- Ukip leader’s interview with Evan Davis to be broadcast on BBC1 at 7.30pm
- Daily Politics debate on economy
- David Cameron says Tory party chairman ‘does a great job’
- Labour would invest £150m in cancer diagnostic equipment
- Lib Dems would halt pay cuts for public sector, Nick Clegg announces
- Cameron says Salmond’s budget joke will ‘shock’ voters
- Lunchtime summary
Shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna has reacted to the prime minister’s struggle to specify the living wage.
David Cameron has shown again that he’s completely out of touch. It’s no wonder the Tories have nothing to offer working people.
And unlike the Tories who have done nothing to promote it, Labour will help employers pay a living wage with new incentives through Make Work Pay contracts.
The prime minister is asked if he could live off £6.50 an hour in a discussion about the minimum and living wage measures. There is then an awkward discussion over whether he knows what the living wage rate is.
Q: Do you know what the living wage?
A: It’s different in different parts of the country.
David Cameron is asked on BBC Newsbeat if he would welcome Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party into a new Government given their record on gay rights.
I have a strong track record of standing up for the rights of gay and lesbian people in our country. Nothing I would do in politics would go against that very clear set of principles and values I have.
I wish we could get rid of this. There’s a problem with getting rid of VAT on certain individual issues because of the way this tax is regulated in Europe. It’s nothing to do with HMRC’s classification of tampons as a luxury good. If it was I would change it like that.
The prime minister has been confronted with a hard-hitting question about the tragic events in the Mediterranean.
Q: Government policy is to let migrants drown.
A: I don’t accept that.
Cameron was asked on BBC Newsbeat about overworked GPs by an aspiring doctor.
Q: A third of GPs want to retire due to stress. Is this sustainable?
Cameron faces tough questions from young voters
David Cameron has been given a hefty grilling by young voters on BBC Newsbeat.
More from our data editor Alberto Nardelli.
ComRes have just published a poll of 10 Conservative-held seats that are Ukip targets. My colleague Alberto Nardelli has taken a look.
The figures aren’t good for Farage’s party. Although the party is considerably up (+15.4 points) on its 2010 vote share, it still lags behind both the Tories and Labour.
ComRes/ITV (UKIP battleground, change vs 2010) CON 39 (-7) LAB 28 (+2) LIB 5 (-10) UKIP 21 (+15) GRN 4 (+4) Writeup http://t.co/nN5pOiGIei
In part this is explained by the collapse in Lib Dem support (-10.2 points), which has gone mostly to Labour and the Tories but overall the numbers are further evidence that the party’s support is edging downwards.
However, looking at the constituencies surveyed (South Thanet, Boston and Skegness, Thurrock, Forest of Dean, Great Yarmouth, North Thanet, East Worthing and Shoreham, Sittingbourne and Sheppey, South Basildon and East Thurrock, and Castle Point), it is difficult to properly assess Ukip’s chances in these seats (or indeed how the party is polling in each) - as the range goes from top-target South Thanet, where Farage is standing, to Sittingbourne and Sheppey, and East Worthing & Shoreham where the Tories won 50% of the vote five years ago, and aren’t realistically “Ukip targets”.
The poll isn’t great news for the Conservatives either. It provides a hint of how Ukip eats into the Tory vote share. Cameron’s party is down 7.3 points across the 10 seats compared with 2010.
Farage reiterates his pledge to step down as Ukip leader if he fails to win the seat in South Thanet.
In a particularly heated exchange in tonight’s leader interviews appearance, Farage accuses Evan Davis of being a member of the “metropolitan elite”.
It’s very interesting that you do what everybody in the liberal metropolitan elite does. You pick up a comment from somebody in Ukip made on Facebook, probably late at night. What you never do is challenge the other leaders about why their elected councillors and officials.
Nigel Farage has said he would prefer migrants from India and Australia to come to Britain over eastern Europeans.
I have to confess I do have a slight preference. I do think, naturally that people from India and Australia are in some ways more likely to speak English, understand common law and have a connection with this country than some people that come perhaps from countries that haven’t fully recovered from being behind the iron curtain.
I think to be honest with you in the earlier part of the campaign I wasn’t … feeling quite as sharp and as fit as I should have been and I think that’s because of, frankly, in my enthusiasm for Ukip to succeed in this election I got my diary planning wrong and I was doing way, way too much. I’ve readjusted that and I have to say the last two or three days I’m feeling pretty bouncy, back to being a bit more like Tigger, I’m enjoying it and looking forward to the next fortnight.
