UK Election 2015: party leaders campaign after TV debate – live.

• SNP leader mobbed in Edinburgh after debate success
• Cameron and Miliband tied in snap polls
• 
  

LIVE Updated 32m ago

Labour leader Ed Miliband carries fish and chips he bought for the media from a Harry Ramsden’s restaurant as he campaigns in Blackpool Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

Andrew Sparrow and Claire Phipps

Friday 3 April 2015 17.03 BST Last modified on Friday 3 April 2015 17.52 BST

Afternoon summary

• The Conservatives, Labour and the SNP have all claimed victory in the light of last night’s leaders’ debate.

• The Lib Dems and and SNP have clashed over plans for future spending on the NHS. As the Press Association reports, The SNP claim their anti-austerity plan would see Scotland’s health budget rise by a total of £2bn by 2020. But the Lib Dems say the SNP’s desire to increase public spending across the UK over the next five years “threatens to wreck NHS funding”. The Scottish Lib Dem party president Sir Malcolm Bruce said:

The SNP plan to borrow £180bn to pay for their promises threatens to wreck NHS funding. The SNP plan to take on more debt would mean £3.1bn extra in interest payments every year. That eats into the money available for health.

• David Cameron has tweeted a picture of the note Liam Byrne, the former Labour chief secretary to the Treasury, left for his successor saying there was no money.

That’s all from me for today.
Thanks for the comments.

Steve Fisher, the Oxford academic who produces a weekly election results forecast for Elections Etc, using a complicated model looking at current polling and who polls shift before an election, has published his latest update.
Here are his latest seat forecasts.

Con: 300 (257– 346)
Lab: 258 (215 – 298)
LD: 20 (11 – 30)
SNP: 47 (36 – 55)
PC: 3 (2 – 3)
UKIP: 5 (4 – 5)
Grn: 1

And here is an extract from his commentary.

Our first update since the official start of the campaign finds the Conservatives having moved ahead in the polls, by a nose. Our polling average now has them leading Labour by a point — 34%-33% — having been locked together on 33% apiece for the past month. (All the polls so far were before last night’s debate.)
This has boosted the Tories’ chances: our model now gives them a 79% chance of winning the most votes and a 79% chance of winning the most seats (both up from 74% last week). The probability of a Conservative majority is up to 20% (from 16%), while Labour’s hopes of a majority are virtually gone (our model gives them less than a 0.5% chance of one). The chances of a hung parliament are still high, at 80% (down slightly from 83%).
Our central forecast is for a hung parliament with the Conservatives clearly the largest party, with 35% of the vote and 300 seats to 32% and 258 for Labour.

Updated at 3.05am AEST

Nicola Sturgeon is to address an anti-Trident rally in Glasgow tomorrow. Patrick Harvie, the co-convenor of the Scottish Green party, who is also speaking at the event, said the protesters wanted to make it Trident election issue.

We have a chance to send a strong message that by re-purposing our military and adapting to the threats of the 21st century we can leave the Cold War mentality behind and free up funds to create the jobs our society needs. Scotland is a nation of peace not international aggression. Those advocating renewal of Trident should think carefully how £100bn could transform our communities.

Ed Miliband has been buying fish and chips for the journalists travelling with him in Blackpool ...

Ed Miliband with fish and chips for the media in Blackpool. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

While David Cameron has been ticking a baby ...

David Cameron looks at 7-week old Regan with first-time buyer Kelly Jeffers in a showhome during a general election campaign visit to a housing development with a family in Chorley Photograph: Leon Neal/REUTERS

And Nicola Sturgeon has been photographed with a little one too.

Nicola Sturgeon campaigning in the Edinburgh West constituency Photograph: Ken Jack/Demotix/Corbis

