100th post

So this is my 100th blog post. Seems a little circular to write a blog post about it being your 100th blog post, but anyway. I wrote my first post on the 18th July 2009. I started partly because blogging seemed like an interesting thing to try and partly because I’d outed a friend who had been blogging anonymously but whose posts made it obvious who they were. In fact, they’d linked from their blog to their own twitter feed so I’d assumed that they were were no longer anonymous. The slight look of shock when I mentioned their blog made me feel somewhat guilty and I thought I would try anonymous blogging partly to give them a chance to get their own back on me. It hasn’t happened yet.

This blog hasn’t been particularly popular. To date I’ve had 7983 views and 80 comments (quite a few of which are my own). My busiest day was 15 December 2009 when there were 1233 views, 985 of which were for the post STFC: Investing in the future?. This post has now had 2238 views, more than a quarter of the total. The sudden increase in views gave me such a fright, I didn’t sleep very well that night. In theory, one writes a blog for others to read, but it was still quite a shock when so many visited the blog on that day. It didn’t last; the number of daily views quickly dropped back to about 10.

The next most popular post is one I wrote about The Gini coefficient. Although I’m a scientist and started this blog partly because I was regularly following other science bloggers, my post are often quite political. This wasn’t my initial intention and, I think, is because I get more worked up about political issues than I do (apart from the STFC funding crisis) with science issues. Also, there are plenty of other very good science bloggers out there. I have also tried, unsuccessfully possibly, to bring a little bit of rigour to my posts. I find it very frustrating when the rhetoric surrounding some political issues doesn’t match the information available. Two examples are the AV vs FPTP issue and the NHS privatisation. AV vs FPTP was particularly annoying in that the FPTP supporters were being (in my opinion at least) rather economical with the truth.

Anyway, I’ll probably keep blogging. I don’t know where this will go in the future. I’ve remained anonymous, for no really good reason. It’s hard to change once you’ve started. I also don’t actually know how anonymous I actually am. I haven’t told anyone but have made a few slips when commenting on other blogs, so some may have worked it out. If you do know who I am, I won’t be annoyed if you let me know, but may look a little shocked.

Budget deficit

I listened – last night – to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee session with David Willetts. In general I was impressed, both with those on the committee and with David Willetts himself. Phil Willis (the ex Chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee) was a member of the committee and he was, as usual, well informed and articulate. He asked a very interesting question about why we are planning to cut research budgets while many other countries (Germany, France, Spain, Japan, China, USA) are ring-fencing or increasing their research budgets. He also pointed out that our total public debt is comparable to or less than that of many of these countries. David Willetts’s response was that the problem is not necessarily the total debt, it’s our current deficit – the amount we need to borrow in order to cover the difference between expenditure and receipts. This is illustrated in the figure below that I have taken from the treasury website. It shows total public sector spending (blue bars) and total public sector spending (yellow bars). The deficit is the difference between these two values.

As can be seen in the above figure, there was actually a surplus in the late 1990s. In about 2001 we started running a budget deficit, but it remained at less than 3% of GDP until 2007-2008 when it suddenly ballooned to about 10% of GDP. This is a big number and does mean that we are borrowing a large amount of money at the moment. This is what confuses me though. If the economy recovers, then the deficit should return to 2007-2008 levels within a couple (maybe a few) years. If we were to do nothing, we would need to borrow a large amount of money and although this may make the city a little nervous, it’s hard to see how the economy itself would suffer. People would remain in employment, education and healthcare would still be well funded, and research budgets would not need to be slashed. What is more, the small print on the above figure says that the public sector spending is the “Total managed expenditure, including the temporary effects of financial interventions.” Maybe I don’t know what this means, but I assume it means that one of the reasons for the large deficit is that we’ve been bailing out the banking sector. If right, we’re facing massive cuts entirely because we’ve had to bail out the banking sectors who already are making profits of billions of pounds a year.

This again seems to indicate that the deficit should reduce, fairly quickly. Again, I understand that our debt will grow if we don’t cut it quickly. Currently we pay 43 billion in interest on our debt. If we increased our debt by one-third, we would be paying about 60 billion a year. It is a lot of money and I’m all in favour of reducing our deficit and, over time, reducing our debt. Given that our deficit is likely to return to pre-financial crisis levels of about 3% of GDP, a reduction of about 9% in public spending (given that public spending makes up about one-third of our economy) could remove the structural deficit and – in the short term – essentially cover the interest payments. What is more, a modest increase in taxation together with a modest reduction in public spending could produce the same result without the carnage that the proposed cuts are likely to produce.