Ed Miliband has dismissed claims - disputably made in jest - by Alex Salmond that he is writing the Labour budget as “fantasy and nonsense”.
It’s fantasy and nonsense. We’re going to be writing the Labour budget.
He’s been sending me encouraging words. He thinks it’s going well.
Hello, Jamie Grierson here to guide you through the political swamp that is the election campaign. Key event this evening is Ukip leader Nigel Farage’s interview with Evan Davis on BBC One, which according to Guido Fawkes is quite lively (see 16.25).
James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson have interviewed David Cameron for the Spectator. The interview does not contain “a story”, but that doesn’t matter because it is interesting, which is even better. It provides some reasonably illuminating insights into how Cameron sees himself.
Here are the key points.
Why do so many people, including members of his own government, think that Cameron must do more to show he really wants to win? ‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘There is something about me — I always manage to portray a calm smoothness or something.’
‘Conservatives are practical, sensible, clear-headed people. We want to know not just what the passion is, we want to know what the plan is. This is who we are.’ Then he adds, ‘This is who I am.’
‘The trouble is we all sound like the people who lift up the car bonnet and fix the engine underneath. We have got to tell people where the car is going, and how great it is going to be when we get there. But as Conservatives, we always go back to the car. To me, that is part of what being a Conservative is — we are not utopians and dreamers, we are deeply practical people. But don’t underestimate the passion and the love for our country in what we’re doing.’
Now I accept plan versus dream makes you sometimes the boring one but I think the vast majority of the British people know that plan plus carrying out a plan equals dream. Dream plus rhetoric equals chaos.
‘It is an extraordinary phenomenon,’ he says, ‘and it sometimes makes part of the process of politics quite difficult. Everyone wants a selfie rather than to have a conversation, and sometimes that’s a bit frustrating, particularly with your party activists. I want to know what they are finding on the doorsteps, but actually you are too busy having your picture taken.’
He accepts that the revolutionary character of his government is not widely appreciated. ‘I think it is very undersold in many ways,’ he says. He doesn’t say by whom. He later refers to the government’s ‘quiet revolution: pro-work, pro-saving, pro-enterprise’.
We ask if there might be a place for his friend Jeremy Clarkson, who is now at a loose end. The answer is no: Clarkson is unsound on foreign policy. ‘Clarkson has some very strange views about Europe, he’d like smoking to be compulsory, smoking and Europhilia to be compulsory. I used to take part in one but I’ve never been involved in the other as it were. I think I’ve probably said enough about him over the last few weeks.’
In an interview with Channel 4 News being broadcast this evening, Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, says at one stage earlier in the campaign he made the mistake of trying to do too much.
I started the campaign and think I make some mistakes. My desperation for Ukip to do well meant that I really packed the diary and the day in a way that frankly wasn’t very bright. I have now trimmed it back a bit. I’m being a bit more selective.
I was. No, no. Hands up I was. I had completely overdone it. I wasn’t getting it right. I feel a bit of the old vim and vigour back and I’m looking forward to the next fortnight.
On the blog we’ve been publishing comments about the campaign from swing voters taking part in our Battleground Britain project.
You may find it easier to read some of the full focus groups reports. They are all available here, on the Britain Thinks website.
Support for Sturgeon was as strong as ever in Scotland, with some panelists suggesting that Labour and the Conservatives had been unduly negative about the SNP ...
On the other side of the border, however, opinion amongst our English panelists was more mixed. There was a strong sense of distrust about the SNP, with several commenting on how Scotland’s interests would be better represented than England’s if the party were to play a role in government:
Evans Davis has been interviewing Nigel Farage this afternoon. It will be on BBC1 at 7.30pm.
According to Guido Fawkes, it got a bit lively.
Hear Farage goes tonto and calls @EvanHD a member of the metropoltan liberal elite in the BBC interview later.
Loughborough University’s Communication Research Centre is publishing regular reports on media coverage of the campaign. The latest one went up at the end of last week. Here is a summary of its findings.
A ‘quotation gap’ has opened up in TV coverage, with the Conservative party receiving 6.6% more speaking time than Labour.
However, there is no ‘appearance gap’ between the two main parties in TV coverage. Conservative and Labour representatives featured in similar amounts.
It was a tough debate for the candidates. Andrew Neil and Robert Peston would not stand for any obfuscation as each politician was put to the test over their party’s economic proposals. SNP’s Stewart Hosie probably stood out as having the strongest resolve, clear and unflinching with his party’s message to end austerity. But like the other members of the panel even he became flustered on occasion - particular over the value of oil to the Scottish economy and the reality of achieving fiscal autonomy.
