The Guardian has reported that:
The UK's successful vaccine rollout was thanks to “greed” and “capitalism”, Boris Johnson has told Conservative MPs during a private call.
Johnson hailed the fact that more than 28 million people have been given a first jab in the UK, saying: “The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends.”
It is quite extraordinary that even when making base claims Johnson can't get things right.
The only thing that I think the government can really claim to have got especially right in the vaccine programme has been to have ordered sufficient of it. That was a success. But before we get too carried away, this has to be compared with its failure in buying almost everything else, from PPE to track and trace, to consultancy services, onwards. The government splashed cash. On vaccines it worked. It was a rare exception that does not prove foresight, but luck.
That there was a vaccine developed in the UK was not thanks to the government, or greed or capitalism, but to a university. I presume that some there will have small fortunes as a result. But it is exceptionally hard to presume this was the motive for many years of work put in beforehand. If money making is the aim then being a university academic is a funny way to go about it. The evidence to support Johnson's claim is scant.
There is also little evidence that this development put us much ahead in any race. AstraZeneca seems intent in destroying any faith the world has in its vaccine by issuing false results of its testing at present, and initially by simply getting that testing wrong. If we have had more of its vaccine as a result that has partly been because it's not the world's first choice. If greed is a factor in the vaccine debate, AZ seems to be doing its best to prove its negative impact.
In addition, whilst there is no doubt that being paid to inject vaccines did encourage GPs and others to organise vaccination programmes I am not too sure many will be saying greed and capitalism were motives. I know there are GPs deeply motivated by profit, but I would suggest they are the exception. Most are money conscious, without a doubt, but Johnson massively overstates his case. This also ignores the fact that much of the supply was by NHS workers, whose reward is to be a 1% pay rise. So much for greed and capitalism.
What can be said with some certainty is that the vaccine programme worked because of its NHS focus. The fact that major outsourcers have had little role is likely to have been a major contributor to its success.
What is apparent then is Johnson's obvious lack of understanding as to how capitalism works. Because he has never actually run a business (like most of capitalism's political proponents, including almost all those in university economics departments) he clearly does not appreciate that greed is almost certain to kill the prospects of success of any enterprise. The one person I almost invariably showed the door to during my accounting practice career were those who said that they were setting up a business to make a great deal of money. The reason was not political aversion for their desire. It was, instead, the certainty of their forlorn hope that motivated me to cut my losses as quickly as possible.
The fact is that the greedy make extremely bad business people. They screw their customers, suppliers and employees. And, before long, the goodwill that is essential for any business to survive, however good its idea might be, is destroyed, and with it any chance of success.
If Johnson really understood business he would know that it (and so capitalism) succeeds by the allocation of capital to the meeting of perceived need or want in a way that delivers customer satisfaction (which in turn requires at least acceptable levels of supplier and employee satisfaction) with profit being a resulting epiphenomenon of that process. In capitalism profit is earned from a job done well.
What Johnson described was something quite different. He described speculative rentierism. In the minds of many Tories, and clearly that of the Prime Minister, this is what capitalism now is. But those thinking that are wrong. Rentierism, which can also be described as financial capitalism, is the process of skimming an unearned reward off the top of the efforts of others, the endeavours of which people are not advanced, and may well be hindered, by the process.
This process is greed driven. It wants what has rightly been earned by others. So it takes rents, royalties and other fees. It charges excess interest. It seeks to secure contracts by favour. It diverts what should be public income steams for private gain. It hollows out companies by stripping them of their assets. It seeks to exploit labour by robbing people of their rights and pay. Johnson simply reveals his familiarity with this process by his comments.
What he also reveals is his incomprehension. Ultimately financial capitalism produces nothing. It most certainly cannot make vaccines, although it has been exceptionality good at delivering the failed track and trace system and useless, overpriced, PPE. If Johnson cannot spot the difference between the plunder of financial capitalism and added value investment he reveals that he quite literally does not understand how the economy he professes to support works. And that is deeply worrying.
