The big picture
All the stops are being pulled out now, as the final straight looms, with David Cameron warning in an interview with the Times (paywall) that there are only “10 days to save the United Kingdom” (I’m saying nine days, but as we know from the polls, numbers can mean different things to different people).
Perhaps setting himself a mighty target, he told the Times:
Not winning the election outright is obviously not a success … I have a duty to spend the next 10 days to win the election outright.
I’m feeling pumped up. There’s 10 days to go, it’s a bloody important election and I’m determined to get across the line. The line is victory – and victory is a Conservative majority. I know the polls are tight but victory is doable.
Keeping with his feisty tone, Cameron is putting an uncharacteristic boot into the banks on Tuesday, with an announcement that he will use a £227m fine imposed on Deutsche Bank for rigging the Libor rate to create 50,000 new apprenticeships for 22- to 24-year-olds. He’ll say Deutsche Bank was “part of Labour’s failed past” and that he is “taking the money off a bank that tried to rig the market and using the money to get young people off the dole”. Unemployed young people who do not take up the apprenticeship offer will be obliged to do community work, the Tories will say.
Another leader feeling pumped up (and isn’t this all getting rather macho, guys?) is Nick Clegg, who tells Classic FM in an interview on Tuesday that he imagines he is beating up Ed Balls during his weekly kickboxing classes.
I just sort of wallop these sort of things that you have to hit. I try not to put a face on the things that I’m striking with my feet and my hands … Sometimes Ed Balls might flicker through my imagination.
Meanwhile, Labour turns to immigration, setting out a “10-point action plan”, including an immigration bill in the first Queen’s speech. This list, via Press Association, seems only to be nine points, but perhaps the 10th is the rabbit in the hat? (Or see above, re numbers, polls, etc.)
- Recruit 1,000 extra borders staff.
- Introduce full exit checks.
- Stop serious offenders coming to Britain.
- End the indefinite detention of people in the asylum and immigration system.
- Maintain the cap on workers from outside the EU.
- Crack down on employers undercutting wages.
- Ban overseas-only recruitment.
- Introduce two-year wait for benefits.
- Language requirements for state-sector workers dealing with the public.
You should also know:
- That letter to the Telegraph from 5,000 small business owners unravelled pretty quickly following the revelation that it was organised by Conservative HQ.
- Nicola Sturgeon said Ed Miliband has been bullied by the Tories into rejecting a deal with the SNP and argued that Westminster parties ought to get used to multiparty government.
- Nick Clegg has staked out a Lib Dem red line, saying the party would not enter into a coalition with a party that refused to implement its education funding policy.
- The Conservatives took a three-point lead over Labour in the latest Guardian/ICM poll.
- Nate Silver, the US statistician who correctly predicted the results in every state in the 2012 US election, says the UK vote could lead to an “incredibly messy outcome”. He puts the Conservatives on 283 seats, Labour on 270, the SNP on 48, the Lib Dems on 24, the DUP on eight, Ukip on one and the other parties on 16, which would make a rainbow coalition of three or more parties almost inevitable.
What isn’t at all messy is our attractive poll of polls, which shows you how the parties could shape up on 8 May:
Today’s diary
It’s a jam-packed schedule on Tuesday:
- At 7.30am, Nick Clegg starts the day with a press conference on the economy.
- At 8.30am, Ukip’s Suzanne Evans and Patrick O’Flynn are briefing on the party’s tax and economy policies.
- At 9.30am, we get the latest growth figures.
- At the same time, the SNP’s John Swinney is in Stirling talking about plans to cut employers’ national insurance and increase the employment allowance.
- At 9.50am, David Cameron makes a speech in London on the economy and jobs.
- At 10am, the Institute for Fiscal Studies will be showing the results of its comparison of the parties’ tax and benefit plans.
- At 11am, Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy is with Caroline Flint in Glasgow, to campaign on energy prices.
- Ed Miliband will be in the Vale of Glamorgan talking about Labour plans for immigration.
- At 1pm, Nicola Sturgeon is campaigning in South Queensferry.
- The Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson is in Edinburgh for the afternoon.
- And this evening, Nigel Farage rocks up in Hartlepool.
The big issue
All eyes will be on the economy – it’s no coincidence that most of the parties are gabbing about it on the day we find out GDP figures for the first quarter of 2015. They are expected to show a small slowdown in the growth rate, which was 0.6% in the fourth quarter of last year.
As my colleague Larry Elliott argues, the Conservative party’s tactic to focus its election campaign on the economy hasn’t yet won it huge poll riches:
The Conservatives have put the economy at the heart of their election strategy in the belief that it will give them a decisive lead over Labour.
This approach will still be justified if there is a swing to the Tories in the last 10 days of the campaign. But so far, despite zero inflation, falling unemployment and rising consumer confidence, David Cameron has yet to reap a significant ‘growth dividend’.
Our business live blog will have the GDP figures when they burst forth at 9.30am, and we’ll have the fallout and the political bickering here, too.
Read these
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In the Telegraph, Philip Johnston points out that for those millions of people not living in so-called priority seats, the election campaign has actually been a rather quiet affair:
The real battle is being fought for a few thousand votes in around 80 marginals mainly in England, which are being bombarded with election literature and subjected to a steady stream of political heavyweights beating a path to their doors. Some of them may be getting fed up with it but at least they are involved. Their vote counts; it doesn’t feel like mine does.
- But the Guardian’s own Polly Toynbee thinks some voters need a wake-up call:
The momentous nature of the choice ahead is still passing too many voters by: canvassers need the patience of saints hearing those whose lives will be radically affected by the result say ‘They’re all the same’ or ‘We don’t vote.’ The temptation to grab people by the lapels and give them a good shaking must be almost overwhelming.
- Alex Massie, writing for Politico under the rather eyebrow-raising headline The end of Britain as we know it?, says a rebellion is brewing in Scotland:
The parliamentary arithmetic means that a vote for the SNP is most probably actually a vote for a weak Labour government. Unless Cameron can cobble together a majority with the Lib Dems and, perhaps, Northern Ireland’s Unionist parties, it’s likely that, together, the SNP and Labour could, as Sturgeon says, ‘lock the Tories out of Downing Street’.
Labour in Scotland, however, cannot admit such a possibility even as Labour in England cannot afford to discount it.
The day in a tweet
Could it be anything else, on this fourth anniversary of Ed Balls’s accidental tweet? (And if you’re thinking yes, yes it could: it could be something I actually understand, have a read of this.)
Ed Balls
— Ed Balls (@edballsmp) April 28, 2011
If today were a song, it would be…
Abba: Money, Money, Money. It’s all you’re going to be hearing about on Tuesday.
