Newspapers feast on plane crashes, but they yawn over poor engineering. The conflagration gets the front page, while those prior expert warnings over causes were lucky to make the bottom of page 46. You can see the same pattern in all the huffing and puffing over Pfizer's battle for AstraZeneca.
Here's the tale you have probably read over the past few days: a US drugs giant is eyeing up a UK rival in what would be the biggest foreign takeover in British history. Trouble is, America's Pfizer has got form as a slash-and-burn merchant, snapping up big competitors, then axing staff numbers and research budgets. Were it to do the same with AstraZeneca, pop would go one of Britain's few big corporate spenders on R&D, one of our most important exporters and one of our best hopes of becoming a hi-tech knowledge economy.
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