Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will any party really offer an election message of ‘hope, not falsehood’?

Ed Miliband today promised that Labour will offer ‘hope, not falsehood’ in its General Election campaign. It’s a bold pledge given the party is making so much of the claim that the Tories want to reduce public spending to levels not seen since the 1930s – a claim that has foundations made of something oddly similar to sand. Similarly the Tories have today produced an interesting dossier that Miliband’s party has interestingly called ‘dodgy’ because it contains a number of ‘assumptions’. As James explains, that’s part of the plan, as Labour now has to say which cuts it wouldn’t reverse and which it would.

But one of the central tricks of the Labour campaign – which it is proving very good at – is to threaten the voters with a vision of the NHS under the Tories, unable to function and severely under-funded.

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