Money is only confetti

Over a bizarre weekend, the desperation of Labour and the Conservatives in the UK election stakes is becoming more apparent.

Labour worst of all, in a blatant bribe, offering a stamp duty holiday to first-time buyers who spend under £300k (also, who they hell spends more than £300k on their first house - who waits until they are earning £100k odd before buying, really?).

This is another in a string of vote grabbing strategies that ape the Greek model of just bribing voters to vote for you. Labour, under Gordon Brown, have been the champions of this strategy for a long time and have won 3 of the past four elections on the back of it and are well set to win 4 out of five next week.

The fact that 'there is no money' does not matter to those handed out bribes like this. The view these days, very anti-capitalist, is that there are all these rich people and they should be paying. But even if we take the rich list, the total wealth is only £547 billion - this is all their wealth including assets. The UK's annual GDP is £2 trillion. Even with a massive wealth tax the rich could only possibly contribute around £50 billion a year and as we all know, this would rapidly diminish as they leave (in the same way that the rich list just shows how many rich people come to live in the UK, not how well the UK is doing as an economy, few make their money here from scratch).

The Tories are increasingly likely to join in this game, saving some tax cut promises for late in the Campaign.

My hunch is that all of this confetti will cause two things to happen:

1) Desperate policies will be counter-productive and see a rise in the vote for UKIP and SNP.

2) Long term the new Government of whatever hue is not going to reduce the deficit very much and the UK will be left structurally exposed in the next major economic downturn.

I wonder what other giveaways we will be offered this week?

And so it starts with Salmond at the Fore

Finally, the UK Election hoves into view as the main chapter in the Nation's life for a few weeks.

It is for yourself to decide how welcome this (I am on hols for abroad 2 weeks of it, lucky me!) for your media viewing habits....

Interestingly though this time is that the minor parties are still far up the agenda. This as we know from the last election means a hung parliament is nailed on. With coverage the minor parties have their Oxygen.

Mr Salmond has led the way with his frankly bizarre rants about holding Westminster to ransom. They are less bizarre when you remember how bitter he is to have lost the referendum and with it his job last year. Now is the time for revenge on those pesky English, the bogey men who cost him his job by not being able to vote for him in an Scotland-only referendum.

So now he remains keen to be as obstructive as possible - he is lucky that with such a and tiny vote base on a single issue, his clarity of strategy is easy. Wind up the English, make it hell for Westminster, appear lefty and populist to garner the votes of the '45%.' Simples.

Rather more of a nightmare for Milliband and Cameron. For them too is the Farage outlier, roundly attacked in the press and every slight mistake jumped upon, the role of traditional English underdog beckons for the campaign. The harder the mainstream try, the more oxygen he gets and his vote base firms up. Plus of course, he can become the English anti-Salmond - always important to be a lucky General.

Meanwhile, Cameron produced a non-budget to save excitement for the manifesto, so squandering his last big set-piece and Milliband, well the less said about him the better (literally true, as Labour is so much more popular than its leader...).

The debates finally agreed have an odd structure but this will suit the Government, with so many and such an arcane format they will likely not have the impact of 2010 - so helping the incumbent.

Still though, the Campaign will be bitter and repetitive with so many voices heard and few of reason amongst them.