The Tory campaign

Michael White in the Guardian dissects the Tory ads (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/mar/29/negative-advertising-michael-white)

"As for Maurice and Charles's, "I increased the gap between rich and poor vote for me" Brown poster that is a jaw-dropping example of chutzpah which would probably be disbarred by the advertising standards authority

The income/wealth gap in 1997 was dramatically wider than in 1979. Labour's efforts to close it have been conducted while running up a down escalator. The statistics are disputed, but valuable gains have been made at the bottom.

It's the escalating accumulation of wealth at the very top of the top which distorts the figures and much else. Yet the very newspapers which denounce Alistair Darling's "class warfare" efforts to claw some money back from the top 1% of earners or people buying £1m houses will also be the papers which parrot this allegation."

Meanwhile hopefully we will get less pious hair shirt stuff from the Tory Treasury frontbench about their fiscal rectitude and focus on cutting the deficit now that they have revealed that one of their top priorities is to cut National Insurance - i.e. presented with the choice of paying down the national debt, spending money on essential public services or a reckless pre-election bribe that actually reduces the income the government will have and thus increases the cuts that will have to be made, they do the third one.