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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, a few weeks ago the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca wasn’t exactly front of mind in the public consciousness.  Well that all changed of course when it became the target of what could be the biggest ever foreign takeover of a British company.  The American company Pfizer wants to buy it but what guarantees can the government get that British jobs will be protected?  Well I am joined now from Stratford upon Avon by the former Trade Minister and ex-head of the CBI,  he is of course Lord Digby Jones.  Very good to talk to you and you may have heard that I mentioned that in my interview with Nick Clegg a little bit earlier.  What possible assurances can a government get that they can hold a company to that they will protect British jobs if they take over a British company?

LORD DIGBY JONES: Well I don’t actually think that governments can and if they try to then wham, you’re straight back into 1970s Socialism.  We forget that AstraZeneca is the creation of a spin-out of ICI that then went and bought a Swedish company so Astra and Zeneca were formed from trans-border acquisition activity and also at the same time of course you have the situation where AstraZeneca itself does an awful lot of its R&D, high grade research, in India, in Bangalore, so globalisation is something which Britain takes enormous advantage of.  In fact one of the most successful car companies at the moment is Jaguar Land Rover, it’s Indian money, it’s German management, it’s made in Britain and they sell it in China.  This is what globalisation is so we can’t turn round and go we love all the nice bits when something is going to happen the other way, no, sorry, we don’t like it.  What we can do, and this is really what Messrs Miliband, Clegg and Cameron should be doing, they should be saying to the American government, not to Pfizer, that if AstraZeneca came and said I’d like to do this to Pfizer please there would be hell to pay in the Congress in Washington, there would be senators and congressmen going wild about it and they’d bad it basically because America is a protectionist regime.  So what they should be saying is that if you want Pfizer, your company, your country, to come and do it to us, you’ve got to have some rules and let us do it to you and unless you do, no deal.  That’s what the government should do and not try and involve itself in the commercial deal.

DM: That’s interesting what you say there Lord Jones because America, well it’s the standard isn’t it for the success of a globalised economy and yet you are saying that the Americans would block it, well why don’t we?

LORD DIGBY JONES: Well America is a protectionist state. They think they’re the home of the brave and the land of the free, they are pretty brave actually but they’re not free, they are a very protectionist regime, state subsidies when companies go under.  They’re like France, they are very, very protectionist and at the end of the day what you end up with if you’re France is an economy that’s really in trouble and in America of course you get some of the domestic industries, airlines, steel, that aren’t at all efficient and productive because there is no outside competition.  So we could do it their way, we could pass laws that say we’d like to go back to that and you’ll end up with everything nationalised, you’ll end up with airways and telecom companies and car companies, freight companies, all owned by the government.  That’s socialism and it failed. 

DM: Well they are all very different industries aren’t they that you lump together there, this is about specific skills, research bases, science skills and you’re saying we should just lie back and take it and if further down the line Pfizer do win AstraZeneca and say do you know what, we want to move the R&D, more of it, to India or Indonesia or wherever, we should just suck it up.

LORD DIGBY JONES: Well I’m saying two things, one is bluntly AstraZeneca is doing that anyway so that’s not a Pfizer call but secondly, where you have a very good point is does Britain want to lose some of this really top level skills base at a time when we must pay our way in the world, with having quality jobs at the high end of the market?  To do that, far more than pass rules and get party politics into it, we should concentrate on having an environment in this country that skills the people better than we do now, an education system that teaches them to read, write and count.  We ought to have a transport infrastructure that works like let’s have an international airport basically that works and we should have a tax regime that encourages people to stay.  If you do those three things, skill people, infrastructure and tax competitiveness, Pfizer will stay here not because of rules but because it’s the best place to do it.

DM: Okay, well a lot flows from that in your analysis. Thank you very much indeed for that, Lord Digby Jones there, joining us from Stratford upon Avon.