The Conservatives have accused the Lib Dems of being in favour of regional pay variations in the public sector. As the Western Morning News reports, George Eustice, the farming minister, has cited as proof of this a leaked letter that Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, wrote to the Welsh government in 2012 saying he was “keen to see local, market-facing pay introduced across the UK”.
Nick Clegg has rejected the claim. Speaking in Bristol, he said:
This is desperate stuff from the Conservatives. What Danny Alexander was doing is what happens in government - you look at the evidence for a change and he actually announced, within weeks of that letter, that the evidence was not there and we stopped the Conservatives from going ahead with the plan.
It’s ridiculous the Conservatives are trying to pretend this letter is anything other than what Danny was doing, which was looking at the evidence. We looked at it, thought it was a really bad idea and stopped it.
Ed Miliband went marginally further than he has before on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show in terms of ruling out an arrangement with the SNP.
Asked if Labour would do a deal with the SNP in the event of a hung parliament, Miliband replied: “There isn’t going to be a coalition.”
On Sky News just now Boris Johnson confirmed that one day, perhaps, he would not mind standing for the Conservative leadership.
In the dim, distant future obviously it would be a wonderful thing to be thought to be in a position to be considered for such an honour, but I think it highly unlikely. As I’ve said many, many times before that it’s more likely that I will be reincarnated as an olive or blinded by a champagne cork or locked in a disused fridge.
BBC Daily Politics has posted highlight quotes from its economy debate on Twitter.
From Labour’s Chris Leslie
From the #bbcdp debate on the economy hosted by @afneil and @Peston ... here's @ChrisLeslieMP pic.twitter.com/4eYDRqQYZE
From the #bbcdp debate on the economy hosted by @afneil and @Peston ... here's @DavidGauke pic.twitter.com/Iv1VWM0ef3
From the #bbcdp debate on the economy hosted by @afneil and @Peston ... here's @oflynnmep pic.twitter.com/AG8HlLDwld
From the #bbcdp debate on the economy hosted by @afneil and @Peston ... here's @RichardNewby3 pic.twitter.com/dceVQQpjEs
From the #bbcdp debate on the economy hosted by @afneil and @Peston ... here's @StewartHosieSNP pic.twitter.com/t7xytMsdUG
Viewers tuning in on 7 May will see “Darren”, the man responsible for keeping E4 on air, manning the control room in place of its regular programming.
The Scotsman’s Kenny Farquharson has this take on the Alex Salmond budget joke.
What shocks me about that footage is that Alex Salmond is campaigning for Ian Blackford. https://t.co/tB7v5qlAx3
Alex Salmond has issued a riposte to David Cameron’s quip on ITV this morning about him being a pickpocket. (See 11.57am.)
The Tories have been picking Scotland’s pocket for years, and have been well and truly rumbled - which is why David Cameron and the rest of the Westminster gang are sinking like a stone in Scotland.
Of course, it’s typical of David Cameron’s style to make an off-microphone gibe but he didn’t have the bottle to debate in the referendum, or with Nicola Sturgeon in this election campaign - if he had he’d be looking even more hot and bothered.
Everybody in the SNP has a broad smile at the moment because our very positive message for the future of Scotland, having real influence for the first time since the 1970s in the Westminster Parliament, is catching this campaign alight.
Here’s a Guardian picture gallery with some of today’s best photographs from the election campaign.
Andrew Neil puts it to David Gauke that a pledge by David Cameron to create two million jobs has been plucked out if thin air.
Gauke dodges the question. Businesses and employers create jobs. Governments can put in place conditions to create jobs. Tax policies, bring regulations down.
A Ukip candidate has been threatened with beheading, the Press Association reports.
A Ukip candidate has said he fears for his safety after being threatened with beheading in a phone call from someone claiming to be a potential constituent.
Northumbria Police have confirmed they are investigating allegations made by David Robinson-Young, who said he received the call from a man calling himself Mr Khan yesterday.
Nick Clegg has been visiting an Airbus factory near the Liberal Democrat seat of Bristol West, currently held by communities minister Stephen Williams.
“I think my own constituents would prefer a progressive coalition,” said Williams. “Probably in their hearts they would like to see a Liberal Democrat-Labour coalition.”
Alex Salmond has responded to David Cameron. He says Cameron should get a sense of humour.
