It was pretty repulsive watching Mel Braham, chairman of the Harley Medical Group, pontificating on television about the government's "moral duty" to remove the many thousands of faulty breast implants that he and his company had profited from inserting. Braham's argument is that such an undertaking would put his company out of business. Exposure of the company's cavalier attitude to the health of the women whose money it and its surgeons were happy to take will surely not be good for business anyway.
Braham says the Harley Medical Group is "an innocent victim like everyone else". He suggests that it's all the fault of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), for approving the implants. Why is this institution not an "innocent victim" too, when it has now been established that the French company Poly Implant Prothese (Pip), did not inform anyone outside the company when it started using in-house-manufactured industrial-grade gel in 2001? Braham doesn't say.
Even after these rogues at Pip had filed for bankruptcy, following legal action against them and their dodgy implants, they had the cheek to seek a €2m investment to start another implant-manufacturing company. The plan was abandoned after "adverse publicity". Now, that's what I call a failure of "moral duty".
Not much beats the executives of Pip for moral turpitude and dangerous irresponsibility. But in choosing to condemn the regulator rather than the manufacturer, and in seeking to place the blame and the solution squarely with the state, the Harley Medical Group exemplifies the worst of private sector attitudes.
These attitudes insist that the state must be small and regulation must be light. But when regulation fails, then it is regulation, not those who complain about regulation and how terribly it stifles them, who have failed. These attitudes say that businesspeople deserve to keep their profits, rather than have them taxed, because they are the ones taking the risks. Yet, when their risks prove … risky, they bleat that a big state did it and shouldn't be allowed to run away.
The financial collapse illustrated how risk gets socialised while profit remains private. So does this appalling episode. Nothing and no one is more dependent on the state than capitalism. Why so many politicians get away with insisting that it's the other way round is unfathomable.