My gut feeling is that this is largely idealogical. It is an opportunity for an essentially conservative government to reduce the size of the public sector. Today’s proposal that students fees could be uncapped and could double in the next year or so, seems to be first step in this direction. Furthermore, it is very difficult to see how removing this amount of money from our economy on such a short timescale won’t do some damage. I accept that not cutting the budget will result in an increase in public debt, but at least we could be reasonably confident that the economy should continue to recover. A goal to cut an amount comparable to the 2007-2008 deficit so that within a few years we’re running a balanced budget and can work towards reducing our debt would seem to be a much more sensible option. It’s quite possible that I misunderstand this competely and I’m pretty sure some people will think this to be the case (probably fairly safe from actually being attacked for this as not many people are reading this). Essentially my view is that we are facing ideologically driven cuts that are justified on the basis of a large deficit resulting from us bailing out the banking sector. If we can convince the right people that cuts of this magnitude are suicide, maybe we can also convince them that cutting the science budget will also do much more damage than good.

Science budget cuts

I’ve signed the Science is Vital petition and clearly agree with the view that if the cuts are of the magnitude that people expect, the damage done to UK science could be extreme and irreversible. I’m, however, finding it quite difficult to really get behind this fight, largely because I’m not particularly comfortable with what this argument implies. The government wants to cut the total public budget by something like 10-20%. Their reason for doing this is that they want to reduce the structural deficit, essentially the amount of money the government has to borrow, annually, to balance its books even when the economy is performing optimally.

Although I do believe that cutting the science budget would be disastrous, if one assumes that the cuts are inevitable and we don’t want the science budget to be cut, what gets cut in its place. As far as I’m aware, health and education (although not Higher Education) are ring-fenced. Ultimately, reducing (or getting rid of entirely) the structural deficit is a perfectly sensible thing to do. We can’t expect to simply borrow money indefinitely. However, trying to do so on the timescale proposed by the government may be the problem. Admittedly, annual borrowing is currently something like 10% of GDP, so we are increasing our debt by a substantial amount every year. However, our total debt is still not particularly large. It is similar to, if not smaller than, many other comparable countries.

Allowing the debt to grow for the next few years is not obviously the wrong thing to do. Although slashing public sector budgets may also not be obviously wrong from an economic perspective, it will clearly have a very serious effect on some sectors of our society and if we can’t protect the most vulnerable in our society, then we have some very questionable ethical standards. What is more, I suspect that the impact of the proposed cuts will be very hard to predict. When scientists try to understand the evolution of a system, a very common approach is to perform a linear analysis. If you assume the perturbation is small, the equations often become analytically solvable. If, however, the perturbations are large the system becomes non-linear and understanding its evolution becomes very difficult. Computer models can deal with such systems, but predictions based on the simple linear analysis become largely useless.

Strictly speaking the cuts aren’t effectively non-linear, but the consequences of such a large perturbation must be virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy. I certainly feel that cuts of this magnitude will be damaging for the country as a whole and that even if we can protect the science budget, the damage done to some other sectors of our society may make protecting the science budget all a little pointless. I think we, as academics, should be making strong arguments as to why cuts of this magnitude are too unpredictable to be worth considering. Growing our debt in a managed way and aiming to reduce the structural deficit over a longer time period will be much safer and result in more long term stability. Included in this are decisions about the size of the public sector and how to get the required revenue, but this will be much easier to do if the economy is reasonably stable than if it is highly perturbed and uncertain.

Scidebate

I listened to most of the Science debate, a couple of days ago, between Adam Afriyie, Evan Harris and Paul Drayson. Couldn’t quite listen to it all because my daughter decided to be diligent and practice her guitar and insisted on me helping. The debate was pretty good, but it hasn’t really done much to change my view of the different parties. I find Adam Afriyie unconvincing and insincere. He also insists on stating things like the UK has the highest deficit and the worst debt, none of which is strictly true (as far as I can tell). I know our economy isn’t in good shape, but when I look at the data it doesn’t look much worse then Germany, for example, and seems better than the US. It appears as though the conservatives are going to continue to insist that the UK economy is in dire straits, that it is all Labour’s fault and that there is therefore no chance of extra investment in anything (or conversely, they are unable to suggest that extra investment might be possible because this would imply that the economy isn’t quite as bad as they want it to appear and therefore Labour hasn’t done as bad a job as they would like us to think).

