Labour will continue on their negative trail this evening with their latest election broadcast, Nightmare On Your Street, writes John Hipwood.

On Election Call yesterday on BBC Radio 4, Gordon Brown spent nearly as much time attacking the Tories as he did answering questions about Labour policies.

The governing party describes today’s broadcast as “a nightmare vision of the future following the election of a Conservative government”.

It shows a grey-suited government official visiting three families in a suburban street a few weeks after George Osborne’s emergency Budget has cut £6 billion from public spending. He tells the householders that the Conservatives have stopped child tax credits to hundreds of thousands of families, stopped baby bond payments for families with incomes over £16,000, and ended the right to see a cancer specialist within two weeks of GP referral.

These scare tactics are justified by Peter Mandelson, who says: “Labour has a duty to make sure every family in Britain knows how much they would lose if the Conservatives were elected.”

If you like being frightened before the watershed, or if you suddenly find you have better things to do, Nightmare On Your Street is being broadcast on BBC2 at 5.55pm; ITV at 6.25pm; 6.55pm on BBC1; 7.25pm on Five; and 7.55pm on Channel 4.

****

For the second day running David Cameron was collared on the campaign trail by voters unhappy with Conservative Party policies.

First it was Chloe Green at Southampton University who challenged him about funding for students from poorer families, and yesterday it was Jonathan Bartley, who was visibly upset by a Tory manifesto proposal to “end the bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools”.

To his credit, Mr Cameron discussed the issues at length with Miss Green and Mr Bartley, whose seven-year-old son has spina bifida.

Why haven’t Messrs Brown and Clegg been involved in such confrontations?

They couldn’t be using their breakneck schedules to avoid any considered conversations with voters, could they?

****

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has told us what anyone observing the election campaign already knew — that all three major parties Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats — have hidden the truth from the electorate about how they would tackle Britain’s giant budget deficit.

As the governing party, Labour bears the brunt of the IFS onslaught for its failure to spell out the budgets for individual departments from 2011.

****

Ken Clarke conceded yesterday the Government had been right to nationalise Northern Rock when the bank hit the rocks. Chancellor Alistair Darling took it a bit farther by claiming that the former Conservative boss at the Treasury had become the first senior Tory “to admit they got their judgment on the financial crisis wrong”.

****

State funding of political parties might be hard for taxpayers to stomach in the wake of the expenses scandal.

But there continues to be a wide disparity in the spending powers of the major parties.

The Electoral Commission has reported that in the second week of the election campaign the Conservatives raked in £2.2 million in donations over £7,500, compared with Labour’s £1.49 million and the Liberal Democrats’ £120,000.