Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, sent the Foreign Secretary to a nuclear security summit in Washington, so that he could launch the Labour party manifesto in an empty hospital in Birmingham. It promised to halve the annual deficit by 2014, through growth, taxes and cuts, but not to raise rates of income tax and not to extend VAT to food, children’s clothes, books, newspapers and public transport fares. Underperforming schools might be taken over by more successful ones; failing police forces might be taken over by more successful ones. There would be a referendum before 2011 on the alternative vote method of electing MPs. Mr David Cameron launched the Conservative manifesto at Battersea power station, promising: ‘People power, not state power.’ It proposed a right to veto council tax rises through local referendums, and for communities to buy their local pub or post office and to run schools. The number of MPs would be cut by a tenth. An emergency budget would be held within 50 days, to eliminate the bulk of the deficit over five years. Public-sector pay would be frozen for 2011. Those on Incapacity Benefit will be reassessed. There would be an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants. The Liberal Democrats proposed raising the income tax threshold to £10,000. They also put up posters with the invented claim: ‘You’d pay £389 more in VAT a year under the Conservatives.’ Mr Brown, asked in a television interview what his biggest mistake had been, said: ‘In the 1990s, the banks… We should have been regulating them more.’ The leaders of the three main parties then limbered up for this week’s television debate, the first of three planned. The Royal Mail suspended deliveries to a house in Leeds after postmen were chased by a 19-year-old cat called Tiger.
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