I’m still not particularly impressed with Paul Drayson. Part of this is clearly because I don’t like a system in which people can become part of government by being made Lords. However, I do think that he is really listening to what he is being told and is trying to reach some kind of consensus. He has recognised problems with the structure of STFC and has come up with what appears to be a reasonable solution (although no reversal of the cuts to the grants line). He did, however, say something a little odd. He made the comment that the £600 million cut to HE funding and science funding is a cut on an as yet undefined budget and therefore doesn’t necessarily mean a reduction in funding. I guess that if the message gets through in time, the HE and science budgets could be set at a level such that a £600 million cut can be included without a reduction in the budget and without anyone losing face. Still seems rather odd to announce a cut but then suggest that this doesn’t necessarily imply a reduction in the budget (although it was Peter Mandelsson who announced the cut, not Paul Drayson).

Paul Drayson also went through his arguments for the inclusion of impact statements in grant applications. One was that evidence is needed to help make the case for doing research. I happen to agree with this. I just don’t see how academics writing statements about how their research “might” have impact qualifies as evidence. There must be a way to get evidence that is more concrete than this . The other argument he made was that it is taxpayers money and therefore there is an obligation to convince the public that it is well spent. Again, I agree with this in principle. However, there is a subtlety to this that I think Paul Drayson doesn’t get (or choses not to get). Many people in the UK are in careers that rely on public funding, but we don’t necessarily expect individuals within these different areas to justify their existence. We – the public – realise the value of, for example, healthcare, education, social services, etc. The fact that he wants us as individual researchers to justify what we do implies – in my view – that in some sense research is viewed as some kind of luxury and that we are in some way privileged. Make no mistake, I do feel very lucky and privileged to get paid to do a job I enjoy and that brings me much satisfication. I just don’t believe that research is a luxury. It is a crucial part of our economy and is a primary reason why we have world class universities and graduates that can subsequently contribute significantly to our economy. Of course at some level we do have to justify how public money is spent and how much should be spent. But, like other publically funded areas, I just feel that it should be done in a much broader way. Holistic rather than reductionist. It is the science minister and the heads of funding councils who should be making the case to treasury, not individual researchers. What we as researchers and academics have to do – in my view – is to do our teaching and research to the best of our abilities, which then makes it easier for these people to make the case for HE and science funding. This is what we (or certainly me) were hired to do.

Evan Harris was, once again, fantastic. He even managed to keep his comedy (which is actually pretty funny) at what seemed like a perfectly reasonable level this time. He seems to really understand the value of universities and of university research and he makes clear and coherent arguments about how we should fund these organisations and the role of science in society. In fairness, maybe it is easier to make these kind of idealistic arguments if you’re never likely to become science minister and never have to deal with more of the realities of the job, but he makes them extremely well nonetheless. He also seems to be the only person making the argument that research funding plays a crucial role in ensuring that we have world class universities that can attract world class academics. He also seems to realise that to attract world class academics into university and research jobs, we are going to have to make sure that the career prospects are attractive. Academics and researchers are a resource but not an infinite one, and the more pressure we place on these people and the more we imply that their role is not of obvious value, the less likely we are to attract people into such careers. He also seems to recognise the issue of gender imbalance in academia and that it is not a simple problem. For some reason, women are less likely to remain in academic or research jobs and we need to do something to reverse this trend.

All in all, I’m very pleased that science is a becoming an important election issue, but concerned that the two main parties are not making a convincing case that they genuinely believe in the value of science and scientific research. I would really like to see Evan Harris playing a bigger role in making science policy, so would be quite comfortable with a hung parliament. Adam Afriyie, on the other hand, seems to think a hung parliament would be a disaster which suggests – to me at least – that what is driving the Tories is a desire to be in power, rather than a desire to play a role in developing policy that would be of benefit to the UK and its people.

Celebrity scientists

It feels like celebrity scientists are the flavour of the month at the moment. Whenever I turn on the TV I seem to do so just as Brian Cox’s new BBC documentary Wonders of the Solar System is being advertised. Also ended up watching him on CBBC (newsround or something like that) when watching TV with one of my kids a few days ago. My wife then came in to say she’d been listening to him on Radio 4 talking to Dara O’Briain, Eddie Izzard and others, and I think he was also on the News Quiz yesterday with Sandie Toksvig, although I didn’t listen myself. Then I turned on the radio in the car this morning only to hear Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a physicist and engineer who now works for Astrium Ltd. as an optical instrument scientist, talking to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs.

