Latest updates as the parties head into the last 10 days of the campaign, as Labour unveils plans to scrap stamp duty for first-time buyers and 5,000 small business owners come out for CameronInteractive: what are the parties offering you?Catch up with our essential morning briefing 4.45pm AEST Disappointing news. I posted a picture of Sturgeon in my morning briefing gamely braving a gym beam, and said she did not fall off.It turns out I was wrong.@Claire_Phipps Good morning! I witnessed Sturgeon’s beam walk and can confirm she fell off@Claire_Phipps Sorry to say she did. Ms Sturgeon then contemplated trying to swing on this but decided against it pic.twitter.com/KR0CXBjuLh 4.41pm AEST Hillary Benn, shadow local government secretary, is on the Today programme now, talking about Labour’s housing proposals.Benn says the number of homes being built needs to increase substantially. He says Labour is committed to 200,000 extra homes a year by 2020.Hilary Benn says stamp duty would go up for foreign buyers of homes to help pay for three year stamp duty holiday for many 1st time buyers 4.22pm AEST Ireland correspondent Henry McDonald has this report:Northern Ireland’s health minister has resigned after uttering anti-gay remarks during the general election campaign.Democratic Unionist party (DUP) candidate Jim Wells now faces a police investigation over a further anti-gay controversy involving a lesbian couple at the weekend. 3.59pm AEST Good morning and welcome to the Guardian election live blog. For the election that is next week. Ten days away. That thought might make you feel excited, trepidatious, fatigued or just plain angry. Fear not: we cover all bases here.I’m Claire Phipps and I’ll be starting off the blog, helpfully providing you with what you need to know to get through the morning, before handing over to Andrew Sparrow. We’re on Twitter, @Claire_Phipps and @AndrewSparrow, and hovering below the line, too, so come and share your thoughts.Take the ‘right’ of SNP MPs to vote in the Commons, or the supposed lack of legitimacy that stems from it. No one who purports to be a unionist can question it. They have the right.That’s why we fought and won the referendum: to enshrine the rights of Scots to go on sending representatives, fully equal to every other, to Westminster. Glib and lazy talk about SNP MPs somehow not being as entitled to vote in every division in the Commons as any other British MP simply fuels nationalist paranoia.If you want political excitement, go to Greece. If you want more showbiz in this election, go to Hollywood.Here and now in the UK I’m focused on something real. A stronger economy – something that excites millions more: more jobs, more homes, more business, more childcare, more security in retirement.UK. Failure to win majority against either Brown in crisis or Miliband would mean chop for Cameron. Open talk today in party and press. one of the boldest policy announcements of the election campaign, designed to steal David Cameron’s thunder We run small businesses right across the country. We work hard, make sacrifices and invest our own money to help our businesses grow and succeed. It was tough during the recession, but we kept going.This Conservative-led government has been genuinely committed to making sure Britain is open for business. They’ve managed to get the economy moving again by tackling the deficit, helping to keep interest rates low and inflation down.The immorality of homes becoming sterile investments takes us straight to the other big fault line: rising inequality and stalled social mobility. The two are linked, because if you must cling precariously to the home base you have — rented or mortgaged, council or private — it reduces your ability to move, change, re-educate yourself and leave a dead-end job and rock the financial boat with a small enterprise.Cameron is right to hold his nerve. He does not need every single beneficiary of the recovery to vote for him. He just requires a sufficiency of pencils to hover for long enough in the polling booth, as voters decide, at the only moment that matters, that this is no time for a change.Why panic when such an outcome remains possible – plausible, even? .@nick_clegg: "In this General Election, we are fighting 60 Eastleighs" #GE2015 http://t.co/YOro5TVMk4 pic.twitter.com/o5HG7i2r5S Continue reading...
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