from my youth. Chancellors probably shouldn’t frame last-minute vote-buying policies, but it’s happened many times before and we’re all still here, so I was comforted. It’s a nice, fond old annoyance, like drizzle, litter and the grocer’s apostrophe, rather than climate change, trolling and beheadings on YouTube.

Which isn’t to say he necessarily is planning a giveaway budget. But that doesn’t matter – his critics say he is. He will undoubtedly claim he isn’t. “Oh yes he is!” the opposition will retort, and this pantomime works both before and after all the tedious details that actually make up a budget have been announced. It’s like the Bible – you can infer pretty much whatever you want from something that long. Henry VIII found a bit in Leviticus that led him to conclude that, now his wife had gone all middle-aged and barren, it was probably a lot holier all round if he started fucking someone else.

The prospect of this traditional fiscal quarrel warmed my heart like the sight of British road signs after a holiday abroad. Like many people, I’m frightened by novelty and crave the familiar, particularly in these unsettling times (I’m 40). I suppose this fearfulness is what drives some voters to Ukip, the rise of which makes me, in turn, more fearful. It’s a chain reaction in which fear of change changes people’s behaviour, which engenders more change for people to fear. If you can make fear your business model then get ready for a boom. (The good sort, partly caused by fear of the bad sort.) Good news if you’ve got shares in Kevlar or the Daily Mail.

I’m particularly susceptible to a reassuring, cynical budget giveaway at the moment, because the atmosphere of British politics is changing so fast and so nastily. A fortnight ago, I was really shocked and depressed, not by a slasher film set in a hospice, but by the prime minister. As I wrote here, he seemed to be announcing policies that made life harder for the weak (the fat, poor, young or drug-addicted) in an odd spirit of righteous joy.

It’s getting worse. In the past few days, the Tories have been gleefully frothing with horrible new plans. On immigration, charities, universities and free speech, they’re proudly making clear that their vision of government is about shutting people up, cutting people off and keeping people out.

As ever, Theresa May is in the vanguard, insisting that the government’s spectacularly missed immigration target should be readopted after the election. This is clever. As home secretary, it was her responsibility to hit the target. But, by rejecting the suggestions of several senior colleagues to abandon it, she appears hardline and unwavering despite her own failure.

Arguing in favour of immigration control is easier than arguing in favour of immigration, because you get to tell persuasive anecdotes about depressed wages, Britons put out of work, and pressure on public services. Whereas if you’re trying to emphasise the benefits of immigration (eg on the economy), you’re rather stuck with offering statistics – unless your audience likes hearing stories of improved living standards told in a Polish accent which, the received wisdom seems to be, middle England doesn’t. Free movement of people can be an incentive to commerce and self-betterment and a vital component of free trade, but these macroeconomic factors provide scant comfort to a constituent who’s irritated by the number of Bulgarians in her GP’s waiting room.

Theresa May is also behind various assaults on universities. So underfunded that they’re desperate to attract higher-fee-paying students from abroad, our seats of learning have become magnets for foreigners. This, May believes, must be clamped down on like a scrotum in Guantánamo Bay. As well as closing “bogus colleges” and “satellite campuses”, she also insists overseas students should count towards the immigration figures. This means her unrealistic immigration target will continue to exert a huge downward pressure on an important national export, university education.

Freedom of speech is also taking a kicking. I used to think that issue was one of the Tories’ saving graces: their commitment to the welfare state and redistributive taxation might have been suspect, but they seemed to believe in liberty. If you can, you let people do and say what they want – that seemed to be their sincere view. Well, that’s gone out the window.

Charities that receive public funding, Eric Pickles has announced, will lose it if they use it to campaign against the government. That’s potentially hugely restrictive as, in many cases, a charity only exists because of a failure of government. You could argue that the very existence of, say, a food bank is an implied criticism of the state.

Worst of all, the Home Office is planning to force universities to ban “hate preachers” from campuses – even “hate preachers” who don’t advocate violence and who have committed no crime. The government absolutely hates hate preachers. It hates what they say but certainly won’t defend to the death their right to say it. On the contrary, they are to be silenced. Preferably before they say anything hateful. Although I suppose they’d have to have said at least one hateful thing to justify the presumption that they were hate preachers. But maybe a hateful glance would be enough – a hard stare, a raised eyebrow, an undemocratic beard.

Quite how you define a “hate preacher”, if they haven’t broken one of the laws about incitement to violence or hatred that exist already, is unclear. But if we say it’s someone who uses inflammatory rhetoric to turn different members of the community against one another, then the Oxford Union may run into trouble extending future invitations to David Cameron.

The Tory parts of the government are absolutely fizzing with spite. And this is all in the run-up to an election, let’s not forget. These aren’t the electorally unpalatable tough measures that ministers feel they have to push through for practical reasons, or a secret malevolent agenda sprung on us after a landslide victory. This is stuff they’re proposing in order to win us round. It’s as if the latest Lord Ashcroft poll has found that the British are 90% evil. If so, it’s no wonder the Tories believe that hate preaching will convince.