The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in governments playing increasingly prominent
roles as active economic agents. However, state capitalism does not necessarily
serve broad developmental purposes, and rather can be directed to supporting
sectional and private interests. As the literature on variegated capitalism
alerts us, governments and other actors regularly devise fixes in response to a
systemic crisis, but the focus, scale, and scope of the interventions vary
considerably, according to the constellation of interests. Rapid progress with
vaccines notwithstanding, the UK government's response to COVID-19 has been
associated with much controversy, not only because of an extraordinarily high
death rate, but also because of allegations of cronyism around the granting of
government contracts and bailouts. We focus on the latter, investigating more
closely who got bailed out. We find that badly affected sectors (e.g.
hospitality, transportation) and larger employers were more likely to get
bailouts. However, the latter also favored the politically influential and those
who had run up debt profligately. Although, as with state capitalism, crony
capitalism is most often associated with emerging markets, we conclude that the
two have coalesced into a peculiarly British variety, but one that has some
common features with other major liberal markets. This might suggest that the
eco-systemic dominance of the latter is coming to an end, or, at the least, that
this model is drifting towards one that assumes many of the features commonly
associated with developing nations.