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A Note on Tory Covid Profiteering

Throughout the last two years, Boris Johnson has ostentatiously praised the ingenuity of capitalism for coming up with the goods for combatting Covid. If most people hadn't heard of Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca before the pandemic, the vaccines have made them household names for hundreds of millions of people. Johnson also praised the enterprise of our home grown business class, who at a moment's notice, were able to start producing the materials the NHS and our public health strategy demanded. Images of DIY protective gear done out of bin bags and duck tape swiftly disappeared from television screens as the equipment began flowing. Covid came, and British capitalism (apparently) saw it off. Covid's invisible menace was no match for the invisible hand.

But anyone acquainting themselves with how the Tories simultaneously mismanaged the pandemic (while handling the politics of the disease with some skill) knows this is a fairy tale. With the population bar key workers shut up at home and capitalism itself on life support, the government created a market with a single customer - it - for PPE, medical equipment, and pharmaceuticals. Apart from a guaranteed sale, this market was entirely unregulated. The situation was deemed so desperate by Tory ministers that little to no due diligence was done, and everything and anything was brought up. This meant huge mountains of waste as virtually anyone who could clamber aboard the Covid gravy train did. In all, the scale of the waste was huge. According to Department of Health accounts, £2.5bn was spent on PPE unsuitable for use in NHS settings and £673m worth going straight to landfill thanks to not being suitable for any use. £750m went on products whose expiry came up before it could be used, and some £4.7bn splashed out on firms deliberately inflating their prices.

It's this latter figure that's most interesting. According to investigative work done by the Graun, Tory peer Michelle Mone privately lobbied Michael Gove on behalf of PPE Medpro, an outfit set up just to supply masks and gowns to the NHS sourced from a firm in Hong Kong. A contract was placed for £122m, and the firm fulfilled the order by paying their Chinese partners just £46m. Minus the shipping costs, whatever huge lump was left was pure profit. When Johnson talks about capitalism's "animal spirits", I'm sure it's not the leech, the tick, nor the vampire bat he has in mind. It's also worth noting the 25m gowns that arrived were rejected as unsuitable and never used - unsurprising when these "sterile garments" were produced in, reportedly, sweatshop conditions. In other words, an instance of British capitalism not rising to the occasion and parasiting off the largesse offered.

This has everything you'd expect from a Tory money scandal. Secret deals done behind the scenes, massive mark ups on goods sought, and then the delivery of complete rubbish. And it gains traction in the week the Chancellor announced he'd be doing nothing for those most in need of support as the latest round of crisis bites. Considered alongside the alacrity with which the Tories wrote off the £10bn that moved from the Treasury into the pockets of their wealthiest supporters, in this case all the logics of Tory political economy is laid bare: the use of the state, wherever possible, to enrich their class further. Even if monies expended are entirely wasteful. There's always plenty of money for the socialism of the wealthy.

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