Labour party

Finally, after six weeks of campaigning, endless opinion polls and the semi-TV debates, the final day of the 2015 general election campaign is upon us. David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg will be dashing all over the country to make their final plea to voters, while rumours are beginning to spill out about the conditions for any coalitions. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, here is a summary of today’s main election stories. 1. Neck and neck Before the election campaign kicked off properly at the end of March, a poll of polls put Labour on 34 per cent and the Tories on 33 per cent. Six weeks of vigorous campaigning later and barely anything has changed. Yesterday, Survation put Labour on 34 per cent and the Tories on 33 per cent.

This week Labour was accused of hypocrisy for allowing gender-segregated seating at a party rally. While the party have since defended their position claiming 'there was no forced segregation', many have accused Labour of pandering to the Muslim vote. Now word reaches Steerpike that Labour activists working alongside Gavin Shuker, the Labour Co-operative MP for Luton South, are posting leaflets to the local community which tell non-English speakers exactly how to vote. The flyer helpfully includes instructions telling the reader to vote by placing an X 'next to every candidate with the Labour logo': Of course no instructions as of yet on how to vote if you are a non-English speaker who doesn't wish to plump for Ed Miliband.

On Monday, I hopped aboard the Labour ‘battle bus’ for a day on the campaign trail with Ed Miliband. Although each party has a different campaign operation, I was a little surprised to find that journalists are given a bus of their own, travelling separately from the party leadership. But I still managed to gain some insight into Labour’s campaign and how Team Miliband are feeling about the election with in the final stretch. The battle bus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEL4vI-1AXE The campaigning day began at 7:30am, with Labour’s battle bus pulling out of a garage in Westminster. I boarded with two other journalists, from the Financial Times and the Daily Mail.

The Guardian’s superb live blog was even better than usual this morning when it covered Twitter’s reaction to the Ed Miliband interview: eight tweets, of which five came from Spectator staff. That’s what I call balance: opinion from the full spectrum of opinion in 22 Old Queen St. We were challenging Miliband's claim when he said the debt was "lower than what we inherited" - it was about £200bn higher. I can’t imagine these tweets went down too well with Guardian readers, because an update emerged later saying that the debt/GDP ratio fell. So was Ed speaking the truth after all? I’m rather keen on this topic.

Ed Miliband spent a lot of his Today programme interview refusing to answer questions about how a minority Labour government would work because he is focusing both on the ‘big issues’ and on ‘winning a majority’. Both are good things to focus on when the polling stations haven’t yet opened, though of course how a government would pass laws is generally a big issue too. But what’s interesting is that behind the scenes some Labour figures do still sincerely think they could win a majority. One senior Labour MP told me in the past few days to remember that in 1992 the polls didn’t move until the very last minute and produced a majority government.

Ed Miliband began the first 15 minutes of his NHS day talking about trust and the deficit. In a feisty interview on the Today programme, the Labour leader again did not apologise for borrowing too much when his party was in government. Instead, he argued it was a failure of banking regulation that lead to Britain’s financial problems: 'Yesterday George Osborne’s permanent secretary at the Treasury Nicholas Macpherson published an article, in which he said that 2008 was a banking crisis pure and simple. And he reflected my judgment which is what happened in the country is that we had a dramatic crisis in banks which lead to high deficit.