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This website was established whilst I was a Member of Parliament. As Parliament has been dissolved there are no Members of Parliament until after the election on May 6 2010. Any reference on this website to my position or work as an MP is purely historical .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blog for CaSE

 

CaSE has done a great job in keeping the flame for science alight in the wider world.  This is so important.  I have often felt that the science and engineering community impresses itself rather more comfortably than reaching out to others. This has been frustrating during a lot of my Parliamentary career as I have noted that colleagues have chosen too often to avoid speaking up on science subjects as if they form part of a walled garden to which they do not have the key. Generating interest in debates in the House is hard work and there have been too few of us committed to the cause – and many of us are leaving at this election. Improving the scientific literacy of our politicians and Ministers would improve the quality of their decision-making as they would learn both the importance of science and engineering to their role and how better to evaluate scientific evidence.

 

Nevertheless I hope that the next Parliament will be more engaged with scientists and engineers. Science and Maths are the centre of a network, connected to so many things. They influence, often without us realising it, the making of policy in a vast number of areas. Scientific advice underpins a wide range of policies.  How governments deal with these issues has an impact on public opinion of the science involved. Simply to list the challenges facing today’s politicians is to demonstrate the importance of science. Energy, bio-fuels, security, space and earth observation, climate change, genetic modification, mapping the human genome, dealing with pandemics, health science, medicines, communications and IT are just some of the more obvious areas that are crucial for the UK.

 

Yet here lies the problem. Lord Krebs has written in a recent article:“Ministers look to their expert advisers for clear-cut answers, a unanimous view, and preferably one that is politically convenient. Scientific advisers are prone to disappoint on all fronts”.Yet, asNietzsche once noted: "There are no facts, only interpretations."  The Royal Society has as its motto Nullius in verba (“Take nobody’s word for it”).

 

Don (Krasher) Price wrote in The Scientific Estate (1965): “The union of the political and scientific estates is not like a partnership, but a marriage. It will not be improved if the two become like each other, but only if they respect each other's quite different needs and purposes. No great harm is done if in the meantime they quarrel a bit.”

 

Perhaps not – but the quarrel needs to be based on a mutually sympathetic understanding.  At present, engagement with science and engineering is hampered by an inability by politicians (and the public) accurately to assess risk and uncertainty.

 

During my 23 years in the House, I have taken a particular interest in higher education, science and space. I was lucky enough to be a Minister with responsibility for science and technology in the mid-1990s up until the 1997 election. Within the context of public expenditure constraints, we must preserve expenditure as much as possible in education, science and space and, in some cases, invest, in contradistinction to the cuts that we will need to make in other sectors. We need to do that because what will really determine whether this country will be successful, whether it will punch its weight in the world.

 

 

I welcome the comments in the March Budget about funding for extra students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That is a positive move, although it is not enough. I juxtapose, as the Royal Society did in its recent report, "The Scientific Century", the fact that France has just announced an extra ?35 billion in funding for research and development in science, and the fact that we are slicing £600 million from our higher education sector. We need to encourage universities to teach scientific subjects and we must recognise that those subjects are more expensive to teach, pro rata, than arts subjects. In turn, we need to encourage more people to take those scientific subjects, which means offering better teaching in the schools that are the feedstock of our higher education institutions.

 

 

We respect as a nation our achievements in basic, blue sky science.  The importance of applied science however is not fully appreciated.  The Labour Government have rightly taken credit for increasing the amount of money that goes to the research councils; they have more than doubled it since I was the responsible Minister, when I was unable to persuade the then Chancellor of the Exchequer that he should do the same thing. However, it is interesting that both lord Sainsbury’s retirement report, "The Race to the Top", and the recent report from the Royal Society ‘The Scientific Century’ draw attention to the fact that the percentage expenditure on public R and D is the same now as in 1997, when I left office as the Minister for Science and Technology, at about 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product. So, despite the increase in the research councils' budgets, there has been a diminution in public investment in science across the board in other Government Departments.

 

 

My view is that scientific expenditure stimulates growth in other sectors of the economy, although not always predictably. President Obama has put in place massive science and technology stimulus projects that will have a big effect progressively on the way in which the United States recovers, because it will have a lot of value-added industry and skills in universities. Some of the money going into American universities will attract talent from throughout the world, so there will be an influx of top academics and research institutes, perhaps including those from the United Kingdom. We need to be careful, so I hope not only that science expenditure will be ring-fenced, but that the importance of science will be underlined and understood in Government Departments, so that each Department's chief scientific adviser, and perhaps their engineering advisers, will ensure that every Minister understands the importance of projects that lead progressively to more scientific expenditure and the application of science in Government decision making.