Dean Young, Liverpool Socialist Party
AstraZeneca has announced the scrapping of a £450 million plan to build a new vaccine plant in Merseyside. It says this is because Keir Starmer’s Labour government wouldn’t grant it a large enough subsidy to continue. Considering AstraZeneca made $6.5 billion in profits in 2024, surely it isn’t strapped for cash!
Former Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt, rarely quoted in The Socialist, called the lack of investment from the Starmer government “penny pinching”, ironic given his austerity credentials.
What can be seen in this story is two key things. Firstly, despite Starmer’s government promising ‘change’ and investment to grow the economy, it can’t provide incentives big enough to convince large corporations to do so. However, the second key thing is that it shows the unwillingness of large corporations, and therefore capitalism generally, to invest in their productive capacity and provide jobs without governments massively subsidising them.
As short-term profits are prioritised, big business increasingly relies on our tax money via subsidies to avoid putting its own revenue into projects to expand its productive forces. Yet taxpayers have no say about projects when they are built using our money to line the pockets of shareholders – such is the ‘democracy’ we live in.
The solution in Merseyside as in any other area of the country (or indeed the world) is not having to rely on a government of big business to fund big business. We need a society run in the interests of the working class, by the working class. Taking the wealth and resources out of the hands of the bosses, we could democratically plan production for what we need not what makes profits for a few. A nationalised pharmaceutical industry wouldn’t have to beg for subsidies to expand vaccine production but would be run by workers ourselves, and we all would reap the rewards.
