For the third time in three years, the national politicians are back on the campaign trail doing their best to win our votes. Once again they are busy telling us what they think we want to hear and promising us sweeties.

But I’m not interested in what they are saying. I’m interested in what they are not saying.

Remember the elephant in the room during the 2010 General Election, when the political parties avoided as far as possible saying anything to do with the spending cuts that everyone knew were coming?

Only after the election was over and the MPs had another five years of job security did we find out the spending cuts meant hundreds of thousands of government and council staff losing their jobs, large swathes of local authority services privatised or axed, the NHS plunging ever deeper into debt, our road repairs being so neglected they filled with potholes – the list goes on and on.

No wonder the party leaders avoided talking about the subject.

That’s like your car insurance company telling you, after you’ve paid for it and someone has totalled your car on the A64, that your policy only applies on minor roads, not motorways, A-roads and B-roads.

What are the party leaders hiding this time, starting with why are we having a General Election?

If the real reason was, as Theresa May says, so that she can get a mandate for her way of handling Brexit, then the proper way was to call the election after she had unveiled a detailed plan of how she intended to deal with Brexit and before triggering Article 50. She did neither.

Instead, she was adamant all through autumn, winter and spring that she didn’t need one because she was carrying out the will of the people. What has changed since?

What persuaded her to call the election she was adamant she wouldn’t call? What can she see coming down the line before the scheduled time for the General Election, May 2020, and which persuaded her to get the votes cast and counted before it happened?

Why was Labour so happy to go along with it?

The result is with the clock ticking on Brexit negotiations – which everyone agrees will be tricky to finish inside two years – she has taken two months out to go campaigning.

She and her party colleagues, like the other party leaders, have spent the early stages of the election talking loudly about various policies to do with the NHS, immigration, energy bills, taxes, etc.

But the European Union is so much a part of life in this country that until we know what Britain will look like outside the European Union, there is no point in discussing internal changes.

How can we possibly know what cash the Government will have until we know the final bill for Brexit?

How will the politicians have time for the legislative work needed to implement all these new policies when Parliament will be working flat out for at least two years discussing all the laws that depend on us being part of the European Union and making the necessary changes to keep the ones we want to keep?

We need to know from each party what they consider essential of European Britain to keep in post-Brexit Britain and what they are prepared to jettison.

By June 8 they will have had almost a year to work it out, but not one of them has gone public on it or how they plan to manage the negotiations to get us there.

The party leaders are proving adept at surrounding themselves with barriers that prevent them from answering awkward questions. They are doing their very best to prevent us finding out what they are so keen not to talk about.

If the voters are not told the unpleasant facts as well as the pleasant ones, then no matter how much the politicians may claim after June 8 they have a mandate to do this, that and the other, they don’t.

You can’t have a mandate to do something if you don’t tell the voters about it during the election.

If only the party leaders would treat the voters as adults and tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.