I'm going to start with you Charles. There was an elephant in the room tonight and it was the big hole in the public finances. Nobody really seemed to mention that head on.

The Liberal Democrat's Nick Clegg did suggest a few cuts. Euro to biometric passports. He's got one or two others. But basically, they're still pretty small ones. £15bn out of £65bn or so that has to be cut and even some of that he was suggesting might be spent in other ways like on school child premium.

So this is really the big issue for whoever takes over the government and it could be a poison chalice. Mervyn King said that whoever wins the next election is going to the lose one after and not be in power for another 10 years. So it might be that the losing one will be the winner.

Robin Bew - I just think it is very interesting that for all of the parties a lot of the cuts that they have announced are actually around efficiency savings and we know from experience that those can be extraordinarily difficult to actually find in practice and most of the parties, with the exception of the Liberal Democrats have actually ring fenced big chunks of public spending from the cuts.

So you have to find this £50bn, £60bn from a very small chunk of the public spending bill and that's going to be extraordinarily difficult and in fact, in our view, probably impossible.

I think it is important to recognise that the £6bn of cuts that the Conservatives are talking about putting into effect this year is absolutely minuscule in the context of the public spending bill and the economy overall. So actually, the impact is going to be very, very modest.

But I think an emergency budget would be an opportunity to start rethinking perhaps some of these ring fenced areas and making it clear that perhaps the cuts will have to fall a bit more widely and indeed, areas where the taxes are going to go up.

I fear that even Lib Dem's plan for £10,000 tax limit is not going to be able to be afforded. If they can make the money up somewhere else, that money will be needed to plug the deficit.

I think the interesting thing with Clegg though was saying that he would go ahead with a lot of these policies without international agreement and of course you see the other parties much more interested in whether you get the other major financial centres to step in and perhaps put something in place as a bit more globally co-ordinated. So we saw that on the banking side.

Of course, the other area that we talked about which is impacting on the rich was inheritance tax and the Conservative plans there to increase the inheritance tax threshold. A lot of discussion about that. Actually, relatively small sums of money at stake, but an interesting political counterpoint to perhaps cutting tax child credits, tax credits for children.

I felt that given that this is such a highly charged policy area and his policy is perhaps one that you wouldn't imagine would resonate with many in the audience, which the other two parties didn't manage to land the killer blow perhaps they could have done on him. So he did pretty well in this area.

Of course, the point was made that David Cameron is having a cap that only applies to actually quite a small proportion who come from outside the European Union. He said there won't be transition periods for new members, but there is only going to be one new member, Croatia, pretty small country in the new future. So that's not all that relevant really. Robin Bew - It's also relevant to point out that a lot of the immigrants come here for economic reasons and given the shape of the UK economy now and over the next few years, it's likely to be far few are going to want to come anyway.

But nonetheless, as you say, everyone loves manufacturing. It's been one of the themes you've seen come up in other debates as well. Perhaps a counterpoint to what we see happening in the financial sector, but I didn't hear any policies tonight that are really going to change that story.

Charles Jenkins - Yes, I mean it's actually a perfectly sensible policy. What's the point of building a whole lot of new buildings when you can repair old buildings and provide incentives to new build new buildings? But yes, he didn't perhaps answer it as strongly as he did the one on immigration.

I think that Clegg did slightly better in the first debate. I thought slightly better. The opinion polls showed much better and Cameron did slightly better in the second debate. I thought that they were pretty even. They had one or two direct confrontations which they hadn't had to the same extent before, but neither of them scored a winning blow.

So I think all three come out of these debates fairly well and I think the debates have been proven to be useful.

There was an interesting commentary by John Lloyd who said that the debates show completely the wrong things and hide the policies that really matter and he cited the debate between Nixon and Kennedy where apparently Nixon had a painful knee and this gave him a rather bad impression. He did much better on the radio according to opinion polls than he was on the television because people didn't see him. So there could be unfair aspects to it, but I think on the whole, that the debates have been successful. Whether there should have been as many as three of them, I'm not sure.

Robin Bew - I actually think they've been pretty good. In terms of the depth of the policy debate, much higher than I had expected before all this started. If you look at the quality of debates you see in other countries, often it can be very, very political and not much policy discussed. No question that we didn't get to the root of our £50bn hole, but I don't think anyone expected that. But broadly, the quality of the answers have been pretty high.

I felt this one was relatively even. Perhaps Cameron and Clegg doing slightly better than Brown. But also, I think people did seem a bit more desperate. As Charles said, you saw a few blows being landed on each other and we haven't really seen that before and then right at the end at the closing statements Brown saying something really quite extraordinary, this idea that if nothing changed he would be out of office because Cameron and Clegg will be running the country in a week's time. Quite an astonishing admission and a real sense I think of the desperation that Labour are now feeling if the polls don't move.