But it also explains something else. Johnson famously once said ‘fuck business'. With his comment he shows he meant it. Real business enterprise of the type essential in a mixed economy is as much abused by rentier capitalism as anyone else. He shows himself on the side of that abuse. And by giving him the keys to Downing Street he has been given the opportunity to pursue his own personal agenda of greed at cost to us all. And that's deeply damaging.
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Very telling.
What do you think Richard?
Did this Government use its sharp elbows to grasp as much vaccine for itself as it could and cause trouble for Europe? Has it exposed us to a faulty vaccine? A vaccine that might go out of date as Covid seems to mutate? Boris seems to be that type of person who lashes himself to major events like traders do to quarterly trading figures.
And whose greed is referring to? The Government’s or Astra Zeneca’s?
I have a feeling that more will come out about the vaccine fracas over time. I wonder how much we’ve actually paid for our doses?
It seems to me that Johnson has been watching a certain film (Wall Street) and listening to a Mr Gecko? And I’m sure he’s hoping that Europe hears about this. He’s needling them again.
And what does it tell us about the Tory party – the party in Government? Our Government. Phew – what a mind set.
No thanks.
I truly hate the politicizing of the vaccine roll out by the Tories. Just another instrument for the Tories to have a pop at the EU and make out how great we are. Makes me not to want to play ball with them and have the jab. I don’t want to be a statistic in part of Johnson’s propaganda game. It shows what these Tories are like that they will take advantage of and politicize a life or death issue. How low can they get?
MarP
In answer to your question I was going to say that 99.9% of Tories are lower than infected yeast in the grand scheme of things but then they would be very unfair to infected yeast!
I’ll tell you what the Tories have got more in common with: Covid-19.
Like the virus, the Tories coat their necrotizing effects on society in a cloak of respectability, faux concern for the people and warm words (‘addressing longstanding injustices’ ha!) whilst doing entirely the opposite.
We’ll call it ‘Conservo2010’ – it’s been around about 11 years now and its deadly.
The Conservo2010 virus is also good at turning the body’s immune system and cells against each other using a self made bacterial agent called ‘Auto-fascism-33’.
This confuses the immune system and friendly cells and bacteria end up killing each other, leaving Conservo2010 to wreak havoc.
‘Auto-fascism-33’ also contains a chemical blocker to society’s more benign red cells known as the Fixed Term Parliament Agent that helps to fend off the initial immune response and render a society’s democracy helpless no matter how poorly it gets.
Conservo2010 is a very resilient and hard to eradicate virus as it mobilises free market radicals in societies to survive such as ‘MainstreamMedia-4’ , ‘RichBastardsVestedSelfInterestTop-100’ and the more recent ‘ChumsRus-21’.
There you go!
What an excellent explanation of the difference between actual capitalism and greedyidiotism. Cheers.
…………..then look at this tripe in today’s Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/24/why-is-no-one-in-europe-talking-about-dangers-of-rising-inflation
No mention of tax anywhere from what I can see. Why do they even give room to stuff like this?
Funny. People in Europe, well Germany are talking about inflation. And quite worrying those that pay attention to the ecb the most are the ones worrying most about inflation. More importantly they believe that inflation caused the nazis. Only 30% of germans now know that the period of hyperinfatlion happened at the end of ww1 rather than the beginning of the 1930s. They are drawing ahistorical conclusions.
Where is their inflation coming from?
Maybe they don’t know much economics either
Not to mention that the vaccine delivery has had a huge number of volunteers supporting it! Johnson couldn’t have got it more wrong – though I have yet to hear any BBC commentator point this out.
Agreed
I meant to, and forgot, to say that
Agreed. Far too often in my experience I see business plans concentrating on making money rather than meeting customer needs. They are shoved to the bottom of the pile for funding.
