Vaccines success is an opportunity for Keir Starmer to wean his party off its reflex opposition to the private sector

It has been a tricky week for Keir Starmer. Two things Labour Party members believe above all are that multinational drugs companies are bad and that the European Union is good. But now, not only is international capitalism riding to our rescue by providing vaccines, but our government is better able to take advantage of the help because we are out of the EU. 

Yes, I know it is more complicated than that. For one thing, the success so far of Britain’s vaccination programme is not down to the profit motive alone. The big drugs companies work in partnerships with governments and the public sector. Kate Bingham, the former boss of the vaccines taskforce, has been using public money to “pick winners” with more verve (and success) than Tony Benn in his heyday. One of the biggest winners, AstraZeneca, has been working with a public institution, Oxford University, to produce its vaccine. It is supplying it at cost and licensing it to India. And the injections in Britain are being done by Clement Attlee’s great collectivist creation, the NHS. 

It is awkward, though, for those Remainers who turned into Rejoiners the moment we left the EU, a year ago on Sunday, that we have used our departure to such benign effect. I know that, in EU law, there was nothing to stop other EU countries buying up vaccines and giving them emergency approval, but none of them did. They felt bound by the demands of “solidarity” to pool their efforts and trust to the dynamism of the European Commission. 

What had seemed like a self-defeating disaster, as Brexit forced the headquarters of the European Medicines Agency out of London to Amsterdam, turned out to be a blessing. It liberated Lady Bingham – I assume she is shortly to be elevated to at least a hereditary duchess – to be “nimble”, as she modestly put it on the radio this morning. (The 8.10 slot on the Today programme, for a non-politician, being the equivalent of a duchessdom.) 

Nimble? It allowed her to place some huge bets on our behalf that combined the recklessness of the free market with what Rishi Sunak called the “overwhelming might” of the state. She behaved like a speculator and a commissar at the same time, a combination of Tony Benn and Michael Heseltine. 

Anyway, the bets paid off. Indeed, it is an irony to have Tony Blair, the practitioner of the third way and the advocate of “what matters is what works”, sound a gloomy note in today’s Independent. He ought to be using the success of the British vaccine programme as a teachable moment, a lesson to the Labour Party, now that it is returning from the further shores of anti-capitalism, in the benefits of the mixed economy. 

Perhaps Keir Starmer will instead. He looked a little uncomfortable in Prime Minister’s Questions this week when Boris Johnson demanded an apology for his having criticised St Catherine of Bingham’s spending on public relations consultants. And he looked worried – although he usually looks worried – when the prime minister, for the second week, accused him of having stood on a manifesto pledge to “unbundle” the big drugs companies.

I didn’t understand it when Johnson said it last week, and now, having looked up the Labour manifesto, I still don’t. At the election, Labour promised to establish a state drugs company to make copies of patented drugs at “fair prices”, which would cause problems, because patents are how companies recoup their investment in medical research. The companies might move some of their operations out of the UK as a result, but “unbundling” seems a curious word to use. 

Anyway, the point I assume Johnson was trying to make is that the idea of penalising drugs companies for doing high-end medical research seems a bad one. This is a lesson Starmer can hope his party might learn: he has praised the vaccines effort, and especially the NHS staff working on it, but perhaps he should be praising the virtues of public-private partnerships and state intervention, too. The trouble with that, of course, is that he would have to praise state intervention by a Conservative government, and his activists are already getting restless about him being too supportive of the prime minister.  

He shouldn’t let that hold him back: the wider electorate tends to think that, if anything, he hasn’t been supportive enough. The vaccines story is an opportunity for Starmer to wean his party off its reflex opposition to the private sector – plus it might get it to bang on a bit less about Europe, which it probably needs to do for several years.