Instead of a few carefully stage managed appearances, David Cameron should try holding a few public meetings and meeting real people - and develop a sense of humour. The point made in a light hearted way was that Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy had been slapped. down by his party bosses at Westminster and told that he would have no role in Labour budget. David Cameron is clearly a prime minister with both a people by-pass and a sense of humour by-pass.
Labour’s Chris Leslie is asked on Daily Politics if it is sensible to borrow more while debt is running at £1.5 trillion.
Leslie says there is a distinction between day to day spending and productive public investment. Capital is important, he says. Labour still hopes to move to budget surplus with debt falling as percentage of GDP.
Andrew Neil despairs at David Gauke for dodging a question on where the Tories will fund spending pledges such as £8bn for the NHS. “It’s like groundhog day,” Neil says.
NHS is a priority for us, Gauke says. We’re committed to £8bn. He keeps repeating that the coalition found £7.3bn in last term but won’t explain how £8bn will be found in next term.
Candidates on Daily Politics are asked about a comment made by former leader Alex Salmond. The former SNP leader is quoted as saying the Scottish labour leader will not be writing the Labour budget because “I’m writing the labour budget.”
SNP’s Stewart Hosie says he was having a bit of fun. Our plan sees the deficit fall every year in this parliament. Debt falls as share of GDP in each year. It’s a deal to be struck which seems fair.
Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil asks Ukip’s Patrick O’Flynn if it can be presumed Ukip will not tax late-night adult TV channels after Daily Express owner Richard Desmond, who also owns Television X, Red Hot TV, donated £1m to the party.
Ed Miliband says David Cameron is trying to "stir up English hatred of the Scots". @theJeremyVine
Ed Miliband told Justine re #milifandom: "She thought it must be a case of mistaken identity.."
Hi Jamie Grierson here. I’ll be keeping an eye and ear on the Daily Politics election debate, this time its on the economy. Tory David Gauke, Labour’s Chris Leslie, Liberal Democrat Dick Newby, Ukip’s Patrick O’Flynn and Scottish National Party’s Stewart Hosie are all appearing. I won’t post a minute by minute account, rather flag up the most interesting bits.
According to the Press Association analysis, SNP candidates are most likely to be on Twitter, and Ukip candidates least likely.
Of the seven main parties, the SNP has managed to get all of its parliamentary candidates on Twitter - while Ukip has only managed to do so with 52% of its prospective MPs.
The Scottish nationalists and Ukip top-and-tailed a Press Association table on Twitter participation. Labour were in second place with 92% of candidates on the micro-blogging site, while you can expect to see tweets from 84% of the Tories’ hopefuls.
David Cameron has tweeted a video of Alex Salmond joking about writing the next Labour government’s budget.
Unsurprisingly, Cameron doesn’t find it funny.
This footage will shock you: Alex Salmond laughs & boasts he’ll write Labour’s budget. Vote Conservative to stop it. https://t.co/A6DGJtM8OM
The pink bus was sadly absent today as Yvette Cooper came north of the border to help launch the Scottish Labour women’s manifesto with deputy leader Kezia Dugdale MSP, co-founder of the Women 50/50 representation campaign, and shadow Scottish secretary Margaret Curran, who is fighting for her political life in the key SNP /Labour battleground of Glasgow East.
After the requisite photocall with toddlers at a nursery in Ballieston, Cooper warned voters not to “swallow” the SNP’s prospectus.
Here’s the YouTube video of David Cameron’s Alex Salmond joke. (See 11.57am.)
David Cameron and Boris Johnson are doing a campaign visit together in Surbiton. They have been visiting a nursery.
Here are some of the highlights from Twitter.
Boris and Cameron arrive at a campaign visit. The media are kept behind a rope. Boris and Cameron say nothing pic.twitter.com/QbbMfW4PEi
PM and Boris help 3yr olds with a jigsaw. PM:"I have a cunning plan". Boris: "He has a long-term cunning plan". pic.twitter.com/p6myNuqU1X
Boris, finally completing child's puzzle: "It's a bit like the campaign." PM: "It comes together in the end" pic.twitter.com/0RiyuTdvIv
Boris Johnson and Cameron enjoyed their finger painting in Tory blue with nursery children. "It's the woad to recovery" puns Boris #GE2015
DC conceded that Boris has bigger hands. We all know what they say about men with big hands. Though perhaps a fact check for another time.
Five minutes after Cameron and Boris enter nursery a child is brought out screaming. Correlated? Causal?