I am also reminded of a wonderful poll not so long ago amongst school leavers who were asked their dream job. The top three at the time were supermodels, investment bankers and footballers. Now I am sure that politician has been added to this wish list.
Perfectly skewered!!
Also: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-vaccine-greed-b1821453.html
Billions of public money was provided for the development of the vaccines. For good reasons, of course, not just capitalist “greed”. If anything it shows (if any further demonstration were required) the powerful result when the resources of the private sector are fuelled and directed with huge amounts of public money. And the PPE debacle shows what happens when this goes wrong.
And AstraZeneca at least is delivering its vaccine on a cost recovery / non profit basis. No doubt they expect to make money eventually, but not right now. Is that “greed”?
(It is a side issue, but did Johnson have any responsibility for the finances when he was editor of the Spectator? Apart from his commissioning of racist writers, he broke the promise he gave when he took the job not to stand as an MP while editor. Not the first time or the last time he has broken his word. He continued as editor for seven years while he was an MP, only leaving when he became Mayor of London. No doubt he needed the money, given his rather chaotic personal life.)
Across the world the background research which made the rapid development of the vaccines possible had been going on in publicly funded institutions for years.
https://www.ukri.org/our-work/tackling-the-impact-of-covid-19/vaccines-and-treatments/creating-new-vaccines/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-billion-dollar-covid-vaccines-basic-government-funded-science-laid-the-groundwork/
https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/research-area/health-research-and-innovation/coronavirus-research-and-innovation/vaccines_en
As Mariana Mazzucato explains so well innovation is invariably a collaboration between public and private sectors with the former responsible for much of the blue-sky research.
Thank you
Thanks Richard – this message will resonate with many people that I know both in and outside of business.
Johnson continues to reveal himself, yet the public seems enamoured of him – what are we to do?
Keep plugging away!
Doh ,he us such an idiot with a big mouth, he just can’t help himself.
This is the lady who designed the Oxford vaccine,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55043551
The nearest motivation towards greed and capitalism she got was that “she needed an income”. She did set up her own research group to find a universal vaccine for flu and she was working on a similar vaccine for the MERS virus and carrying out trials when Covid hit. She also says elsewhere that “We’d been planning for disease X, we’d been waiting for disease X, and I thought this(Covid) could be it.” If she wanted to just become rich she was in the wrong job, disease X may never have even arrived in her lifetime, so that’s a lot of “dead end ” research that any capitalist wouldn’t deem to touch.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55041371
However it does bring up the issue of money/funding for such vaccines when they are discovered by the “non capitalist” researchers. Do we allow private profiteering from investors in such companies when the outcomes are for major public health issues?. Dean Baker does some good work on the subject and reckons that the current situation costs the USA heavily in higher priced drugs, but that patent rights can and are sometimes limited by govt decree ,especially when the issue is so vital as Covid. We need this vaccine spreading fast at a cheap cost and at a global level. Capitalism left to its own devices would never succeed on this task.
https://www.cepr.net/big-pharma-strikes-back/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=ed9c3a05f7b66763b6bbb219600c819299e122f1-1616578228-0-AajSUghdQmDTCze5c1ozBIWQCFKuluyFCDcZH4_V9SB40dj8zuWGwgMklk6C29yB528_sS9GR6PxGhxQno1n8mrLcnHtiBeYQNnAINJF8gf87JXQsRIWbT6RBY0YqzWLgUEYp62Qj-I45Bxq5QCaho_5tBG4eDEqFKPuhsbXR6QKWHyUyLkm9hwthZ71sp-txkwaXZTdunzGmQgAu0jpDMQr-5nmRyAwstDLOhQpqJLUu_CbUMWRn532LI6cAA1LdcklXXtU6gLWR6NKn2BpotKzf1X1_8h4lueYJRGyrOmeUvFN-iDkAuWEwZMfdqx5QdCoUUCLv11ZXL1JSBseECkpCGEYwJ2QsIsseBIP_HfHFn5WY94t7sn8qh_d3-tXVhaucwLyU9SM3N4XREedLddj9l1PLM8FAtcd_PzHglqX
Thanks
I think the only extraordinary claims are the ones you are making in this article.
