James Forsyth

Tonight Ed Miliband takes one of the big risks of the campaign. He debates with Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage, Leanne Wood and Natalie Bennett. All of these leaders will be aiming to score points off Miliband. Those close to the Labour leader give several reasons for why he is taking part tonight. They argue that he does well whenever he’s given the chance to speak to voters directly. But the main reason for Miliband’s doing this debate is the Scottish situation. Labour feared that without Miliband present, this debate would have turned into a clash between Sturgeon and Farage — which would have benefitted the SNP north of the border.

The Lib Dem manifesto launch was typically Liberal Democrat. Nick Clegg offered a robust defence of the coalition declaring simply that it ‘worked’. He argued that it had proved the superiority of multi-party government and said that in any future coalition the Lib Dems would be the Tories’ heart and Labour’s brain. This was a rather more pointed version of his refrain that the Liberal Democrats will be the Tories’ heart and Labour’s head.

Security is the watchword of this Tory election campaign. But today the Tories put just as much of an emphasis on national security as economic security. The message was, to put it crudely: it is a dangerous world out there with threats at home and abroad, so who do you want on that wall—Cameron or Miliband? This new emphasis began with Theresa May introducing David Cameron. She talked about the threat from Islamist extremism and how the Tories would combat it. Cameron continued this theme in his speech, declaring in some of the punchiest language of the campaign from him that: ‘We also need to assert the British values of democracy, freedom and the rule of law – and assert them proudly.

Tomorrow’s Tory manifesto will contain the boldest policy proposal of this campaign so far. The party will promise to extend the right to buy to 1.3 million families living in housing association properties. This policy has the potential to create a new group of homeowners and to start the reversal of the decline in home ownership; even critics of the plan think that more than 150,000 families might take advantage of it. It helps to keep alive the idea of a property owning democracy which has been so crucial to the success of the centre-right in this country.

Even Tory insiders admit that while they broadly had the better of the first week of the campaign, Labour had the better of the week just gone.  This makes it imperative for their hopes of re-election that the Tories wrest back the initiative this week. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, if they don’t, Tory discipline—which is already beginning to fray a bit—will crack, and Ed Miliband will have the keys to Number 10 within his grasp. The Tories have made a decent start to this task. Labour has been unsure of how to respond to the Tories’ commitment to give £8 billion more to the NHS.

If the election in England is the political equivalent of trench warfare with Labour and the Tories inching forwards and then back, what’s going on in Scotland is a rout with the SNP driving all before it. What is remarkable is how the Nationalists are even in with a chance of winning seats such as Edinburgh South West that voted No by a more than twenty point margin. At the moment, everything their opponents throw at it seems to bounce off the SNP. The so-called Sturgeon memo, which claimed that she had told the French Ambassador that—contrary to all her public protestations—she would prefer Cameron to Miliband as Prime Minister, was the big story this time last week. But now, it is an irrelevance.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/edcouldstillwin/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and James Forsyth discuss the current state of Scottish politics" startat=866] Listen [/audioplayer]Normally, if a candidate whose party came fourth in a constituency last time tells you they’re going to win, you put it down to election derangement syndrome. But in post-referendum Scotland the normal political rules don’t apply. When Joanna Cherry, the SNP candidate for Edinburgh South West, says she’s headed for Westminster — despite the SNP picking up just 12 per cent of the vote here in 2010 — she is probably right.

One of the most striking things about Scotland is how the referendum still dominates politics here. I’ve seen more Yes posters and stickers than I’ve seen posters for any political party. The referendum also goes a long way to explaining the SNP surge. In Edinburgh East, for instance, 17 thousand people voted Labour in 2010, giving the party a nine thousand majority. Considering that the seat has been Labour since 1935, you’d expect that to be enough for the party to hold on easily. But as the SNP candidate for the seat Tommy Sheppard pointed out to me, 27 thousand people in this seat voted Yes last autumn. If he can get two thirds of them to turn out and vote SNP, then he’ll win.

Tonight’s Scottish debate isn’t going to fundamentally alter the dynamics of this general election campaign in Scotland. But it will reverberate through the UK-wide general election campaign. Both Ed Miliband and David Cameron have been left with questions to answer by their Scottish leaders while Nicola Sturgeon has made clear the price she intends to try and extract for supporting a Labour government. In heated exchanges with Sturgeon about the economy, Jim Murphy pointed out that the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that Labour would not need to cut further after 2016. Now, the Labour leadership in London has studiously avoided endorsing this idea. But Miliband and Ed Balls can now expect to be put on the spot about it after Murphy’s comments.

In a close campaign, you would normally expect the smaller parties to get squeezed as voters decided that is really a choice between Labour and the Tories. But this time, thing might be different. Why, because the general expectation is that there will be another hung parliament and the coverage of the campaign is being reflected through that prism. This emphasis on the likelihood of a hung parliament could change how people actually vote. As I write in the current issue of the magazine, the British Election Study shows that among voters who expect another hung parliament support for both Labour and the Tories is radically lower with the minor parties doing that much better. Among those who expect one party to win outright, Labour and the Tories poll at 39 and 38 percent respectively.

On Thursday night, David Cameron didn’t eviscerate the competition. But nor did he suffer any damage and that, to Tory high command, meant that it was job done. The Tory leadership didn’t want any debates at all, they’d rather not have taken the risk. So, to get through this one debate with the dynamics of the campaign unchanged was, to their mind, a result. As Cameron enjoyed a late night drink with Samantha Cameron, George Osborne and his key aides on Thursday, he reflected on how much better he felt than he did after the first debate five years ago when he knew that he had not only underperformed but that he had two more to get through. This time round he’d done fine and was done with debates.

1) Can Natalie Bennett do enough to spark another Green surge? After Natalie Bennett’s infamous ‘brain fade’ the Green surge faded away. The media stopped giving the Greens the attention they had been and without the oxygen of publicity, support for the party fell away; this morning’s YouGov poll has the Greens on 4%, their lowest score since October. But tonight offers Bennett a chance to get her party back into the election frame. If she can deliver a few good answers and the odd zinger, that would be enough to get the media—and, then, the voters—to take a second look at her and the Greens. 2) Will Leanne Wood attack Miliband over the state of the NHS in Labour-run Wales?