After answering 30 or so questions posed online by something called Vote Match, I've learned that my views are most closely in accord with the Green Party's. My vote, however, remains with Labour. As a subscribing member, I feel spending £6 a month on a party I'm not going to vote for would be like buying a season ticket for a football team I hope to see lose.

At times like this, I am glad of such tribal loyalties, which save me trying to make sense of the parties' policies. These seem to be fired off randomly, like US planes dropping bombs on Afghanistan in the hope that they will hit something or somebody important. Labour's manifesto has 50 pledges (or "steps", as it calls them), including "a golden age of sport", access to psychological therapy if I need it and qualified Mandarin teachers in "many more" primary schools.

These sound very exciting, but I have no idea whether to treat them more or less seriously than promises such as "an end to long-term unemployment" (which really means, I suspect, an end to the payment of long-term benefits), "a good school" (whatever that means) for every child and "a universal service obligation on banks to serve every community".

As we all know, the elephant in the room is the Budget deficit. Once most tax rises have been ruled out, promised tax cuts delivered, various departments "protected", and therapists and Mandarin teachers trained, it is hard to see much opportunity for reducing debt. Labour's manifesto refers repeatedly to cutting "low-priority spending" but offers no examples, unless you include "unnecessary arms-length-bodies", which raises the question of why, if they are "unnecessary", they were set up in the first place.

Vote Match, like the opinion pollsters, asks you to select your highest and lowest priorities among policy areas. It would help if politicians named theirs.

Public relations man
David Cameron proposes that "no public-sector worker" should earn "over 20 times more than the lowest paid person in their organisation". This sounds reasonable - to egalitarians such as myself, at any rate - but I wonder what counts nowadays as "public sector". Are GPs, who are theoretically independent contractors, "public-sector workers"? Do head teachers of academies count? University vice-chancellors? Chief executives of banks in which the state has majority shareholdings? Cameron argues that a salary cap "will improve cohesion and morale in the public sector". But it could become a further excuse for privatisation.

We are often told that public bodies lack dynamism and enterprise. Tory ideology - which assumes we'll all stay in bed if we aren't "incentivised" - surely predicts that, if top salaries are limited, these qualities will be in even shorter supply. Indeed, many privatisations were carried out partly to allow the market, rather than public-sector pay scales, to determine remuneration. I'm all in favour of curbing excessive salaries, but the more you look at it, the more peculiar Cameron's proposal appears.

Taylor-made
The Tories, however, do have a decent case on Labour's National Insurance increases. It may not be exactly a tax on jobs, but it is certainly a tax on work. It does not apply to savings interest, share dividends or pensions, and over-65s like me do not pay it even on earned income. NI was invented to create a fund for benefit payments but, while "contributions" still count towards entitlements, it is no longer ring-fenced. Thanks to a ceiling introduced under Margaret Thatcher, it will be levied from next April at 12 per cent on earnings between £110 and £844 a week, but at 2 per cent on earnings above that. (To its credit, Labour has extended both its 1 per cent increases right up the income scale.) It is a regressive and dishonest tax, which leaves the UK with much flatter overall tax rates than most people think. It should be ditched and merged with income tax.

On the other hand, the Tories have no case at all on their proposal to "recognise" marriage in the tax system. Two-fifths of the beneficiaries will be pensioners. Once she hears of Cameron's incentive, Elizabeth Taylor (aged 78) will probably think better of her denial that she's contemplating a ninth marriage.

Not-so-sticky wicket
Sports pundits greeted the start of the cricket season on 9 April with mockery. It was bound to rain, they said, even snow, and it would be too cold for anybody to watch. In fact, the first round of matches was played in warm sunshine and, as I write, the forecast is good for
the second round, starting on 15 April.

The truth is that April weather - like any month's weather in England - is impossible to predict. London has higher average rainfall in June and July than in April. The best approach is to schedule matches from early April to mid-October, wrap up warm and hope for the best. Besides, most cricket enthusiasts now follow matches indoors through websites such as cricinfo.com, and they couldn't care less if it's cold.

Holiday reading
The chairman of Iceland's "truth commission", set up to investigate its banking meltdown, has proposed a national holiday during which all citizens can read its report. I am not sure how he plans to persuade people to plough through its 2,000 pages rather than getting drunk as Icelanders sometimes do. Perhaps there will be a televised national quiz on the report in the evening and winners will be allowed to lynch one banker each without fear of retribution.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Can we do something similar when the Chilcot report comes out?

Peter Wilby was editor of the New Statesman from 1998-2005