Plan B Forum

ATHERSTONE, England (AP) — Posters are being printed and slogans are being polished as Britain's politicians battle it out in the most unpredictable national election in decades. One top election analyst has dubbed it "the lottery election."

Voters, though, don't seem very excited about who gets the prize.

"There's nobody who can run a country. They all lie to us," said Victor Loach, a fishmonger selling his wares in the cobbled central square of Atherstone, 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of London. "And why do they shout at each other like children?"

It's a common refrain. Opinion polls suggest voters are lukewarm about both Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives, seeking a second term, and Ed Miliband's opposition Labour Party.

So who is going to win the May 7 vote?

"The simple answer is nobody," said Leighton Vaughan Williams, director of the Political Forecasting Unit at Nottingham Business School. "It's very, very unlikely indeed that any party will get a majority.

"Indeed, it's very, very unlikely that any two parties can put together a majority after the election."

Britain's electoral landscape has become a patchwork of parties, including Scottish and Welsh nationalists, Greens and anti-Europeans. Any of them could end up holding the balance of power in Parliament.

It's a radical change after decades in which Britain's electoral system usually delivered either Conservative or Labour majorities in the House of Commons. Not anymore. Support for the two big parties has plummeted,

Strathclyde University political scientist John Curtice, who coined the term "lottery election," has said that "the 2015 election looks less like a simple battle between two straightforward alternatives than any of its post-war predecessors." Although Labour is traditionally left of center and the Conservatives to the right, increasing numbers of voters find it hard to tell the difference.

"They come in force, promise you the world, and disappear," said Margaret Warman, a retiree in the central England town of Coleshill, already weary with more than two months to go before polling day. Tired of both Labour and the Conservatives, she's planning to vote for the U.K. Independence Party, which wants to curb immigration and leave the European Union.

The cracks in Britain's political system have been visible since 2010. In an election held amid a global economic crisis, the Conservatives won the largest share of Commons seats, but not enough to govern alone. They formed a coalition with the smaller Liberal Democrats.

Since then, the political landscape has fractured further. Supporting the Conservatives through five years of spending cuts has cost the Lib Dems much support, and the party stands to lose a big chunk of its 56 seats.

One big beneficiary of the disillusionment is UKIP, led by the affable, beer-loving Nigel Farage. The party has benefited from — opponents say fueled — a growing resentment of immigrants and European bureaucrats amid a squeeze on British jobs and welfare benefits. Polls put UKIP in third place ahead of May's vote, though Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system means it will likely win only a handful of seats.

Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party has seen support surge since it came close to victory in last year's Scottish independence referendum. The SNP could take many of Labour's Scottish seats and make it hard for that party to form a government.

Despite the electoral drama, politicians are struggling to capture the imaginations and loyalty of voters.

Cameron's Conservatives are centering their campaign on Britain's economic turnaround. Unemployment and inflation are low — proof, they say, that spending curbs and fiscal discipline are working.

Labour argues that millions of middle-class Britons have seen real wages fall, and paints the Tories as a party of millionaire fat-cats who can't be trusted to run the vital but overstretched National Health Service, or NHS.

With the outcome so close, politicians are laboring for every vote in areas like North Warwickshire, a key central England battleground where the Conservatives beat Labour by just 54 votes in 2010.

The area is a varied slice of Middle England that's home to half-timbered Tudor buildings and ancient churches as well as big-box stores and suburban cul-de-sacs of modern brick homes.

Many of the tidy villages and towns look affluent, but they don't feel it. People here are anxious — about the health service, about jobs, about money. Once, the area was home to heavy industry and coal mining. Today, many residents work in retail and service-sector jobs that pay much less than the trades they replaced.

Here, candidates say, the election will be won the old-fashioned way — by speaking to voters, one at a time, on their doorsteps.

"You've got to show how you're different," said Craig Tracey, an insurance broker who is running for the Conservatives. "I'm certainly not a career politician. I run a business and my reason for getting into politics was disillusionment with politicians as well."

Labour candidate Mike O'Brien, a former government minister who represented the area for 18 years until 2010, agrees that some voters are "fed up and switched off."

But he thinks the allure of UKIP and other upstarts will fade as voters focus on what is most important to them.

"The mood is changing," he said. "During the (European election) campaign it was immigration, immigration, immigration. Now it's NHS, NHS, NHS."

