“The Nationalists are engaging in irrelevances from independence, to talking about who will and who won’t be campaigning in Glasgow East. Our candidate is there and has centre stage – rightly in my view because she is the person people in Glasgow East are being asked to elect. The SNP can talk about peripheral issues but what matters when the cross goes in the box is who will work hard for the area and not for their own self anointed cause.”

Labour was criticised by the SNP for failing to publicise visits to the constituency last Friday by UK cabinet ministers. “If Harriet Harman and Des Browne can turn up where are Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown?”, said Angus Robertson, the party’s Westminster leader.

But Robertson countered: “The Nationalists have cut funding for the Science Centre and disabled children and are backtracking on the promises they made in last year’s elections for the Scottish Parliament. The question is not who has been to campaign, but the substance behind it and by focusing on trivial matters the SNP are either out of ideas in this department or are unwilling to put them to the people of Glasgow.

“With every pledge the Nationalists make people should remember the promises over student debt, over class sizes, over police officers, over first time buyers and over nursery places.”

The Scottish Green Party candidate Dr Eileen Duke today launched the party’s campaign at Easthall Park, near Easterhouse, at the site of a community-owned wind power project.

Accompanied by the party’s two MSPs and by Green councillors, Duke outlined the benefits that community ownership of energy generation could bring to areas like Glasgow East: “All the other parties claim to care about the rising cost of living in Glasgow East, but not one of them has done anything to insulate household fuel bills from soaring oil costs.

“Greens believe in an ‘energy-generating democracy’, where local people could be paid when their excess energy goes back to the grid. Instead of being landed with ever bigger bills every month, families here could be turning high energy prices to their advantage.”