Julian Huppert, the incumbent Lib Dem candidate for Cambridge, is distributing election leaflets that describe him as an “independent”, rather than making explicit his party affiliation. The leaflet does not include the Lib Dem logo and has only one mention of the party when it boasts that “Julian and the Lib Dems” will give an extra £8bn to the NHS.
The leaflet claims that Huppert “has always and will always put Cambridge before party”.
No mention he's a Lib Dem, no mention of Clegg. This is one of Duncan Hames's campaign leaflets. pic.twitter.com/ntrbVSaqoU
Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, has been campaigning in Edinburgh this morning.
Overheard an SNP activist saying @NicolaSturgeon is to the Scottish people what Princess Di was to the English.
Tim Collins, the former Tory MP who was a party press officer during the 1992 election campaign, said this morning that David Cameron should learn from John Major’s decision to take to his soap box during that campaign.
An awful lot of money had been invested in advance planning in 1992 of what we called ‘Ask John Major’ events. But in the end, John Major thought he wasn’t going to get through to the actual public, decided he wanted to have a soap box, actually braved howling mobs, got eggs and worse thrown at him, had suits destroyed, blood was drawn and all the rest of it.
But people thought here’s a guy who is actually prepared to fight for my vote and I think that is what’s lacking now.
In his LBC phone-in, while I was listening to David Cameron, Boris Johnson suggested that British special forces should be sent to Libya to stop people traffickers sending migrants across the Mediterranean. Nick Ferrari, the presenter, pushed him into saying this. The Press Association has the details.
Asked again about the use of military personnel, Johnson said: “I think you need to choke off the problem at source - you need to stop these people being put into boats.”
Told the only way to do this was by putting troops into Libya, Johnson said: “Isn’t the tradition you don’t discuss the use of special forces but you need to do something?”
In his speech earlier David Cameron said poverty increased under Labour. (See 11.35am.)
If our summary of Labour’s distributional objectives is accurate, then outcomes reflected those objectives quite closely. Turning first to poverty, both absolute and relative measures of income poverty fell markedly among children and pensioners - although the scale of the changes did not always match the considerable ambition, as set out explicitly in the case of the government’s child poverty targets.
By contrast, the incomes of poorer working-age adults without dependent children - the major demographic group not emphasised by Labour as a priority - changed very little over the period. As a result they fell behind the rest of the population and relative poverty levels rose. Since childless working-age people started the period with low levels of poverty compared with other demographic groups, one consequence of these trends was that the risks of poverty across the major demographic groups converged under Labour. This is illustrated in the Figure below.
Brian Hoskins, the director of the Grantham institute for climate change at Imperial College London, has said that given the importance of the Paris climate summit this year, the attention given to climate change in the general election campaign was “pathetic” and “extremely disappointing”.
“The contrast between the importance of this year and our election is just stark,” he said. “It seems we go towards the lowest common denominator in such a discussion of this, instead of stepping back and saying what do we want, what is our vision for the country, what is our vision for the world, we’re saying, are we going to get a pack of butter for 20p rather than 30p? It’s a shopping list rather than a vision.”
Here’s David Cameron’s Alex Salmond joke. (See 11.57am.)
Anyone else hear the PMs little joke at Alex Salmond?... #ThisMorning #DavidCameron pic.twitter.com/BfpJxwa97I
Here’s today’s Guardian three-minute election video, with Jonathan Freedland and Gaby Hinsliff discussing whether the Tory campaign is wobbling.
The Tories campaign has been lacking in many ways. The ludicrous uncosted spending commitments, the absence of hope or humanity and the shackled, bloodless performance of David Cameron have all been risible.
But on the challenges that will define this contest – the SNP scare, the ground game gamble and the retail offer – Labour’s campaign bosses have repeatedly made the wrong call.
Natalie Bennett, the Green party leader, has been speaking to Sheffield Students’ Union this morning. She said today’s Trussell Trust figures showing 1m people used food banks in the last year illustrated why the Greens were demanding sweeping changes to the welfare system, including an end to punitive sanctions.
Here’s an extract from her speech.
Unlike the other parties, who are chained to their slogans about hard working families, we are standing up for a very important principle.
That is: that our benefits system should be there for anyone who needs it, and provide enough for people to get by on without fear of hunger.
It seems the best bit of the ITV This Morning interview came right at the end. The BBC’s Sean Clare is quoting what Phillip Schofield was saying, introducing the next item, and David Cameron’s response.
"Coming up on @itvthismorning, a man who can steal your watch without you noticing". @David_Cameron: "Who's that, Alec Salmond?"
Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, was interviewed on Sky News just now. He was asked if he regretted referring to Ukip’s immigration spokesman Steven Woolfe as “half-black”. Farage replied:
Well, he refers to himself as that, so you will really have to ask him that question ... I don’t regret repeating how a candidate describes himself.
There’s a wee stooshie in Aberdeen about Alex Salmond’s appearance at today’s Oil and Gas UK hustings. Initially it was reported that he has pulled out of the event, with the Lib Dem’s Danny Alexander, but overnight changed his mind. Salmond’s rivals for the Aberdeenshire seat of Gordon have accused him of spending more time on his book tour than on the campaign trail.
#salmond now changed mind and IS appearing at Aberdeen oil and gas hustings after Daily Mail's @AlanRoden revealed that he had pulled out.
Here are some extracts from David Cameron’s childcare speech this morning.
That is the choice at this election.
On one side, the so-called Labour party.
We introduced 15 hours of free childcare a week for 3 and 4 year olds and disadvantaged 2 year olds.
In the next parliament we will double that for 3 and 4 year olds.
Here is a Guardian video of David Cameron responding to the Grant Shapps story.
Q: People think the Conservatives are heartless. Do you guys lack heart?
Cameron says he does not accept that. He has taken the poorest people out of income tax. He has created 2m new jobs. It makes him mad to hear Labour talk about this.
Q: Why do 1m people need food banks?
Cameron says he is trying to address this. The key thing is to improve the economy, so more people get jobs.
Following on from Andrew’s post about the Ukip vote being squeezed (see 10.39am), our data editor Alberto Nardelli has written this detailed analysis of how the Tories are clawing back supporters from Ukip.
The Tories’ is a 36.5% strategy. It isn’t aimed at winning over new friends, but at winning back old ones. This tactic relies on targeting Ukip voters without scaring those already convinced to back the party …
The idea that many Ukip voters are working class and that they therefore pose a threat to Labour’s support in the election has gained considerable currency in recent years. But we find this is wrong; the working class basis of Ukip has been strongly overstated.
The party’s strongest supporters are often the self-employed and business owners. Even within the working class, Ukippers tend to be low level supervisors, and not the disadvantaged semi and unskilled workers often thought to provide the core of the party’s support.”
David Cameron is being interviewed on ITV’s This Morning.
Cameron says it is his wife’s birthday this weekend.
Here are some more lines from Nick Clegg’s news conference this morning.
The Conservatives aren’t doing anything to help the parents of two-year-old toddlers with the childcare costs for two-year-olds.
They are doing nothing to help the mum and the dad, the parents who go back to work after nine months or a year and have to wait - under the Conservative scheme - for two whole years before they get any help from a future Conservative government on childcare costs.
I’ve been in government with George Osborne and David Cameron for five years and I’ve seen at every single turn that when the Conservative backbenchers start cutting up rough they buckle,” he said.
John Major is a very decent man, but he knows from his own time in Downing Street what it’s like to be basically held hostage by the right wing of your own party. It’s a very very real prospect and people simply aren’t focusing enough on it.
Ballot Monkeys, a new election satire, went out for the first time last night. Stuart Heritage was impressed. His Guardian review is here.
This is an excellent website. Set up by a team from Democratic Audit at the London School of Economics, the Democratic Dashboard allows you to find a wide range of information about your constituency, just by inserting your postcode.
The polls suggest the Ukip vote is being squeezed. But, on BBC Breakfast this morning, Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, said the party would do better than people expected.
Our vote is firming over the course of the last couple of weeks. In our target seats we are doing well.
The thing about Ukip is that all the so-called experts have underplayed us over the last few years. They have underestimated our potential, they are doing so again, and I think we are going to surprise people.
Here’s Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative health secretary, responding to the Labour cancer announcement. (See 9am.)
When Labour left office, they left us with the lowest cancer survival rates in Western Europe. We’re treating 700,000 more people a year in this parliament than the last, and now survival rates are at record highs. That’s only possible because we have built a strong economy that has allowed us to invest an additional £750m in cancer services.
Here’s the Guardian video of Nick Clegg mocking Grant Shapps.
Cancer Research UK has welcomed Ed Miliband’s pledge of £150m for cancer diagnostic equipment (see 9am), as well as other pledges made on cancer by other political parties.
NHS cancer services are already under strain, and the UK’s ageing population means there will be a growing number of people being diagnosed with cancer for the foreseeable future.
What do the real voters think? We have 60 in five key seats giving their view throughout the campaign as part of our polling project with BritainThinks. They each have an app and are telling us what they think of stories as they crop up.