Nationally, the outcome remains impossible to predict. Most opinion polls put Labour slightly ahead, but betting markets think Cameron is more likely than Miliband to be prime minister once the dust has settled.

"If I was (Cameron) I wouldn't be going to bed confident I was going to be prime minister," Vaughan Williams said. "I'd be a little bit more confident than Ed Miliband — a little bit."

Cameron's Conservatives are centering their campaign on Britain's economic turnaround. Unemployment and inflation are low — proof, they say, that spending curbs and fiscal discipline are working.

Labour argues that millions of middle-class Britons have seen real wages fall, and paints the Tories as a party of millionaire fat-cats who can't be trusted to run the vital but overstretched National Health Service, or NHS.

London: The leader of Britain's Green Party has apologised after her party's election campaign launch on Tuesday was overshadowed by what she described as "a very bad" interview in which she struggled to explain her party's housing policy.



The resurgent Greens are winning supporters from the opposition Labour Party ahead of a close election on May 7 and, although they may not capture any new seats in Parliament - they have just one at present - a split in the left-of-centre vote could hand victory to Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives.

But the party was embarrassed on Tuesday when its leader Natalie Bennett stumbled repeatedly when asked on LBC Radio how the Greens would pay for a plan to build 500,000 new social rental homes.

"Right, well, that's, erm, you've got a total cost, erm, that will be spelt out in our manifesto," she said at one point.

When the interviewer, Nick Ferrari, who later described it as "one of the worst interviews ever by a political leader" pressed her, saying, "So you don't know?" she responded, "No, well, er".

Ms Bennett, who grew up in Sydney, later said she had had "a mental brain fade".

"It was absolutely excruciating in the studio," Ms Bennett told a news conference in London later in the day after upper-house MP Jenny Jones tried to block a journalist's question about the interview.

"All I can say is occasionally one just has a mind blank; that happens. I've been presenting the Green Party's policies up and down the country, I'm delighted with the response they get and I'm delighted to have the backing of more than 54,000 Green Party members."

Speaking later on BBC Television's Daily Politics program, Ms Bennett apologised to party members and said a fully costed manifesto would be published in March.

"I had a very bad interview on housing this morning," she said. "I am very sorry to the Green Party members who I did not do a very good job representing our policies on."

Ms Bennett is scheduled to join the other party leaders in televised debates before the election after Mr Cameron said it was "only fair" that the Greens should be included.

The party, which has been scoring about 7 per cent in opinion polls and increasing its membership as support for the traditional major parties has dwindled, will be running candidates in at least 509 districts - 89 per cent of seats in England and Wales - and is targeting 12 seats in the House of Commons.

It won its first seat ever in the 2010 election.

Ms Bennett, who grew up in Sydney,

"I am very sorry to the Green Party members who I did not do a very good job representing our policies on."

There's nobody who can run a country. They all lie to us,"

George Osborne's handling of the economic recovery has been "remarkable" and Britain must now stick to his plans and "finish the job", the head of the OECD has said.
Angel Gurria, General Secretary of the international economic forecaster, congratulated George Osborne on the success of his policies as he hailed Britain as a "text book" example for other nations.
He said that while further cuts are needed, Britain has already done much of the "heavy lifting" and future austerity measures will not need to be as deep.
He said that Britain's economy is now out-performing the US, adding that his main message to the Chancellor is "well done" and that Britain deserves a "pat on the back"

Ukip is on course to come second in at least 100 seats at the general election as it displaces the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems as the main opposition across large parts of the country, according to new analysis of the party’s electoral prospects on 7 May.

The extraordinary potential haul of Ukip “silver medals” – in an addition to a likely tally of half-a-dozen or so seats at Westminster – would represent a massive breakthrough for Nigel Farage’s anti-EU party, which failed to achieve even a single second place in 2010.

The analysis, conducted by Robert Ford at the University of Manchester for the Observer, suggests that the biggest threat to the established parties from Ukip will come in future local and national elections after May, once it has put down local roots and established itself in the minds of voters as a real alternative to the incumbent party.

It also means that the future of the UK in the EU – normally not a top issue on the doorsteps – will become far more central to election debates, as Ukip candidates press the case for the country to quit the EU and apply pressure for an in/out referendum.

Examining Ukip’s strength, as well as byelections in this parliament, Ford concludes that Farage’s party will pile up “silver medals” across industrial and urban regions in the north, as well in parts of the Midlands, the south east and East Anglia and the south west.

