The coronavirus pandemic has become a living experiment that is illuminating the different national coping strategies in a way that no intellectual dissertation from the London School of Economics could ever do.

In the struggle to curb the spread of Covid-19, America is empowering its private sector innovators by slashing regulations, speeding up the testing of its own medicines and equipment and devolving distribution and accountability to state level. Philanthropy not ‘greed’ has emerged as the defining feature of the US private sector initiative - while shady dealings: the ‘disappearance’ of a large order of face masks and one hospital’s opportunistic hoarding of ventilators has not gone unchallenged. The UK, by contrast, is trying to work through a nationalised health system - long stifled by bureaucratic regulation, characterised by waste, fraud and dependent for drugs and equipment on long complex supply chains many of which have their source in China - the origin of the pandemic.

The response to Covid-19 appears to be supporting the case for that popular 19th century idea: laissez faire capitalism - which, despite its many detractors, has never yet been tried. Although capitalism continues to have a bad press, wherever and whenever the private sector has been allowed to expand and the public sector reined in, economies have prospered - through the simple expedient of releasing entrepreneurs to challenge establishment patronage. Sadly, the revolving door for corporatists, politicos and bureaucrats has been an enduring feature of the West’s post-war landscape. Outsourcing production to sweat-shop economies whilst at the same time strangling start-up businesses with regulations, taxes and red tape has rewarded transnational cartels and punished their smaller competitors. The pathetic inaction of the EU in the face of the extreme suffering of its member states, Italy and Spain, has exposed the empty rhetoric of “deeper European integration”.

When Margaret Thatcher observed, “You can’t buck the market” she meant the real market, not the corrupt ‘Third Way’ so admired by Brussels and gifted to us by Tony Blair.

Prof Christine Wheeler McNulty

Oxhey