April 14th: Manifestos under scrutiny

A PREEMINENT—and crushingly dull—feature of this peculiar election campaign has been the failure of both main parties to invade each other’s territory. The fiscally austere, economically responsible (or so they claim) Conservatives have been appealing to voters’ hard-nosed sense; the Labour Party, historic champion of the poor, sick and state-employed, have been tugging at their heart-strings. Yet in presenting their rival manifestos, on April 13th and 14th, first Labour, then the Tories, indulged in a bit of overdue cross-dressing.

Promising a “good life to all” under more Tory rule, David Cameron presented his party’s offer to voters in Swindon, an unglamorous, true-blue, commuter town, on April 14th. Where, until recently, he sought to scare voters with a vision of economic apocalypse under Labour, he now promised sunshine and gravy—mainly in the form of three giveaways. The headline offer was a giant extension of the “right to buy” scheme, under which Margaret Thatcher once sought to create a new property-owning, Tory-voting, middle class. Mrs Thatcher’s scheme affords a discount to council tenants who would like to buy their houses; Mr Cameron promised to extend the scheme to tenants of not-for-profit housing associations, making it available, he said, to an additional million families.