For all their obvious differences, the rhetoric of both the Tories and Labour on the economy over the past few years has actually been much the same: “an economy that works for everyone”, as Theresa May puts it, or “for the many, not the few” in Jeremy Corbyn’s soundbite of choice. It is ironic then that both parties seem bent on delivering the opposite in their post-Brexit plans, thanks to their shared willingness to disregard by far the biggest part of the national economy: the services sector. The Chequers white paper, for example, indicated that while the government will fight to keep goods in the single market, it is not prepared to do the same for services. Its optimistic claim that this will offer the…

Source: The Times July 30, 2018 23:02 UTC