We take a look at what’s happening today on the General Election campaign trail
THE ‘challengers’ debate takes place tomorrow night, which includes all the UK parties other than the Tories and the Lib-Dems, so expect it to be kind of left-wing but with a big dollop of Nigel Farage yelping about immigration and calling the Greens an establishment party. For today, you’ll just have to make do with more party manifestos, more leaders out and about, and a George Osborne scoot up to Scotland and back.
SSP, Lib-Dems and Ukip launch manifestos
Nick Clegg, Lib-Dem leader, will lead his party’s manifesto launch in South London. His pitch is that the Lib-Dems are better coalition partners than the SNP or Ukip because the party will provide more stable governance, i.e Clegg will do what he did last time and basically go along with whatever the leading party throws at him.
Clegg will say voters should back a “proven rock of stability, continuity and conscience” in the Lib-Dems. Some would say a stick of rock has more of a conscience, but we couldn’t possibly comment.
Farage will launch his party’s manifesto in Essex, where he will talk up Ukip as “the party of defence” as he promises to increase military spending.
He will say his party will offer real change “for the first time in 100 years”. Which begs the question: what happened 100 years ago that he was so fond of? The First World War was on, Britain was at war with much of Europe – maybe that’s what Ukip hanker after, a good old war with Europe. Farage probably dresses up in WW1 memorabilia in his spare time, shouting “tally ho!”.
The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) launches its manifesto in Edinburgh today, which is called ‘Standing up for Scotland’s working class majority’.
It’s good to see a title with some real educational value: wet liberal interpretations of working class as folk in blue overalls with gravel in their teeth be damned, the SSP are bringing back the class Marxist definition, the working class as people who sell their labour in return for a wage; which is consistently over 60 per cent of the population. Good on them!
Millionaire meets millionaires
Osborne must have drawn the short-straw among cabinet members in making the trip north of the border, where he is about as popular as lice, but don’t worry about him – he’s not going to be going anywhere near the peasants, he’s just meeting business leaders, then heading back to the safety and serenity of the treasury.
For some reason he’s going to talk up the Conservatives’ record on the oil industry, which consists of being one of the few countries in the world to have struck black gold and not had an oil fund, and therefore allow the vast majority of it to dribble into the accounts of the shareholders of the world’s leading oil companies.
Picture courtesy of altogetherfool