Let us applaud Sturgeon and Bennett’s input, but not give them our vote

The SNP's anti-austerity rhetoric is a pose, and the Greens are playing fantasy economics. Only voting Labour can protect the UK from savage and unfair cuts

This is an appeal to the idealists, the dreamers, the hankerers after a new, sunny kind of British politics, where the spending axe is buried and a thousand flowers bloom. Please don't be beguiled into throwing away your vote.

Watching the seven-strong leaders' debate, which already seems an age ago, anyone on the left found it heart-warming to see the economic argument being turned upside down. Instead of starting from the grim necessity of deficit reduction, the Greens' Natalie Bennett, Plaid Cymru's Leanne Wood and the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon rejected austerity, and instead prioritised human decency and fairness.

It's hard to see how the Conservatives' hoped-for cuts could be achieved without a fundamental reshaping of the state

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