British prime minister David Cameron urged British voters "not to put it all at risk" in next month's general election, when he faced strong attacks from other party leaders about his plans to cut public spending further.
During a two-hour marathon debate involving seven party leaders, Cameron claimed that fears raised five years about the Conservatives have been proven to be untrue: “The choice is not go back to square one,” he said.
However, the Manchester debate was most striking for other reasons: Scottish First Minister and Scottish National Party leader, Nicola Sturgeon put herself at the head of a UK-wide anti-austerity campaign.
British voters on May 7th are faced with a clear choice, she said: “You can vote for the same old politics and the get the same result, or you can vote for something better and more progressive.
“None of us can afford more austerity,” she said, saying that the priorities of the major parties “are wrong, but they won’t pacy the price, it will be ordinary people people across the country who will pay the price.”
Labour's Ed Miliband repeatedly sought to drive home the message that voters are faced with a major choice in the election, one that will decide the future of the country for years ahead.
Rejecting Cameron’s economic claims, the Labour leader, said: “Work doesn’t pay in our country, there are millions doing all the hours that God sends who can’t make ends meet at the end of the month.”
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party made a major gamble by saying that immigrants getting £25,000-a-year drugs to treat HIV are putting undue pressure upon the National Health Service
He was roundly criticised by the three women on the platform: Sturgeon, Natalie Bennett of the Green Party and Leanne Woods of Wales' Plaid Cymru, though Clegg and Miliband quickly disagreed with him, before moving on to other subjects.
“My instinct is look at them as a human being, not consider what country they come from,” said Sturgeon, while Woods said: “his kind of scaremongering is dangerous and it creates stigma.”
Strikingly, Sturgeon made no direct attacks upon Labour’s record in Scotland, though she bids to take dozens of seats from them in May, while Woods focused relentlessly on the campaign in Wales.
Farage, who has had a difficult few weeks with candidates who were forced to quit, is clearly betting that his anti-immigration message will get through to voters in the often-deprived constituencies that Ukip is targeting.
Meanwhile, the Ukip was on more successful ground when he argued that all of the other parties do not want to the United Kingdom to quit the EU – a key issue for many of those inclined to vote for his party.
Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg urged voters to realise that coalition-era politics are now part of the UK's landscape: "No-one standing here is going to win outright. You will have to choose who will be working with whom."
Driving home the central message of his party’s campaign, Clegg, who apologised for abandoning a pledge to abolish tuition fees and instead increased them, said he would borrow less than Labour and cut less than the Conservatives.
Coming generations cannot be left with the bills left by the people of today, he argued, but he insisted that the Conservatives’ drive to cut spending is driven by ideological reasons.
