article: Nicola Sturgeon will today launch an extraordinary bid to ‘lead the UK’ as she unveils a string of policies apparently tailor-made for a power-sharing deal with Labour. The SNP leader will unveil a manifesto including proposals for British foreign policy, welfare payments, energy bills and English university tuition fees. Several of her election pledges overlap with Labour policy, including slashing tuition fees in England from a maximum of £9,000 a year to £6,000, and rolling back competition in the English NHS. Others are calculated to drag a minority Labour government to the left, including halting the roll-out of Iain Duncan Smith’s popular changes to benefits and cancelling the Trident nuclear weapons system. Scroll down for video . Control: The Tories warn SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon will be Ed Miliband's puppet master if he becomes Prime Minister after the election . Several election pledges in Miss Sturgeon's manifesto overlap with Labour policy, including slashing tuition fees in England from a maximum of £9,000 a year to £6,000, and rolling back competition in the English NHS . The SNP also wants the UK to formally recognise Palestine as a state, give energy regulator Ofgem the power to force suppliers to cut prices and to increase public spending on infrastructure in northern England and Wales. At the heart of the SNP’s manifesto are plans for what Miss Sturgeon has called ‘modest’ spending increases funded by yet more borrowing – but which in fact total £180billion over five years. Scotland’s First Minister, who is not herself running for a Westminster seat, said yesterday the SNP had much in common with Left-wing Labour MPs and aimed to build a ‘progressive alliance’ for people ‘right across the UK’. ‘There is an opportunity to build progressive alliances for progressive policies. It is a real rather than a pretend alternative to austerity,’ she told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. Today’s SNP election manifesto will be the first to be the focus of intense national scrutiny. Polls suggest the party is on course for a landslide victory north of the border, winning as many as 50 seats and holding the balance of power at Westminster. That could trigger constitutional turmoil of the sort that followed the 1910 election, when Irish Nationalists surged and ended up with more than 70 seats. In the years that followed, there was bitter conflict and the larger part of Ireland eventually seceded from the UK. The huge surge in support for the SNP could see senior Labour figures such as Jim Murphy (left) and Douglas Alexander (right) lose their seats . The latest Scotland-wide YouGov survey shows the SNP on a record 49 per cent, up three, with Labour trailing on 25 per cent, down four. The Conservatives were on 18 per cent and Liberal Democrats on just four per cent. The scale of the shift in traditional Labour strongholds in Scotland is unprecedented in modern European politics. Even senior Labour figures, including the Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and the shadow foreign secretary and the party’s election campaign coordinator, Douglas Alexander, are facing defeat. The SNP will declare today that a ‘strong team’ of SNP MPs in Westminster would help ‘rebalance the UK - both politically and economically - from the chronic over-dominance of the City of London, which has harmed the overall UK economy and left regions of England neglected’. Miss Sturgeon insisted those who had asked Scotland to remain in the UK in last year’s independence referendum could not now object to it calling the shots at Westminster. ‘We were told by leaders of the No campaign during the closing stages of the referendum debate that Scotland’s voice really mattered. Indeed, we were told that Scotland shouldn’t leave the UK but lead the UK,’ she said. ‘So it is more than a bit rich, now that Scotland has decided to remain part of the Westminster system, for anyone in London or elsewhere to try and imply that Scotland’s voice shouldn’t be heard or that Scotland’s voice somehow becomes an illegitimate one if people here decide to elect a large number of SNP MPs.’ However, the First Minister will face tough questions at today’s launch over her plans for ‘full fiscal autonomy’ or effective ‘home rule’, which would see almost every power apart from foreign affairs and defence devolved to Holyrood. It would end the generous Barnett Formula that funds Scotland. The Institute for Fiscal Studies  has predicted that a ‘fiscally autonomous’ Scotland would have a £7.6billion black hole in its finances.
highlights: Nicola Sturgeon will today unveil SNP manifesto as a 'bid to lead the UK'
  Several of her party's election pledges will overlap with Labour policies .
  Others are calculated to drag a minority LAbour government to the left .
  These include cancelling Trident and halting Tory changes to benefits .
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