Ed Miliband plans four million doorstep visits in bid for No 10

Ed Miliband is urging Labour activists to carry out four million conversations with members of the public before the general election in May.

The Labour leader says this is twice the number carried out by the party in the same period in 2010 and more than any British political party has ever attempted before.

"We will win this election, not by buying up thousands of poster sites, but by having millions of conversations," he is expected to say at a rally in Manchester later today.

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"I am going to be leading those conversations in village halls, community centres, workplaces right across the country, starting this very week and every week from now until the election. I want you to be doing the same. This year, we will be making our case, explaining our vision, house by house, street by street, town by town."

The Conservative party, which launched its poster campaign last week, is expected to outspend Labour by around 3-1, according to LabourList.

The Tories today accused Labour of promising unfunded spending commitments of £20.7bn in the first year if they win the general election. However, the BBC's political correspondent Chris Mason points out that the Conservatives have not said how the final figure was reached.

Mason adds there will be plenty of campaign posters and newspaper articles in the weeks to come "with many focusing on the 'central battleground' of the economy".

Today, Miliband will say the election amounts to a "contest between two different visions of how Britain can succeed".

But The Guardian's Patrick Wintour warns that both parties will struggle to reverse the trend towards protest voting.

"Truculent voters will have to be persuaded to shed their byelection frame of mind, and accept that this contest in essence remains a binary choice between two kinds of government for the next five years," he says. "Protest votes of Scottish nationalism, English nationalism or Green idealism might have suited the elections of 2014, but not the big choice of 2015."