Who won the debates? Five alternative assessments

We’ve already published plenty of information about who won the leaders’ debate. (See 10.26am and 1.42pm.) But the attraction of a multi-party encounter is that it allows for multiple interpretations. Here are five more.
They are all based on grouping the seven leaders into certain combinations. To arrive at an overall score, I have used the average figures for what all seven leaders got in the four opinion polls released overnight (see 7.01am), and then adjusted accordingly. Some assessments are probably more useful than others, but I will post them here anyway in case they provide fresh insight.
1 - Men beat women
Men: 18.5% on average (ie, the combination of the figures for David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg, divided by four)
Women: 9%
This seems like a barmy conclusion because it is completely counter to the verdict produced by those who have been measuring Twitter sentiment. (See 10.26am.) But there is a difference between posting a positive tweet about someone, and telling a pollster that you thought they won. This figure serves as a reminder that, although Nicola Sturgeon made a very positive impression in the debate, the polls suggest Natalie Bennett and Leanne Wood didn’t.
2 - The right beat the left
Left: 12.25% (with Miliband, Sturgeon and Bennett counting as left)
Right: 21.5% (Cameron and Farage alone) or 17.3% (if Clegg is included as on the right)
Again, the focus on Sturgeon’s impressive performance has overshadowed the extent to which other candidates on the left polled badly.
3 - Parties of government beat parties outside government
Leaders in government: 17% (Cameron, Clegg and Sturgeon)
Leaders out of government: 12.5%
4 - Nationalists beat non-nationalists - just
Nationalists: 14.6% (Sturgeon, Wood and Farage, who is effectively an English nationalist)
Non-nationalists: 14.25%
Bracketing the SNP and Plaid Cymru with Ukip is, of course, questionable, because the SNP and Plaid Cymru are progressive, pro-European parties who are quite different from Ukip in many respects. But there are parallels too, and so in some respects grouping them together could be helpful. It is also worth pointing out that, were it not for the inclusion of Wood, the nationalists would have beaten the non-nationalists, and the non-Londoners beaten the Londoners, quite easily.
5 - Non-Londoners beat Londoners - just
Non-Londoners: 14.6% (Sturgeon, Wood and Farage, who all live outside London.
Londoners: 14.25% (Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Bennett all have their main home in London, even though the first three also have constituency homes outside London.

Updated at 2.25am AEST

3h ago15:46

The Home Office said it would introduce exit checks at the borders from April. But it has emerged that the new system is being phased in gradually.
David Hanson, the shadow immigration minister, has put out a statement claiming this is a symptom of Tory “incompetence”.

The Tories have failed to deliver on their promise of full exit checks, and having left it so late companies are rightly concerned about implementation. People will now be worried that the Tories’ incompetence will lead to yet more queues and chaos at our borders.
While information will be provided to the government about who is booked on a ferry or Eurotunnel, we now know the Tories won’t be checking exits because they left it too late to have a robust system in place. Instead exit checks will be ‘phased’ with no timetable on when they will be complete and no timetable on when this information will be matched with visa data – which is how we really know if someone has left.

3h ago15:29

Further to my post about Alex Salmond (see 2.59pm), a reader points out that, even if I can’t find anyone with a tattoo of David Cameron or Ed Miliband on their leg, Boris Johnson has inspired this level of devotion in at least one fan.

3h ago15:19

According to the Telegraph, Nigel Farage’s decision to say that foreigners who are HIV positive should not be treated by the NHS was part of a deliberate “shock and awful” strategy to mobilise the Ukip core vote.

Privately, insiders conceded the comments were “a bit spicy” but they were vindicated by a half-time ComRes/ITV News poll showing 24 per cent of voters giving Mr Farage the lead in the debate.
“It was a core vote message. It wasn’t to reach out to floating voters. We need to mobilise our base and that’s what he did,” said one senior source. “Call it shock and awe, or call it shock and awful.”

The Telegraph also says that Douglas Carswell, the Tory MP who defected to Ukip, has refused to endorse Farage’s comments. Carswell is on the liberal wing of Ukip and his father was a pioneering Aids/HIV doctor in Africa.

3h ago14:59

Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader, said Nicola Sturgeon “hammered” David Cameron in the debate last night.
Asked about a claim by Michael Gove, the Conservative chief whip, that a Labour/SNP alliance would be a “lethal cocktail”, Salmond replied:

I think Michael Gove is showing all the signs of panic and the distress that the prime minister was showing in the debate last night when he was hammered by Nicola Sturgeon ... I think the first minister is wiping the floor with the Westminster old boys’ network.

Salmond was campaigning in Kircaldy where he also met a particularly enthusiastic supporter.
They certainly are passionate about their politics in the SNP. Does anyone know of anyone with tattoo of David Cameron or Ed Miliband on their leg?

Alex Salmond gets a look at supporter Aphra Wilson’s tattoo, of his good self, in Kircaldy. Salmond was signing copies of his book whilst campaigning in Gordon Brown’s constituency. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

Updated at 1.05am AEST

4h ago14:38

The Tory video team have been busy today. Here is another one they have produced trying to make the case that a Labour government would be held to ransom by the SNP.


theguardian.