SEVERAL people have emailed me to express their alarm about US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s bid for our own British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and to demand Government intervention to prevent such a takeover.

Firstly, it is entirely sensible for people to be concerned about the future of British jobs in a successful UK manufacturing company. We are the eighth largest manufacturing nation in the world and probably second or third when it comes to high tech manufacturing of this sort.

This is exactly the sort of high skill, high value-added industry we want more of as we try to rebalance our economy away from an over-reliance on financial services. I believe it is right and sensible that the Government has sought to engage with both Pfizer and AstraZeneca from the very start.

Whatever the outcome, there is too much at stake for Mr Cameron to have sat huffing and puffing in disapproval from the sidelines.

For this to have been portrayed as “cheer-leading” in favour of the Pfizer bid is just mischief-making. Secondly, while the Government must do all it can to safeguard the public interest – by securing as much investment in the UK and as many jobs as possible – it has to act within the law and within our international treaty obligations.

Were the Government to interfere to prevent the bid by acting outside the law like some banana republic, the damage to our credibility as a free trading nation and a destination for so much international investment would be disastrous.

Britain benefits enormously from overseas investment – we get more of it than the whole of the rest of Europe put together. It creates jobs and prosperity.

If we were to act in a narrow nationalistic way we would be sending a signal to capital markets and investors throughout the world that we are no longer open to their business.

I recall a similar furore when Cadbury was taken over by Mondelez. It was portrayed as an unfair contest between the plucky little UK traditional manufacturer being gobbled up by an international giant.

The reality was rather different: Cadbury was itself an international giant that had gobbled up Schweppes. Here lies a truth that so many people overlook when they lament foreign ownership of British companies: we ourselves are the “worst”

offenders; the British own more overseas assets per head of population than any other nation on the planet.

We have been exporting capital in this way for generations since the very beginning of the industrial revolution.

It is the legacy of an imperial outlook and our having been the greatest trading nation the world has ever known. We can hardly complain however, if a foreigner makes an offer for a British asset, when we own so many of theirs.

Ultimately, what happens to the Pfizer bid will depend on whether the owners of AstraZeneca – its shareholders – decide to sell or not. I believe in freedom and in a free economy.

An important part of freedom is the right to do what you want to with your own property. If I were a shareholder of AstraZeneca, it would be my right to sell my shares to Pfizer, or not, as I choose.