Big Pharma Needs a Public Stake by Seamus Milne

What are the key defining moments in Britain’s imperial decline? The massive Lend Lease debts incurred during the Second World War, and still being paid to the USA some seventy years later. The rapid loss of colonies after the war, with India, the jewel in the crown, being the most significant. Then came the Suez debacle. After Suez came the collapse of the pound and the humiliating need for an IMF bailout. And the final nail in the imperial coffin, the selling off of Britain’s assets to the highest bidder. The takeover of the privatised British Steel by the Indian Tata Steel Group was a particularly painful historical irony for British capital to swallow.

China has now been drafted in to finance and build the next generation of nuclear power stations. And the list of once mighty British companies that grew rich on the spoils of empire that are now in foreign hands grows by the day. Last year it was Kraft’s takeover of Cadbury’s.This year it is shaping up to be Pfizer’s takeover of British pharmaceuticals company, AstraZeneca. How the mighty have fallen.

In a half decent article written by Seumas Milne of The Guardian 7/5/14, we are offered a clear insight into the behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings by the corporate world as it seeks to by-pass national tax legislation and local democracy by moving operations to the point of highest return. In this case it is US based Pfizer seeking to gobble up and asset strip the UK/Sweden pharmaceuticals corporation, AstraZenica. This type of corporate cannibalism is inevitable in the current global regime of free-market neo-liberalism. And it is yet one more example, if another example is needed, of global capital continuing to concentrate itself in fewer and fewer hands, oblivious to national borders and local concerns.

The weakness of Milne’s article, if he will forgive me for saying so, is that he waits until the very last paragraph before making a weak and half-hearted plea for some form of public stake in the corporates. But tinkering around the edges as proposed by the Will Hutton/ Ed Milliband types simply won’t do the trick. We humans, after enduring ten thousand years of private ownership of the means of production, have come to a momentous crossroads. Either we sit back and allow some two hundred giant transnational corporations to plunder and wreck our planet; economically, socially and environmentally, or we methodically and consciously establish forms of social ownership and control over the commanding heights of the globalised economy. Tinkering around the edges will no longer suffice. No national legislation, even by a country as powerful as the US, can now stand up these transnational conglomerates like Pfizer.

What Milne should have been calling for in his column is effective global governance to impose public control over what has become a mountain of highly concentrated, privately owned, capital. This now is the only item on the agenda. Public versus private ownership is the central dialectic from which all other social concerns derive. There can be no effective war against poverty, under-development, climate change and religious ignorance and bigotry, until this all-embracing central dialectic has been resolved, and resolved in favour of the 99.9%. Everything else proposed by the Ed Millibands of this world, no matter how well meaning, will be ineffective and doomed to fail. Capital operates in a moral vacuum and it will take humanity’s most conscious and determined effort to impose a social morality into that vacuum.

One reason that Pfizer is so keen to create a UK base is to take advantage of the corporate friendly tax regime so willing installed by Thatcher, Blair, Brown and Cameron. Seumas Milne is spot on here. And if a Milliband government should dare to reign in that corporate friendly regime, companies like Pfizer will simply relocate to Ireland or other willing and compliant tax havens. No national government can hope to outsmart global capital. Any response to global capital must, in essence, be global itself. That means globally connected trade unions, globally connected political parties and globally connected environmental campaigns. Globally constituted and locally administered must be the strategy in response to global capital. Milne argues that corporates still have a national base and national loyalties. This may have been true once but this notion is increasingly redundant. Capital increasingly recognises no national borders and no local democracy. Profit maximisation is its only rational and both Milliband and Milne need to keep that truth firmly in the forefront of their thinking. Both are honest operators but honesty alone will not be enough.

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