Diary – 9 April 2015

So far, what an infuriating election campaign. We have the most extraordinary array of digital, paper and broadcasting media at our fingertips — excellent political columnists, shrewd and experienced number-crunchers, vivid bloggers and dedicated fact-checkers. There has never been a general election in which the interested voter has had access to so much carefully assembled and up-to-the-minute data. And it’s unpredictable, and it matters: the recovery on a knife edge, the future of the UK, our future in Europe — all that. It ought to be thrilling. So why is the campaign proving so tooth-grindingly awful? Simply because the parties have chosen to refuse to tell us what we need to know. There’s this thing called the deficit (you may have heard about it). It’s sitting there like a great stinking ordure in the middle of public life. If it isn’t shovelled away over the next five years, we are all going to spend ever more on debt interest. To deal with it, big taxes have to go up — I don’t mean just the mansion tax, but taxes that hit most of us — or very large and extremely painful cuts in public spending must be made; or some combination of both. We know this. It’s the uncomfortable truth bracketing the entire campaign. So — which taxes, when? Which cuts, where?

Before the campaign started, we were getting somewhere: I could interview Cameron or Osborne and make some progress in finding out where cuts would be made. When pressed, Ed Balls was starting to talk about which projects he might scrap, and about tough decisions in unprotected departmental budgets. Now? All that has closed down completely. The Tories seem to have forgotten that the Autumn Statement ever happened. They now want to spend huge extra amounts of money on the NHS; Labour has ruled out almost all tax rises for most voters.