As we've been reporting, the Conservatives' eye-catching announcement of the day is to raise to £1m the starting point at which inheritance tax is paid on family homes.

How will they fund this tax cut? By increasing the tax paid by people with big pension pots. The Conservatives plan to reduce tax relief on pension contributions on incomes between £150,000 and £210,000. The idea is to cut relief from £40,000 to £10,000.

The director of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, says the change will take "really quite large sums away from people earning more than about £150,000 a year".

And he warned it will "probably either reduce the amount of savings in the economy or create a lot of complexity in the savings landscape".

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They’ve already got Hobbit Martin Freeman on board and now Labour has got the backing of another actor. Robson Green, the former Soldier Soldier star and one half of 90s novelty pop act, Robson & Jerome, tells PA news he doesn’t believe the party’s policies represent the socialism he grew up with in a “true sense”. But, all the same, he adds: “They believe in something I’m passionate about, which is education, the National Health Service and defence. I’ll vote Labour all the time.”

Nick Clegg, pictured earlier today, looked a bit of a natural at tenpin bowling. Maybe he's been practising - to avoid the embarrassment faced by his predecessor Charles Kennedy when he tried his hand at bowling...

Image source, Sophie Long

After a relatively sleepy Easter break, the parties kicked their campaigns into a higher gear this past week, and today was no exception. Here's some of the things we've covered so far today:

• The Conservatives promised to exempt family homes worth up to £1m from inheritance tax , with George Osborne telling Andrew Marr the policy showed Tory "values"
• The Lib Dems announced their economic plans , with Nick Clegg promising only three new spending commitments before the deficit is cleared
• Natalie Bennett said the Green Party would increase the top rate of tax - for those earning over £150,000 - to 60%.
• Leaders of the Scottish parties clashed in a heated Sunday Politics debate over financial policy
• Nigel Dodds of the DUP said his party would not take part in any coalition or formal arrangement to support a party if the SNP was also involved, because Nicola Sturgeon's party want to "break up the United Kingdom"

This is Tom Espiner and Adam Donald signing off, leaving you in the capable hands of Kristiina Cooper and Andrew McFarlane for the rest of the evening.

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That's what the late Gore Vidal said about politicians. Over at the Telegraph, they've compiled some of the best political insults, external - all the way back to Benjamin Disraeli, who said of his great rival William Ewart Gladstone: "If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anybody pulled him out that, I suppose, would be a calamity." But Disraeli wasn't left unscathed - the great radical John Bright called him "a self-made man who worships his creator".

Paul Johnson, the director of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, gives the BBC News Channel a withering verdict on the parties' tax and spending plans.

On tax avoidance, he thinks all the parties are "just making up numbers". The Tories had "made up a £5bn number, the Liberal Democrats a £7bn number and the Labour Party a £7.5bn number". Whether we would get anywhere near to those kind of savings was "anybody's guess", he claimed.

When it was put to him that he didn't sound impressed, he laughed, saying: "I'm not terribly impressed, particularly with some of the things on the tax side. There is this kind of illusion or delusion that there some magic money tree there called tax avoidance which will provide you with lots of easy money to spend on other things."

He wasn't impressed with spending promises either, complaining that the parties had not provided enough detail on the cuts required. He said he wasn't surprised but warned: "I think it's important for everyone to bear in mind that there is some bad news hiding there which we'll no doubt be told about in the spending review from whoever wins the election, which will come towards the end of this year."

Image source, Press Association

The leader of UKIP in Wales has claimed climate change is not man-made. Speaking on BBC Wales' Sunday Supplement, Nathan Gill also said it was "complete stupidity to think by sticking a bunch of wind turbines all over Wales that we are somehow going to stop the weather from changing". Mr Gill's comments were criticised by Labour, the Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party, who all say the climate is affected by human activity.

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On Radio 4's Broadcasting House this morning, (from 12:09 minutes in), the constitutional historian Lord Hennessy and the broadcaster John Sergeant took a trip through the radio archives to look at some of the harsh ways politicians have spoken about one another in the past. They start in 1945, when - in the aftermath of a wartime coalition - Winston Churchill said that a socialist Labour government would require "a kind of Gestapo" to police the society it wanted to make.

A historical view from Jason Beattie, who reminds us that manifesto commitments could, eventually, be met! He says we should remember that large parts of Labour's 1983 manifesto were enacted by Tony Blair's government (apart from nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EU).

he tweets:

@JBeattieMirror

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Image source, Matt Chorley

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Spectator political editor James Forsyth, writing in his Mail on Sunday column, external, has the scoop on Conservative tactics going into the week when manifestos are published: "The Tories have delayed the launch of their manifesto by a day so as not to clash with Labour (on Monday 12 April). They believe that, given time, they can 'unpick' Miliband’s proposals. As one member of the Tory war room puts it: 'Our big job on Monday is to find the flaw and absolutely hammer it."'

With the SNP today launching a charm offensive trying to woo Scottish Labour supporters, Scottish First Minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon (second from left) went to a cafe in Glasgow to talk to SNP converts who were former Labour supporters.

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Image source, Sophie Long

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Answers to questions of funding and taxation can often get lost in all the numbers used during party political blustering. Luckily, the BBC's correspondents sift through the data to get to the bottom line. Economics editor Robert Peston has been asking: who's going to win from today's inheritance tax giveaway announced by the Conservatives?

The TaxPayers' Alliance, a pressure group that campaigns for lower taxes and cuts in government spending, says that Conservative plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million is a first step towards "abolishing Britain's most hated tax altogether".

The Scottish National Party has made a direct approach to Scottish Labour voters, urging them to vote SNP. The 'Guarantee to Labour', external is part of SNP efforts to woo Labour voters with a promise to "lock the Tories out of Downing Street" and to "stand up for progressive politics at Westminster".

UKIP are either poised for an election breakthrough, or are "on the brink of disaster", according to Graham Sharpe, a spokesman for bookmaker William Hill. "No-one seems to know for sure which it will be," he says. "We see polls saying Nigel Farage won't be elected, yet he is favourite to take South Thanet with political punters."