A selection of front pages of the multi-varied British press.

What the papers say

Who should the British vote for on 6 May? Here’s a selection of front pages and opinions from the national press. One thing is clear, if Britain might not be “broken” as the Conservatives would have it, it is definitely angry.

Published on 5 May 2010 at 12:00
A selection of front pages of the multi-varied British press.

On Gordon Brown

“Yet being an appalling PM doesn't make Gordon a small one. Far from it, this is the largest politician we've known since Mrs Thatcher – a man who'd have stood tall in any age but stands out as a Titan in this one. The fact that his role model is Prometheus, with his liver devoured daily, highlights his extraordinary talents both for provoking sadistic attack and for futile regeneration after it.” Soon, Gordon, the torment will be over. Matthew Norman inThe Independent.

On Nick Clegg

“Clegg scores by seeming utterly sincere. Here again, a hierarchy emerges. Brown struggles to communicate in plain, human English; Cameron is better, having mastered the simple, fluent sentence, but leaves doubts as to whether his words are merely those of a slick salesman. Clegg is just as fluent as Cameron, his sentences, if anything, even more colloquial and easy to understand. But he has one great advantage over his Conservative rival: no one so much as raises the question of his sincerity. He is assumed to be completely genuine.” How the also-ran stole the show. Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian.

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On why Britain should vote Conservative

“New Labour will also be remembered for corrupting the democratic process, politicising the Civil Service, turning judges into lawmakers through the Human Rights Act, emasculating the House of Lords and destroying a private pensions system that was once the envy of the world. It has presided over a welfare system that drains incentives to work, launched a series of bloody and highly questionable wars, cheated us out of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and encouraged unprecedented mass immigration - thereby placing intolerable strain on our public services and striking at our very identity as a nation.” Vote decisively to stop Britain walking blindly into disaster. Leader in The Daily Mail

On why Britain shouldn't

“I don't have a phobia about Tories. That would suggest an irrational response. I hate them for a reason. For lots of reasons, actually. For the miners strike, apartheid, selling council houses, lining the pockets of the rich and hammering the poor – to name but a few… As a young man Cameron looked out on the social carnage of pit closures and mass unemployment, looked at Margaret Thatcher's government and thought, these are my people.” I hate Tories. Gary Younge in The Guardian.

On race

“Frankly, I never thought I’d see the day the local Tory party would select a Birmingham-born Sikh businessman as a candidate, and even though I still struggle with the concept of an Asian Tory — it feels as improbable as a miaowing rabbit — if the child of immigrants is elected as a Tory MP in this seat, which was Conservative from its inception in 1950 until Tony Blair took over as Prime Minister, it will be an encouraging sign that politics in Wolverhampton, the first town in Britain to experience mass immigration, have finally been de-racialised.” I’m Labour, but… Sathnam Sanghara inThe Times.

On the elephant in the room

“This is a grave time for our country; graver than most seem to realise. It is a shame that Gordon Brown's pathetic and, for him, mortal insult of a woman who spoke for England last week distracted attention from what otherwise would have been the most significant story of the election: the report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies into the failure of any of the main parties to address how they would tackle the deficit. The parties have been allowed to stay in a universe parallel to the real economy, and to real international markets, because the electorate seems quite happy for them to talk about "values", "the big society" and "fairness" as a sort of simulacrum of a policy debate. But then reality will come soon enough, starting some time on Friday.” Vote with care, then prepare for the worst. Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph.

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