Voters face real choice in wild-card election

The dissolution of Parliament on Monday marked the official start of the general election campaign. And what "an election of wild cards" it promises to be, says Steve Richards in The Independent. "No one knows how many votes Ukip and the Greens will secure, or how many seats the Liberal Democrats will keep."

The fallout from September's referendum means that the SNP is likely to "make hay in Scotland". Meanwhile, the two big parties are following very different strategies: Labour is pitching "a post-New Labour message", while the Conservatives will use arguments "largely unchanged from recent elections". The latter seems a particularly questionable decision: will voters really "support something that they have rejected in elections since 1997"?

Quite, says The Times. During last week's head-to-head leaders' debate, David Cameron "appeared to lack a defining theme beyond deficit reduction". It appears that the Conservatives have decided "to concentrate on the economy, seemingly to the exclusion of all other issues".

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Yet this focus "makes Cameron seem narrow and out of step with a nation which always has higher concerns than with aggregate GDP, as important as that is". Indeed, it almost seems "as if balancing the books is Cameron's sole claim to office".

By taking this tack, the Tories show they aren't listening to voters, says Ian Birrell in The Daily Telegraph. "The key issues on doorsteps are those old family favourites of schools, health and housing" bad news for a party seen as "uncaring and untrustworthy on public services" and "detached from the problems of ordinary people and serving the interests of the rich".

This is the fault of "policies such as bungled health reforms and the cut in top-rate tax, which even Downing Street insiders concede was stupid politics", and the "relish with which some figures seemed to embrace the painful shrinking of the state".

Still, it's better that the debate between the parties on thedeficit is "upfront and out in the open this time", saysThe Guardian. The differences in tax and spending are "bigger than since the 1980s", making a healthy contrast with "the sound and fury of the 2001 and 2005 campaigns", which "centred on rival expenditure plans where the differences totted up to less than 1% of GDP". Overall, "the choices confronting the country in campaign 2015 are stark much starker than in the average general election".

Yet the chance of an honest political debate about these issues is slight, says the Financial Times. "The next five weeks will be a weary slog through a swamp of misleading assertions and numbers taken out of context."

Already the Conservatives are making "dodgy" claims about tax, while Labour is taking a "one-eyed approach" to data on living standards. It's dispiriting that "politicians rank beneath bankers, journalists and estate agents on measures of public trust", but not surprising. "Britain's political class does not trust [voters] with a frank statement of what will come next." No wonder so little trust is granted in return.