The U.K. election on May 7 is too interesting for the country's good. Neither the Conservatives nor Labour expect to win a majority of seats in Parliament. Everything will depend on deals struck after the vote — an idea to which other countries are accustomed, but not Britain. Never have the election promises of the two big parties seemed so irrelevant.
Even allowing for this dynamic, the offers of Labour and the Conservatives are weirdly thin in one respect. This was supposed to be an election about Europe. To dent the popularity of the UK Independence Party and deal with a long-standing rift in his own team, Prime Minister David Cameron has promised that if he's re-elected he will negotiate new terms for the country's membership in the European Union, then put the result to a stay-or-go referendum.
You might therefore expect detailed back-and-forth about what the United Kingdom wants from the EU, and what its options outside the union would be. This hasn't happened. Labour calls Brexit unthinkable, without saying why it's unthinkable. And Cameron hasn't said how the current terms would need to change for him to recommend voting yes in the referendum.