See also: NHS, railways, prisons, court system, building houses…

So many aspects of the state where Labour in opposition convinced themselves that the fundamentals were fine, the Conservatives were just shit penny-pinching managers, and once good common-sense people were in charge and a wee bit more money everything would work fine. Alas, reality is more complex

From the descriptions here, it’s not really obvious that these projects address any of the key underlying problems of the sector

Remember the ten year commitments were always about locking-in private sector matching funding in areas like pharmaceutical R&D. They were never going to apply to blue skies research in universities

Yes. Closer collaboration with Europe seems to be on the govt agenda right now. But the failure to agree on defence shows how hard this can be to put into practice. Also remember that Ian Chapman is a skeptic, and chose not to rejoin Euratom and ITER

It was 100% predictable. This Horizon programme is not a simple repeat of previous iterations. There is much less money for the areas (like ERC grants) where the UK did well in the past. Even my European colleagues were disillusioned with the programme's design.

I always felt that the case for associating to Horizon was too much about proving Brexit was bad, and not enough about the actual returns. We really shouldn't advocate for science policy as a way to score political points. Those who thought it an expensive waste of money will now feel justified.

I think the government is sending a clear message that it believes universities are broadly responsible for their own financial mess, and it's not going to bail them out. It will index link student fees so as to avoid making things worse, but aside from this it's all sticks and no carrots.

Thanks for the reply - I fully agree and support your approach! I was also interested to see that CaSE chose to attend the Reform UK conference this year, something that I think most of the academic community still finds difficult to contemplate...

and now that I think of it, the fact that @sciencecampaign.bsky.social is not on X exactly encapsulates this problem

I think this is smart messaging. I do worry that it will be hard to find messengers compfortable with it, though - how many scientists or researchers are willing to stand up and say "yes, we need researcher immigration, but not other kinds" or use phrases like "we need to fix broken Britain?"

I’ll be even more cynical. We have been given many many opportunities over the past decades to have a tau/charm factory, but never actually wanted one enough to fund it or build it. So no chance.

And now that FCCee has no competition either, I don’t expect CERN council to be in any rush to move forward. They’ll keep things warm, but will want to wait until HL-LHC has successfully turned on before making any firm construction go-ahead on FCC.

One of the problems here is that, quite aside from the question of QR, UKRI and its predecessors have always tried to use research funding to maintain a broad UK university base, as well as to deliver innovation. In fact maintaining the base has often seemed more of a goal than the innovation

Unfortunate subtitle in the article - whenever we seem to yearn for "guardrails" to stop troublesome people saying things we don't want them to say, we lose a little bit more of the argument