Here, five offer their thoughts on media portrayals of the SNP, tactical voting, and which parties are winning the ‘campaign game’.
At his news conference this morning Nick Clegg mocked Grant Shapps over the Wikipedia allegations, Frances Perraudin reports.
Asked for his views, Clegg said: “Well, Grant Shapps has fervently denied that he had anything to do with it. He himself does not have the time apparently to edit his own Wikipedia entry. I’m prepared to believe him. It could have been someone else. Michael Green for instance.”
And this is what Boris Johnson said about Grant Shapps on the LBC.
Nick Ferrari ask if, if it was true that Grant Shapps had been editing huge swathes of his Wikipedia page, was he in some form of emotional trouble? Johnson replied:
Grant has said that the whole thing is a load of nonsense.
This is completely trivial by comparison with the kind of stuff that we have been talking about throughout this programme.
I said it was trivial by comparison ...
... with more free childcare, cuts in inheritance tax. Grant has said it is untrue.
Grant has knocked this thing on the head. He has said it is completely untrue and defamatory or whatever. Frankly, at this stage, I’m much more inclined to focus on the big issues at this election, the direction of the UK economy, and whether we can use that economic success to help people with their childcare.
I’m sure my Wikipedia entry has been edited by all sorts of people.
Wikipedia, from what you have just said, is a farrago, a Nigel Farrago, of stuff that is cobbled together by hidden hands. You know not where or who they are. Many of them know absolutely nothing about what they are talking about plainly. The golden rule is don’t trust stuff you read on the internet, that’s my view.
Other journalists share my assessment of David Cameron’s comments on Grant Shapps.
From the Daily Mail’s John Stevens
Asked if he has full confidence in Grant Shapps, David Cameron does NOT say yes, but says that he's doing a great job
Oh - not a full vote of confidence in Grant Shapps then from his boss David Cameron: https://t.co/RKOSgAruHz
Last night the Lib Dems issued a formal party press released about the Grant Shapps story. In case you missed it, here it is in full.
Grant Shapps is a fine man and has never done anything dodgy – Paddy Ashdown
Grant Shapps is a wonderful human being, a literary great and has in no way ever brought his party or politics into disrepute, the Chairman of the Liberal Democrat General Election Campaign said.
Q: Turning to hardworking people you have been talking about, an industrious Wikipedia user has had his account closed. It is alleged that this is the work of your party chairman. Do you have full confidence in Grant Shapps?
Here is David Cameron’s reply in full.
Grant does a great job. He’s made a very clear statement about this. And I’ve got nothing to add to that.
Q: You say Labour cannot lecture you on poverty. But today’s food bank figures are embarrassing. You don’t have a good record on this, do you?
Cameron says he does not accept this. Poverty is down, and pensioner poverty is down too.
Cameron says he has put extra money into the NHS every year.
In 2010 Labour said spending extra money on the NHS would be irresponsible. Cameron says his government ignored that.
David Cameron is taking questions now.
He says he will give priority to the regional media. He is in Bedford.
Q: What is your view on the impact of immigration?
Johnson says immigration has been very beneficial.
Q: What do you think of the DPP’s decision not to prosecute Lord Janner?
Johnson says this was regrettable, but that the DPP took that decision because Janner has Alzheimer’s.
Nick Ferrari says David Cameron was stumped by a question from a 10-year-old girl who asked him if he could pick another politician he would like to win. Cameron could not name anyone. He wanted to win himself.
Ferrari says the same girl is on the line. She asks Johnson what one decision he took he would most regret.
David Cameron is giving his speech on childcare now. I will post more from the speech when I’ve seen the text, but I will do the Q&A in full.
David Cameron visiting a factory in Bedford where he once bought a shed (apparently not a joke) pic.twitter.com/ljDaJFxGki
Boris gets about a month ahead of himself on LBC. Asked about Tory housing policy: "I am absolutely clear MY policy is...."
Q: Couldn’t the anti-SNP talk backfire, and lead to the break-up of the union?
Johnson says the SNP are entitled to their views.
Q: Why are you only getting involved in the campaign now?
That’s not true, says Johnson. He says he has been doing plenty of campaigning.
Boris Johnson is doing his LBC phone-in now.
Labour released details of their cancer treatment announcement overnight. Here are the key points. The quotes are from the Labour news release
Labour’s new investment of £150 million each year from 2016/17 in new diagnostic infrastructure will make it possible to do more tests directly in GP surgeries by ensuring key equipment is available in every town.
