During Lockdown in 2020 Baroness Mone used her contacts to help set up a contract to provide PPE equipment worth £220 million between the Department of Health and a newly founded company established by her husband, PPE Medpro.
The company provided gowns for the astronomical sum of £120 million, but they were unusable, and Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, made a profit of £60 million.
The government is suing the company for that £120 million but Mone and her husband say they will defend themselves. As far as they are concerned, they have the right to keep that profit they made for providing substandard goods.
They effectively are going public saying they have right to keep £60 million of public money for effectively providing nothing.
They think they have the right to profit off the back of an unprecedented national crisis and essentially from the suffering of others.
A rare example of the elite admitting their extractivist logic…?
While the shameless attitude of these two multimillionaires may seem shocking, from a Marxist perspective, this is how the elite works all the time.
The only thing unusual about this case is that here we have two members of the elite openly saying how they operate in relation to the State and the general public.
This is the naked business of capitalism: exploit people to make a profit and this is precisely what Mone and her husband have done.
They have taken advantage of a crisis to make £60 million. They have taken advantage of her networks in politics, which is the point of politics for the elite.
Their existence is not to provide public goods, it is to extract as much as they can from the State and the general public, and that is what they have done.
According to Marxism this is what most members of the capitalist class do. This is simply capitalism as usual. What is unusual is the extremity of the case: to have made so much money for providing basically nothing, because the gowns they produced were unusable.
Maybe this explains why they are so brazen: because they are being singled out, whereas all their elite buddies are getting away with extracting and going under the radar.
They are annoyed, not because they feel guilty for profiting of other people’s suffering, but because they are the minority of the elite who have got singled out doing what for them is perfectly normal!
Relevance to A-level sociology
This is a great example to illustrate the problems of capitalism and the continued relevance of Marxism today.
It’s also an example which supports the Marxist theory of crime. As far as I can see, these two awful human beings haven’t done anything technically illegal. However they have caused huge harm to the public. Marxism suggests we should look at harms rather than crimes.