“That there was a vaccine developed in the UK was not thanks to the government, or greed or capitalism, but to a university. ”
With massive extra funding from government, partnered with AZ thanks to government and huge underwriting of any liabilities that may result.
“I presume that some there will have small fortunes as a result.”
AZ are manufacturing the vaccine and selling it at cost. The UK and AZ are the biggest contributors by far to COVAX, distributing vaccine and saving lives across poorer countries. I suppose that also is greed in your books.
“There is also little evidence that this development put us much ahead in any race. ”
There is very strong evidence. We are far ahead in vaccinations and number of cases, hospital admissions and deaths have dropped rapidly. As opposed to Europe where all are climbing.
“AstraZeneca seems intent in destroying any faith the world has in its vaccine by issuing false results of its testing at present”
Do you have any evidence for this, or are you just throwing around anti-vaccine and libelous statements? Quite disgusting ones at that.
You are doing what European leaders have done, casting doubt on a good vaccine which is saving lives. This kind of statements which have led to people refusing the AZ vaccine both here in the UK and in Europe. Which is going to cost people their lives.
You should be ashamed of this and I hope you and your libel is reported.
Mary
Interesting, but all wrong, of course.
First, the government spend was actually small compared to other spends and backed a number of projects. So it was a punt.
Second, some at Oxford will make money. So will AZ directly and indirectly.
Third,I’m acknowledged the problems in Europe. Why make something up?
And on AZ results, read the issues arising in the US. There is no libel, just accurate observation.
You should try it.
Richard
The USA partially funded the development and production costs of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, to the tune of $1.2 billion…..
He has had enough of being Churchill and fancies himself a Michael Douglas in Wall Street!
It would be funny if it didn’t have such severe consequences.
another excellent article, Richard
at least idiot Johnson realised straightaway that ” greed is good ” message is not a good prelude to the new austerity which is apparently just around the corner
” When will we ever learn ? “
Quite true, when I worked as a VAT officer the companies that failed were often those where the directors had personalised car number plates, claimed extravagant entertaining expenses, paid suppliers late, set up separate management service companies to manipulate inter company charges and extracted the maximum out of the company rather than reinvesting profits
That’s about it….
Dear Richard
Discovering your article on “Johnson Greed” has helped to correct my views of “Accountants” and “Tax Research”. Good job.
Hearing this news last night, my first thought was that this was a potential “Ratner moment” for Johnson. Then on reflection, thinking that this is just one of Johnson’s many potential “Ratners” that have washed off his tail feathers. Then on reading your article, I notice that this term was recently by you used in relation to the AZ efficacy figure boosting, so bang goes the originality of my earlier thought. Maybe on reflection, a “Ratner” applies to commercial disasters, and politicians get away with it.
In my experience, the dream of quick riches works very well for the dream weavers, creating an army of gullible wannabees, shedding their wealth for the benefit others. Greed equates to selfishness. Sibling rivalry is a Darwinian instinct evolved in a “pre civilisation” era, and makes sense in a situation where if you don’t starve to death, I do, so pushing you out of the nest is the best for me.
Tooth and claw capitalism is always looking for opportunities to jump the tracks of civilised behaviour, for short term benefits “just for me” at the expense of others. I have a rosy idea that “civilisation” allows us to rise up above feral instincts and build a much better place by extending our care beyond the immediate “I’m alright Jack” fireside tribe, but then perhaps I am just too idealistic for reality.
Your article has helped me to learn about the concept of “Rentierism” and generally helped me to understand things that I “knew” but did not have a clear picture of.
Seems to me to be a collision of the incompatible forces of Science, Research, Education and Universal Healthcare, the “Civilising” forces on the once side, and “Grab it now” greedy faux-capitalism on the other.