He will also say that Labour’s new Cancer Treatments Fund, which will be put in place after the Cancer Drugs Fund expires in 2016, will help kick start the urgent replacement of outdated radiotherapy machines. In spite of official NHS guidance saying that machines should be replaced every 10 years, NHS radiotherapy centres have not always been able to do so, with a recent Labour Freedom of Information request revealing that 1 in 5 are older than that.
The NHS England’s Business Plan 2015-2016 was released at 9.24pm on March 27th – Parliament’s last working day before the General Election. It reveals that the NHS does not now expect to meet the cancer target for people to begin treatment within two months of urgent referral this year, with officials saying that the point they expect the NHS will be meeting the target will now be March 2016.
The key cancer target has already become a potent symbol of the Government’s NHS failure after being missed for the first time at the start of 2014. On current trends another 23,000 patients could be waiting longer than two months to start their treatment, impacting on health and chances of survival, as well as causing patients great anxiety.
The NHS needs a real plan with real money right now – not an IOU.
Yesterday I set out our NHS Rescue Plan for our first 100 days, our first Budget and our first year in office. Now I want to set out the next stage of our fully-funded plan, an investment of £150 million a year, every year in the key equipment patients need to get quick access to cancer tests and improve early diagnosis.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has been talking about the deaths of migrants attempting to cross Mediterranean to get to Europe. He has made similar points over the last few days but his language today will have some resonance, saying they should be “taken back to where they come from”.
I am suggesting they should be making sure that those coming in vessels that are not seaworthy are put on vessels that are seaworthy and taken back to where they come from.
There may be some cases where people genuinely need refugee status and if Britain has to give a helping hand and if we have to give, for example, some Christians refugee status, given that with Iraq, Libya there’s almost nowhere for them to go, then fine.
The LBC Boris Johnson phone-in has been put back again, until 9am.
And here is today’s Guardian seat projection.
Here are today’s YouGov GB polling figures.
Update: Cons lead at 1 - Latest YouGov/The Sun results 21st Apr - Con 35%, Lab 34%, LD 7%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%; APP -11 http://t.co/EPVhHUzdYT
Boris Johnson may be running late. His phone-in was due to start at 8.30am, but now it is scheduled for 8.45am.
Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, is about to do a phone-in with LBC.
If you haven’t already, do read Robert Booth’s Guardian article about Johnson on the campaign trail. Here’s an excerpt.
The Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip was in the seat Churchill occupied in August 1940 as air force chiefs masterminded the Battle of Britain against Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe. The photo opportunity at RAF Uxbridge was part of the Conservative strategy of rolling out Johnson to energise a campaign that otherwise loyal observers such as Margaret Thatcher’s former communications guru Lord Bell have decried as “dreadful, risk averse and boring”.
Johnson’s perceived likeability, deft touch with ordinary people and impression of capability in a crisis have led to voters making him clear favourite to succeed Cameron as party leader and potential prime minister – ahead of Theresa May and George Osborne, according to a YouGov poll last month.
Good morning. I’m taking over from Mark now.
The Socialist Labour party is launching its manifesto today. Led by Arthur Scargill, the former NUM leader, it standing candidates in some seats in Wales. At a rally last night in Aberavon, where Stephen Kinnock, son of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, is Labour’s candidate, Scargill said his party would abolish public schools.
We should abolish all private schools such as Eton, Harrow and Westminster, because they are an elite which gives a better education because of the more money that is pumped into them. We believe all faith schools should be abolished as well because they are a breeding ground for prejudice and intolerance. If Muslims, Buddhist, Catholics or Protestants can go to university together then they can go to school together.
This government and the Labour government before it and the Tory government before that have been taking money from people’s pension funds for years. The mine workers’ pension fund has half of its surplus taken by this government every time there is an actuarial valuation ... the government takes half. If they can do it to us, then what’s the difference in us doing the same thing.
My colleague Frances Perraudin is with the Lib Dems in London, where Nick Clegg is ruling out any further pay cuts for public sector workers if the party is part of the next government.
"You have done your bit to get the country back on track [with pay cuts]," Clegg tells public sector workers. pic.twitter.com/iogIsCEp9j
"We've only got two weeks left to stop a right wing coalition gov," says Clegg.
Asked where the axe would fall now public sector pay cuts have been ruled out, Clegg says he is confident they can find savings elsewhere.
"Grant Shapps says he doesn't have the time to edit his Wikipedia entry," says Clegg. "It could have been somebody else like Michael Green."
In case you
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