IT IS a long time since quite so much seemed to hang on a British election. With a week to go, the polls suggest that the old duopoly, with either Labour or the Conservatives commanding comfortable majorities under Britain's first-past-the-post system, has been replaced by a three-way split, with Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats on course to pick up around 30% of the votes, just behind David Cameron's Tories and a whisker ahead of Gordon Brown's Labour. The way Britain's voting system works, tiny changes in the popular vote could make huge differences to how many seats each party gets. Horse-trading has already begun in expectation of a hung parliament. And so has conjecture of dramatic realignments—to the centre-left, to the centre-right, to the very United Kingdom.

The exciting possibility that the country's electoral geometry could be redrawn has overshadowed what should be the centre of an election campaign. Britons must judge the parties on the basis of their policies and their current leaders. As polling day, May 6th, approaches, it is to be hoped that debate will increasingly focus on these substantial issues.

The Economist has no ancestral fealty to any party, but an enduring prejudice in favour of liberalism. Our bias towards greater political and economic freedom has often been tempered by other considerations: we plumped for Barack Obama over John McCain, Tony Blair over Michael Howard and a succession of Italian socialists over Silvio Berlusconi because we thought they were more inspiring, competent or honest than their opponents, even though the latter favoured a smaller state. But in this British election the overwhelming necessity of reforming the public sector stands out. It is not just that the budget deficit is a terrifying 11.6% of GDP, a figure that makes tax rises and spending cuts inevitable. Government now accounts for over half the economy, rising to 70% in Northern Ireland. For Britain to thrive, this liberty-destroying Leviathan has to be tackled. The Conservatives, for all their shortcomings, are keenest to do that; and that is the main reason why we would cast our vote for them.

In the Brown stuff

What of the current lot? In some ways, Gordon Brown is underappreciated. He has stood firm in Afghanistan. He kept Britain out of the euro, which Mr Blair wanted to join. No matter what he did, Britain was always likely to get mauled in the credit crunch: with its reliance on banks and property, it was bound to be hard hit. And, since the economic crisis began, he has mostly made the right decisions. He saved the banks, pumped money into the economy and did as much as any leader to help avert a global depression.

But a prime minister should not get too much credit for climbing out of a hole he himself dug as chancellor. Chancellor Brown poured money into public services. As a result, Britain's budget deficit is almost as big as Greece's in proportion to its economy; its public sector is larger. This is a time-bomb of a legacy, and one that Mr Brown is ill equipped to defuse. The prime minister has tended to take the side of producers—especially the public-sector unions—rather than consumers. He frustrated some of Mr Blair's efforts to reform the health service and education and slowed down others once he became prime minister. There are mutterings about choice in Labour's manifesto, but Mr Brown too often reverts to old-fashioned statism. He has run a grim campaign (see Bagehot), scarcely bothering to defend his record and concentrating instead on scaring people about the Tories' plans.

Above all, the government is tired. Mired in infighting and scandal, just as the Tories were in 1997, New Labour has run its course (see article). Some hope that a hung parliament would usher in a refashioning of the centre-left: a Mandelsoned and Milibanded party would arise. But it is better for the country that Labour has its looming nervous breakdown in opposition. A change of government is essential.

The agony and the Cleggstacy

So why not change to the Liberal Democrats? Mr Clegg's surge has been thrilling, all the more so since the viler attempts to smear him by a panicking Tory press seem to have backfired. This newspaper has been looking for a credible liberal party in Britain for nigh on a century. Mr Clegg is clever and charming. We share his enthusiasm for civil liberties and his willingness to stand up for immigrants. And he is right that the current voting system, which could mean that he ends up with the same number of votes as Mr Brown but a third of his seats, is unfair.

But look at the policies, rather than the man, and the Lib Dems seem less appealing. In the event of another European treaty, they would hold a referendum not on that treaty but on whether to stay in or leave the EU; odd, given that they also (wrongly) want to take Britain into the euro. They are flirting with giving up Britain's nuclear deterrent. They would abolish tuition fees for universities, which would mean either letting the quality of British higher education slide still further or raising the subsidy to mostly well-off students by increasing state funding. They are worried about climate change but oppose the expansion of nuclear power, which is the most plausible way of cutting emissions. Their policies towards business are arguably to the left of Labour's. A 50% capital-gains tax, getting rid of higher-rate relief on pensions and a toff-bashing mansion tax are not going to induce the entrepreneurial vim Britain needs. Vince Cable, the Lib Dems' chancellor-in-waiting, recently dismissed the bosses who argued against the government's planned National Insurance increase as “nauseating”; that feeling might well be reciprocated by the nation's wealth creators if the Lib Dems came into power.

An international comparison is helpful. Germany's Free Democrats have adopted both parts of liberalism: they believe in both civil liberties and the free market. The Liberal Democrats, a coalition between the distant heirs of a once-great governing party and more European-style social democrats, have not yet made the same jump to the radical middle. Optimists cling to the hope that a hung parliament and a realignment on the centre-right would bring that leap about, but for the moment the Lib Dems seem unsure whether they are to the left or the right of Labour. To the extent that elections are holidays from normal politics, Mr Clegg has been a delightful holiday romance for many Britons; but this newspaper does not fancy moving in with him for the next five years.

That leaves the Tories. They plainly have faults. They have run a lacklustre campaign. We dislike their Europhobic fringe and their exaggerations about Britain's broken society. We thought they were wrong to oppose the economic stimulus after the banking crash. Mr Cameron is prone to bouts of complacency—amply illustrated by his refusal last year to use the expenses scandal as a pretext finally to get rid of Lord Ashcroft, a controversial offshore donor whose money the Tories plainly no longer needed. He has not done enough to convince voters that he is the man to bring change—and thus created an opening into which Mr Clegg has ably stepped.

But just as the kaleidoscope of this weird election has painted Mr Clegg's relatively small advances in brighter colours, it has dulled Mr Cameron's much bigger ones. Judged over the past four years, not the past four weeks, he has done a great deal to modernise his party, stamping out social illiberalism, reducing the Europe-bashing and adding environmentalism. During the boom years, his much-maligned chancellor, George Osborne, did not give in to demands from the right for tax cuts, pointing to the deepening hole in the government finances; at the Tory conference last year, when Mr Brown was still unable to mention “cuts”, Mr Osborne was also the first politician to commit his party to an austerity programme.

Since then, like the other parties, the Tories have gone quiet on the question of cuts. But, more than their rivals, they are intent on redesigning the state. They would reform the NHS by bringing in more outside providers; their plans to give parents and teachers the right to set up schools are the most radical idea in this election. Centralisers under Margaret Thatcher, they now want to devolve power to locally elected officials, including mayors and police chiefs. Some of this is clouded in waffle about a Big Society. Other bits do not go far enough: it is foolish to rule out letting for-profit companies run schools and wrong to exempt the NHS from cuts. But Mr Cameron is much closer to answering the main question facing Britain than either of his rivals is. In this complicated, perhaps inevitably imperfect election, he would get our vote.