Re the last, I agree
Rent-seeking is the driving force of capitalism. Governance of capitalism and economic regulation are required to prevent sustained rent capture. Most people who are engaged in the formal economy want to put some distance between the effort they put in and the rewards they secure. There is nothing wrong with this – even if most of those on the left either have no understanding of it or disingenuously pretend they don’t.
But you are correct about financial capitalism. And your views are shared by the Chinese leadership. They believe the financial sector should facilitate productive activity and be subservient to it and, in their case, the state. All the other antics is viewed as speculation and capitalist exploitation.
Our main challenge is to bring the financial capitalists to heel.
Every so often the Johnson’s ill-fitting mask slips and we see what lies underneath. Misogny, racism, greed, authoritarianism, pure self-interest – the list goes on.
The idea that he was ever some kind of social liberal is pure fantasy. He is not playing to the crowd – this is who he really is. Yet again, an English version of Trump, turning out to be even worse in power than the most pessimistic of us suspected
Why are we surprised? Johnson and many of his colleagues show classic symptoms of early childhood deprivation which shapes character most emphatically and indelibly. Lack of empathy and accumulation of covetous wealth from any source is a prerequisite and no problems about the source! There is no likelihood that these characteristics change in later life .It is extremely difficult to challenge this type of character but we can hope that analysis like yours gradually reaches a wider audience and that the lies and distortions fatally undermine Johnson’s credibility.
“‘greed’ and capitalism behind vaccine success”, says Johnson. Is that then the behaviour behind the shatteringly awful death rates in the UK?
They’re not awful death rates.
From the govts viewpoint; they’re not awful enough.
500,000 would have been better, from their viewpoint. That’s when the savings really become meaningful. That would have put benefit/health savings into the £10 billion a year +
That’s more nuclear weapons we could have afforded.
Googling up Johnson’s love of greed, I find that this is not the first offence, from 2013:
“The London mayor, Boris Johnson, says the gap between rich and poor spurs economic activity, and encourages the ‘Gordon Gekkos of London’ to be greedy. Speaking at the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank in London in its annual Margaret Thatcher lecture, Johnson mocks those with lower IQs and calls for more help for the brightest ”
Reassuring to find that Richard Murphy was on the case back then too:
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/11/28/the-politics-of-envy-are-alive-in-boris-johnson/
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2013/nov/28/boris-johnson-wealth-envy-inequality-margaret-thatcher-video
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/27/boris-johnson-thatcher-greed-good
Thanks
A chip off the old [bigoted] block:
Stanley Johnson says British public ‘couldn’t spell Pinocchio’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGr3qbOPHoE
“The government splashed cash. On vaccines it worked. It was a rare exception that does not prove foresight, but luck.”
Success was not luck. The UK’s vaccine success was built on many decades of patient investment in biomedicine in the UK. There were already good links between academia and industry – the Government appointed someone from the right background and they clearly took good advice. This was capped off by a determination to ensure that commercial blocks that would otherwise slow development were mitigated. For example, the Government underwrote the potential liabilities for large -scale vaccine trials with novel vaccine vectors. This additional cash ‘de-risked’ the vaccine development process. This was yet another case of the public sector taking on risk for the commercial sector. But in this case it was well justified as the UK-based pharma industry was the only sector that had the scale and expertise necessary for the scale-up required.
By contrast, the performance of the Government in the diagnostics sector has been disastrous. The UK has a much less developed diagnostics sector and when the funding spigot was opened, the cash sloshed into the pockets of dysfunctional middlemen like Deloitte. The Government basically didn’t know what it didn’t know and wasn’t prepared to find out. It could have engaged with the wider UK biomedical community and utilised the dynamic problem-solving capacity that is widely distributed across UK academia, some Public Health bodies and SMEs. Instead of openness, It chose to run things via an inward-looking, secretive, centralised cabal of those ‘in the know’. The outcome was a failed Test, Track and Trace programme that will long resonate as one of the UK’s greatest failures.