After days of focus on Scotland, and particularly the SNP, the spotlight moves to England, and the Conservatives’ launch of their mini-manifesto pledges for the English, due to happen just before 11am. This is, needless to say, just the other side of the same story – David Cameron’s efforts to persuade his core support to get out and vote, but now using sweeteners rather than SNP-flavoured warnings.
Ed Miliband, meanwhile, will be trying to shift attention to foreign policy with a speech at the Chatham House thinktank in London, where he will, we are told, lambast Cameron’s “small-minded isolationism” on international affairs.
The big picture
The centrepiece event comes in Lincolnshire – an area with heavy Ukip support – when David Cameron, backed by William Hague, will unveil the English manifesto. At the centre of this is a plan for England-only income tax by 2016, as well as other measures on things such as health and housing.
My colleague, Patrick Wintour, has a pretty full preview of the ideas, firmly based around the Conservatives’ core election strategy for squeaking a majority in the new parliament:
Cameron’s repeated warnings to the English of the dangers of the Scottish National party holding the balance of power at Westminster has been directed primarily at the same Ukip vote, and Conservative strategists insist it is working on the doorstep.
Setting out plans for an English income tax, Cameron will begin by referring to changes in Scotland. ‘Soon the Scottish parliament will be voting to set its own levels of income tax – and rightly so – but that has clear implications. English MPs will be unable to vote on the income tax paid by people in Aberdeen and Edinburgh while Scottish MPs are able to vote on the tax you pay in Birmingham or Canterbury or Leeds. It is simply unfair.’
Jim Murphy, who leads Scottish Labour, has already condemned the plans as “playing with fire” and likely to stoke further Scottish independence sentiment. Gordon Brown, too, has said Cameron risks the unity of the UK by “retreating to become the party of English nationalism”.
Many of Friday’s newspaper front pages similarly reflect how astonishingly tight the election race remains. The Telegraph leads on an attack on Labour’s attitudes to the wealth-creating rich by Lord Digby Jones, the veteran former CBI head who – and I must admit I’d forgotten this – was briefly a trade minister under Brown. Jones writes an open letter which says:
Not once have they heard you say that earning profit is a ‘good thing’. You can’t really suppress the sneer when you talk of putting up taxes for the likes of them.
The Times and Mail front page leads are similarly self-explanatory. The Mail even manages a page one double whammy of immigration and “union baron” Len McCluskey. No one outside the unions, beyond German aristocrats, is ever called a “baron”:
— Sky News (@SkyNews)April 23, 2015
THE TIMES FRONT PAGE: “Labour’s £1,000 tax on families”#skypapers pic.twitter.com/DIaTQIP1l1
Arguably the most interesting page one story today is in the Financial Times (paywall). The good news for Cameron is that it’s predicated on the idea business leaders want to see him in power. The bad news? They worry he’s not going about it very well:
In particular, they criticise the strident personal attacks on the opposition and the flurry of big-spending promises that jar with the party’s prudent fiscal record. ‘The negative campaign has been disastrous,’ said one company chairman.
If it’s an end to personal attacks the business leaders seek, they should maybe stay off the news websites on Friday. Ed Miliband will be doing some of his own in a speech, and Patrick Wintour also has extracts of this, due at 11am.
In a foreign policy speech, the Labour leader will say Britain’s capacity to navigate global turbulence is being undermined by a short-sighted and inward-looking foreign policy. He will say: ‘Cameron has presided over the biggest loss of influence for our country in a generation. And that has happened because the government he led has stepped away from the world, rather than confidently towards it, sidelined in crucial international events time after time under this government, just at the moment when we needed to engage.’
Friday’s diary
What we know so far:
- 7.30am: Douglas Alexander, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
- 7.45am: Danny Alexander, the Lib Dems’ former chief secretary to the Treasury, makes a speech in Aberdeen on the risks of a single-party government relying on “confidence and supply” arrangements with other parties.
- 10.30am: David Cameron and William Hague unveil the Tories’ English manifesto in Lincolnshire.
- 11am: Ed Miliband’s speech on the UK’s place in international affairs, at the Chatham House thinktank in central London.
Reading list for the day
In the Times the resident pro-Labour voice Philip Collins – he was formerly Tony Blair’s speechwriter – talks up the post-election idea of a minority Labour-Lib Dem coalition (paywall), which would rely on the informal support of the SNP:
[T]here is another prospect if Labour and the Lib Dems fall short of the magic 323 seats required to form a government. They could come together and seek, in concert, the confidence and supply consent of the SNP. That would pose the SNP the choice of whether to be responsible or not while minimising its actual impact in government. This is how Labour muffles the SNP. Ed Miliband should, right now, be preparing a big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats.
This can work if Nick Clegg retains his seat, as he probably will. Senior Labour people can work with Mr Clegg and he with them. Liberal Democrats would offer reassurance that Labour spending would be controlled and a bit of market sensibility into Ed Miliband’s tendency to command into being a capitalism of his own devising.
Over on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, Isabel Hardman has spotted a rare thing for this election campaign:
I’ve just witnessed an extraordinary moment on the campaign trail in Edinburgh. No, it’s not this, but a political party leader talking to a real voter.
This is Ruth Davidson, Tory leader, talking to a random voter in Edinburgh. I know he was a random voter because I ran after him to check. You never know, after all.
He wanted to ask Davidson some questions about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. So he wandered up to her and asked them. And she answered. What’s more, the answer seemed natural, he said.
Well, this is strange. Strange, at least, for this campaign.
The reason the Tories in Scotland are doing these sorts of street stalls is that they want to appear visible and accessible and, I suspect, because they’ve got a fantastic leader who doesn’t look like a stereotypical Conservative and who is a real asset to her party.
Meanwhile at The Conversation, a website where academics offer context on the issues of the day, Matthew Francis, a historian at Birmingham University, has some background on the long tradition of Conservative attacks on Labour’s economic competence. He points us to an elaborate seven-minute Tory animated cartoon from the 1930s:
The film, The Socialist Car of State, shows a car marked ‘Trade and Employment’ carrying the personification of England, John Bull, being skilfully piloted around various economic obstacles by the pipe-smoking Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin.
Things begin to go wrong when, first, the car is struck by the ‘General Strike Charabanc’ (allowing various sinister foreigners to steal its precious cargo of jobs and contracts), and, second, when John Bull takes advantage of a stop at the ‘General Election 1929 Garage’ to change drivers. The new driver, the Labour MP Jimmy Thomas, is unable to get the car moving in the right direction and soon weighs the vehicle down with ‘Socialist Burdens’ which, quite literally, cause the wheels to come off.
You can watch the film on the BFI’s website.
If today were a song …
Resisting the temptation to go for an England-themed song, I’ve opted for something more uplifting, if general, as the election race hots up. This, a lovely tune from Oklahoma’s finest, will get your Friday going.
Non-election news story
Friday is the 100th anniversary of the start of the disastrous and appallingly bloody Gallipoli campaign, when Allied troops tried to capture the Turkish peninsula. The failed eight-month battle saw more than 140,000 soldiers die, among them 87,000 Turks, almost 30,000 Britons and 11,000 from Australia and New Zealand. Prince Charles and Prince Harry will be among those attending commemoration events there.
