Labour and the Tories have now unveiled their manifestos, setting out starkly different spending plans and pledges.

While Labour have made promises of boosts to public services that would cost billions of pounds, the Tories’ pledges will see the party ‘barely increase’ day-to-day spending.

Yesterday, as the Tory manifesto was released, Labour added a further £58 billion to the party’s costings by pledging to compensate the 3.7 million women who lost out on state pensions when their retirement age was raised.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell announced the spending for the so-called Waspi women born in the 1950s – Women Against State Pension Inequality – in what the Tories called a ‘panic move’.

The pledge did not feature in the party’s manifesto and would have to be paid for by adding to the UK’s £1.8 trillion debt, Mr McDonnell admitted.

It takes Labour’s annual spending splurge to more than £97 billion and means their manifesto promises spending £32 for every £1 extra spent by the Tories.

A team of analysts for Sky News also examined the tax and spending plans of the major parties and found both Labour and the Lib Dems have have made promises that would cost the UK tens of billions of pounds a year.

But the Conservative Party’s entire spending plans add up to just under £3 billion extra by 2024, Sky reports.

That is less, in terms of an increase in current spending, than Labour’s education plan of £3.3 billion for further education funding alone.

The Prime Minister launched his ‘Get Brexit Done’ manifesto in Telford by insisting the UK will leave the EU in January as his withdrawal agreement is ‘precooked and ready to go’.

Boris Johnson vowed to put 20,000 more police officers on the streets, as well as promising 50,000 new nurses and 50,000,000 GP appointments.

This was followed by a promise that Scots and Northern Irish citizens would remain ‘passionate’ about their identities, while also being part of a ‘proud, strong and whole United Kingdom’.

Fact-checker Full Fact accused Mr Johnson of being ‘economical with the truth’ and said the Tories had not been upfront about the full cost of their initiatives in the 59-page document.

In the costings list provided with the Tory manifesto, it stated the price of training 50,000 extra nurses and paying their maintenance grant would be £879 million in 2023/24.

But Full Fact said training that number of nurses, funding their £24,000 salaries and stumping up National Insurance contributions would cost the NHS closer to £2.8 billion.

Meanwhile Labour has been criticised by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies over its promise to compensate Waspi women.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Paul Johnson said the policy’s estimated cost of £58 billion is ‘a very, very large sum of money indeed’.

He added: ‘I think there are two interesting things about that – one is the sheer scale of it, and of course it immediately breaks the promises they made in their manifesto just last week only to borrow to invest.

‘So, they would need even more than their £80 billion tax rises if they wanted to cover that.

‘The other, I suppose, is just a statement of priorities or decisive lack of priorities, because there’s so much money for so many things, but they’re not finding money, for example, to reverse the welfare cuts for genuinely poor people of working wage.

‘Whilst some of these Waspi women really have suffered hardship as a result of not realising that this pension age increase is happening, although it was announced back in the early 1990s, many of them are actually quite well off.’

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