With the first round of Brexit negotiations due to start just over a week after polling day, Theresa May has made much of how ill-prepared Jeremy Corbyn would be if he ended up in No 10.
“I have the determination and I have the plan,” she said yesterday. “The only other person that can be prime minister in seven days . . . doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t have what it takes.”
But if Mrs May does have a plan, she is as reluctant as Mr Corbyn to spell it out. Both main parties have deliberately not fleshed out key elements of their Brexit strategies. So what do we know about the way they will approach the talks and what don’t we know?
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Mrs May repeated her pledge this week that the “days of Britain making vast annual contributions to the European Union will end” after Brexit. She has also said that in negotiating the so-called Brexit divorce bill she would insist that Britain’s “rights” as well as its “obligations” were taken into account.
But she refuses to put even a ball-park figure on what she considers to be a “vast annual contribution” and what might be reasonable to pay to maintain access to some elements of the single market and participation in the EU’s science and research programmes that she has said she wants to continue.
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Labour is equally silent on what continuing payments it might make to the EU for its stated aim of “retaining the benefits of the single market”. It also has nothing more than the Conservatives to say on the divorce bill.
Immigration
Mrs May says Britain would control its own borders after Brexit but she has not said what form of immigration control a Tory government would introduce.
The Tories won’t say if EU nationals would be given preferential access to UK labour markets or treated equally with the citizens of other non-EU countries. That issue will be one of the key determinants of what kind of Brexit deal the EU might be prepared to offer.
Labour says it accepts that freedom of movement will end and that the party would “develop and implement fair immigration rules”. It does not say what the principles of those new rules would be. It is more specific on the rights of EU citizens now living in the UK. It says it would “immediately guarantee” those rights and not make them dependent on what the EU offered UK expatriates.
Legal oversight
Another of Mrs May’s favoured crowd pleasers in the campaign has been her promise to end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in UK law.
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But if the UK is to have the kind of “deep and special partnership” she says she wants with the EU this would require some form of mutually accepted legal oversight. Who, for example, will be the ultimate arbiter of post-Brexit citizens’ rights, justice and law enforcement co-operation, trade, air travel agreements and regulatory enforcement?
Labour appears to be open to staying under the jurisdiction of the court, with Mr Corbyn telling Andrew Marr last November that preserving “justice issues through the European Court” would be a key objective of the negotiations. However, there is no mention of this position in Labour manifesto.
Northern Ireland/the customs union
Mrs May has said that after Brexit she wants cross-border trade to be as “frictionless as possible”. But there is no flesh on the bones of how little friction might be possible. She has been equally unclear about what customs arrangements she wants to have. She wants the ability to strike independent free trade deals but at the same time says she would like to be an “associate member of the (EU) customs union in some way, or remain a signatory to some elements of it”. Most experts don’t see how those two wishes are compatible. Labour has been equally unclear but has hinted that it might be prepared to give up on making free-trade deals with other countries to stay in the customs union.
No deal
Perhaps the most important question is under what circumstances either Mr Corbyn or Mrs May would be prepared to walk away from the talks. Mrs May’s mantra is that “no deal is better than a bad deal” but she declines to say what a bad deal might look like or what her red lines in the talks would be. Labour’s manifesto states that “no deal is the worst possible deal for Britain”. That implies the party would not be entering into a negotiation but would accept whatever terms were imposed.