Voting for a new Britain: Campaigns Briefing 13 Days to Go

THE TORIES chose tourism as their theme of the day, claiming that Labour and Liberal Democrat proposals for scrapping the uniform business rate and a pounds 2 per night bed tax for tourists would hit an industry that generates pounds 2.4bn each year. Liberal Democrats proposed a home insulation programme, claiming 6,000 people die in Scotland every year because they can't heat their homes. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, visited an Internet Cafe in Edinburgh to promote Labour's plans for a new "digital taskforce", which will bring together government and the computer industry. Donald Dewar, who has travelled 2,500 miles so far, was in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire.

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MARGARET JAMIESON, who is fighting Kilmarnock and Loudoun for Labour, won a temporary injunction against the SNP over an article in an election newsletter, which she said was defamatory.

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JOB SHARING by members of the Scottish Parliament has been deemed out of order. The Highlands and Islands Alliance thought it had made a breakthrough when nomination papers with two names in one box were accepted. But the returning officer Arthur McCourt has said only the first-named candidate will sit if the Alliance wins.

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FAR LEFT or Far Out? A press release from the Scottish Socialist Party flags up a "Change the drugs laws" election rally in Edinburgh Assembly Rooms on Thursday 29 May at 7.30pm. That is, of course, three weeks after the election. What are the comrades on?

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"BEFORE DISMISSING this as the fantasies of the James Bond Party, I think we should look at the very real evidence that they are in fact being undermined from within - if only by their present leader Alex Salmond." Labour MP Malcolm Savidge speaking in the Commons about SNP claims that it had been infiltrated by MI5.