Nonsense election claims or canny politics? Or both?

Today's rival announcements fronted by Labour leader Ed Miliband and Chancellor George Osborne set the stage for the campaigns until May. Credit: Peter Byrne/Anthony Devlin/PA Wire

So, a new political year has kicked off with a raft of press conferences and Labour and the Tories' latest posters.

As you will quickly see, they are both total nonsense. The comparison with the 1930s is particularly baffling. Sure, we didn't have an NHS then, but we ruled half the globe and still had an enormous military (by the standards of today) so as a scare tactic it seems intellectually vacuous, to say the least.

The Conservatives' election poster was criticised for featuring a road from Germany. Credit: Joe Giddens/PA Wire

Meanwhile the Tories seem to have taken every comment made by every Labour spokesman or woman over the last five years and turned it into a policy 'commitment' that needs to be costed up and used in anger against them.

So what is going on?

For Labour, it is pretty simple. The NHS has always been and remains its strongest issue. Most senior Tories admit the botched reforms were a serious mistake and Labour is going to make every effort to fan public fear that the nature of the service itself is changing in a way that will lead inevitably to its break-up.

Labour leader Ed Miliband has said he will lead a 'crusade to change the country'. Credit: Peter Byrne/PA Wire

This may work and it may not. We certainly all do love the NHS and worry about it a lot (as pretty much every poll agrees), but there seems little sign the public senses a genuine crisis yet.

For the Tories, there was some low but moderately clever politics at play. They know very well that half of the comments they have costed up amount to little more than opposition politicians looking for something to say.

A quintet of Conservative Cabinet figures fronted the Tory response to Labour's spending claims. Credit: Anthony Devlin/PA Wire

But it is also true - as Ed Balls would almost certainly admit - that a lot of shadow ministers have been rather ill-disciplined in their public pronouncements over the last five years and it may be fair enough to hang some of this around their necks.

So it seems to me that this is an attempt to stop Labour having its cake and eating it and to prevent its shadow ministers noisily opposing cuts before quietly accepting them.

In any event, the election campaign has clearly begun. Hold on to your hats!