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Campaign analysis: Monday April 18
Daniel Forman's daily diary of the election campaign.
Monday April 18, 11:10am
It looks like it's health week for Labour.
Following the party's first themes of the economy and education Tony Blair kicked off campaigning again this morning with an attack on the Tories' "right to choose" policy (formerly known as the patient's passport).
He declined to repeat his "24 hours to save the NHS" claim of 2001 but the prime minister hopes a sustained period of debate on the Conservative position on private subsidies will have the same effect as his deconstruction of Michael Howard's spending plans last week.
Howard believes his policies will stand up to scrutiny, but that is not always the point.
If Labour repeats its attack loudly and often enough it will hope some of it will hit home regardless, or at least scare its own supporters into action.
Howard himself has promoted his pension plans for the second day running, not wanting to waste the opportunity to make the most of one of his three major tax cutting proposals.
The Tories have kept £1bn more up their sleeve to announce at a later date.
The main tactical advantage here is that Labour has nothing more than "pensions principles" to offer the electorate.
Yet there is a danger these initiatives have been left too late to have much impact.
Shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin was so scarred by Gordon Brown's savage attack on Conservative spending plans in last year's Budget that he was determined to hold back his figures from Labour for as long as possible.
They do at least give the Conservatives something new to grab media attention with. But a £1bn income tax cutting policy with less than two weeks to go before polling day could backfire if it looks like a pre-election bribe.
As for the Liberal Democrats, they again looked slightly left out of the main debate this morning by talking about policing plans.
They may suffer from a lack of attention. However the flipside of this is that they loftily - if such a word can be used to describe Charles Kennedy - stand above the squabbling.
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