The party is polling at between 10% and 15% in most polls. In today’s Opinium/Observer poll it is on 14%.

Animals would be protected under human rights laws and new taxes imposed on nappies under plans to be considered by the Green Party.

Natalie Bennett, the Green party leader, revived her standing in her party on Friday as she opened its spring conference with a well-received speech proposing free social care for all over-65s.

The insurgent environmentalist party, which hopes to hold the balance of power after the General Election by winning up to ten seats, will also propose creating a fleet of hospital ships to serve the developing world, cutting the size of National Lottery prizes and banning the Grand National. The policies, set to become official policy during a series of debates on Saturday, underline the radical ambitions of Britain’s fastest-growing political movement, which now has 55,000 members – more than the Liberal Democrats or Ukip.

Natalie Bennett, the party leader, this weekend heralded a “peaceful political revolution” at the General Election. Her party plans to form an alliance with the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru to force a minority Labour government to spend billions of pounds a year more on welfare and abandon the Trident nuclear deterrence.

She sought to outflank Ed Miliband from the left with a lengthy denunciation of tax avoidance, foodbanks and low pay. In a sign of the party’s growing appeal, Lily Cole, the Cambridge graduate and model, will on Sunday night appear alongside Ms Bennett during a panel debate on “Latin American experiments in direct democracy.”

The proposed policies come on top of the party's existing platform of legalising hard drugs and brothels, placing new restrictions on advertising and air travel, imposing taxes on large presents and pop stars and cutting economic growth to zero in order to protect the planet.

cutting economic growth to zero in order to protect the planet.

Britain is within a month of a period of deflation. When the figures for March come out next month cheaper energy bills will mean that the cost of living is lower than it was a year earlier.

These are uncharted waters for the UK, at least in the modern era. There have been times when inflation has turned negative but the last time prices were falling was in 1960, the year John F Kennedy became president of the US, and that was on the old RPI measure. This is a record low since the move to using the consumer prices index as the preferred yardstick of inflation.

The general assumption is that this is good news all round, even though some people do better out of zero inflation than others. Pensioners benefit because the triple lock means that the state pension is uprated by whichever is highest of the annual inflation rate, average earnings or 2.5%. At present it is 2.5%.

Deflation is also a boon for those with cash in the bank, since their money will buy more in the future than it does now. Losers include those with debts, which rise in value if prices are falling.

There are two reasons economists think zero inflation is a good thing. The first is the boost to living standards from wages rising faster than prices. Wages have risen extremely slowly since the recession of 2008-09 and even against a backdrop of falling unemployment are currently only going up by 1.6% a year.

But the drop in oil prices last year has pushed inflation lower and meant those modest wage increases now stretch further. This is clearly welcome news for the government, eager to fend off Labour’s accusation that the coalition has presided over a cost-of-living crisis. The opposition says the recent increase in living standards does not make up for earlier falls.


The second boost to consumers comes from the outlook for interest rates. It will come as no surprise to the Bank of England that inflation now stands at zero, and the Bank’s governor, Mark Carney, has said it would be “foolish” to cut the cost of borrowing in response to what is thought to be a temporary fall in commodity prices.

That said, the Bank is not going to be in a hurry to raise rates either. All nine members of the Bank’s monetary policy committee are in favour of official interest rates remaining at 0.5%, which is where they have been since early 2009. They look like remaining there for the rest of this year, and one MPC member – Andy Haldane, the Bank’s chief economist – says he can contemplate voting to cut borrowing costs.

That’s because there’s a potential dark side to the fall in inflation, the risk that it becomes a permanent feature of the economic landscape. The reason the majority of economists view February’s zero inflation as benign is because they think lower unemployment will put upward pressure on wage settlements. Higher pay deals will start to push up inflation at a time when last year’s drop in oil prices starts to unwind. There is, on this view, little prospect of deflation becoming embedded, as it did in Japan.

This, though, assumes that wage settlements are not dragged lower by the drop in inflation. The fact that average earnings are growing at an annual rate of below 2% even after two years of a relatively robust period of growth is indicative of a labour market where employers are able to secure workers cheaply. They may be tempted to be even less generous once inflation goes negative.

the drop in oil prices last year has pushed inflation lower and meant those modest wage increases now stretch further