AstraZeneca: George Osborne ignores Vince Cable's crocodile tears

In any case, expressions of concern about foreign takeovers made over the past week by both Cable and Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, should be taken with a large pinch of salt: they had the opportunity to do something about it – and chose not to.

Attempts now to make capital from public disquiet about “selling Britain by the pound” demonstrate quite breathtaking hypocrisy. Indeed, the only person to emerge well from the unseemly political points-scoring going on around this takeover is Lord Heseltine, who whether or not you agree with him – and I certainly don’t – has at least been consistent in his view; he’s always been an industrial interventionist, and he believes passionately in national champions.

Personally, I cannot see what all the fuss is about. AstraZeneca is itself the result of a cross-border merger – between Sweden’s Astra and ICI’s demerged pharmaceuticals arm Zeneca – as indeed are virtually all the big pharma companies including GlaxoSmithKline. It’s hard to see why the formation of another, even bigger, one is going to make a lot of difference. Loyalty to particular national governments has never been a high priority for these multi-national Goliaths.

Besides, Pfizer is not paying all that money just to wreck the business, or pull the plug on AstraZeneca’s UK science base. If that’s how it ends up, more fool Pfizer; pharma is strong in Britain, not because of a small number of successful national champions but because Britain is thought an attractive place for research and development and it has a relatively enlightened approach to drug pricing.

But the biggest joke about all this political hot air is that there is absolutely nothing the politicians could do about it, even if the Enterprise Act did include some sort of wishy-washy public interest test. This is because big cross-border mergers of this sort are decided in Brussels, not London, and what’s more, they are decided on the basis not of national sensibilities, but strict competition criteria – guidelines which, by the way, were basically dictated by British ministers and lawyers when the initial European legislation was drawn up.

The fact that other countries seem to have more success in protecting their national champions has very little to do with legal mechanisms to block foreign takeovers. It is much more about the French, German, or Spanish government making it clear to foreign bidders that their lives will be made a misery if they succeed, or about engineering a rival takeover proposal from a favoured national player. If this were France, GlaxoSmithKline would already have been lined up to counter the unwanted Americans, despite the obvious monopolistic implications.

None of this is to argue that Pfizer’s bid for AstraZeneca is necessarily a good thing. Any takeover which is made primarily for tax reasons, as this one seems to be, has to be treated with scepticism. And there’s the irony, for while Cable cries crocodile tears over the potential threat to the science base, the Americans have received a warm welcome round at the Treasury, where George Osborne, the Chancellor, sees their bid both as a validation of his attempts to make the UK tax system more competitive and of Britain’s attractions to foreign investors.

If anyone is going to block this merger, it will be US law-makers, ever more alarmed about the threat to US tax revenues of such so-called “inversion” foreign takeovers by some of their leading companies. Hey ho.

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