Maybe I’m just noticing it more, but it does seem like science is getting an awful lot of exposure at the moment. Those doing it, such as Brian Cox and Maggie Aderin-Pocock, also seem to be doing a good job of not only educating the general public but also of being incredibly enthusiastic and excited about what they do. Without wanting to sound too cynical, I have been wondering if this enhanced exposure is somewhat contrived. There has been a great deal of concern recently about the possibility – despite the government’s rhetoric about the importance of science – that there would be significant and damaging cuts to science funding. There has also been a concern that there would be an attempt to shift public science funding away from the more fundamental science areas into areas that could have more immediate economic impact. Maybe people are actively working to increase the exposure of science and, in particular fundamental science, to try and illustrate it’s importance and how much general interest there is in these areas – although maybe there isn’t any agenda at all and it is just coincidental. Either way, I think it’s generally a very good thing.

I only hope that the various “celebrity scientist” know when they’ve reached the limits of their expertise. The Tories, if they get into power, want to return to more traditional school lessons, but the only people they suggest would help with deciding what to do in the different areas are the various celebrity experts. We also already have Carol Vorderman helping with deciding how maths should be taught at school. I do think that the various celebrity experts have an extremely important role to play in exposing people to science and the arts and generally they do it very well. I just sometimes wish that they would realise that their skills are generally in communicating difficult subjects and that, although their science communication can inform policy, their role is not necessarily to become directly involved in making policy. I also wish politicians would realise, more often, that celebrities aren’t the only people worth listening to. In fairness, Brian Cox did a pretty good job in front of the parliamentary select committee on Science and Technology a week or so ago, so maybe some can do it all.

Paul Drayson and Scientific Impact!

Paul Drayson recently gave the Nairn Lecture in Oxford and the title of his speech was “Science: where now?”. Apart from mentioning how successful and clever he had been, it seemed to focus primarily on the relationship between scientific research and economic impact. He specifically states “our capacity to create wealth from science needs to improve – to deliver the strong economic growth and jobs”. If any have read my other posts you will know that I am not a fan of the current impact agenda. This is not because I think scientific research shouldn’t deliver impact, it’s because I don’t believe what is being introduced will in any way help scientific research to deliver more impact and will ultimately be a complete waste of time and money.

It’s my view that if the government wants scientific research to deliver more impact, it should be putting more pressure on industry to communicate with researchers and to take more risks. To me, this is illustrated by the following statement taken from Paul Drayson’s speech

“I remind you that it was UK scientists who invented ultrasound. It was UK scientists who sequenced DNA. It was UK scientists who made the breakthrough on plastic electronics. It was UK scientists who got there first on monoclonal antibodies. In each case, commercialisation happened elsewhere.”

What I think he is trying to say here is that researchers in the UK have been very good at doing world class research, but very bad at exploiting it.  This may indeed be true, but what it actually illustrates – in my view – is that UK industry is very poor at exploiting the world class research that takes place in this country.  Is it reasonable to expect scientific researchers to do both the research and the exploitation (at the moment I seem to barely have time for the research).  In my opinion, it is not.  What motivates researchers is solving the puzzle, what motivates entrepreneurs and industrialists is presumably exploiting the results of the research.  Providing a way for entrepreneurs and industrialists to exploit the results of research done in the UK with public money (assuming that an appropriate amount of the resulting wealth remains in the public sector) seems perfectly reasonable.  Doing it by suggesting that the world class researchers should do better does not.

The more I encounter Paul Drayson, the less impressed I am.  We may well have a problem in the way in which we deliver impact from scientific research.  Trying to fix this by putting more pressure on those who are doing their part well, however, seems simplistic and short-sighted.   Part of me is pleased that he probably only has a few months left as science minister. Another part is terrified by what we will get in his place.

The case for fundamental science!

I’ve been trying to get this post going for a while and am not really sure how to start, so apologies if it seems somewhat rambling and incoherent. As most of you know, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) prioritisation exercise, that was largely finalised on December 16, has resulted in significant cuts to facilities, exploitation grants, and to fellowships and studentships. The one positive outcome is that Paul Drayon (The Minister for Science and Innovation) has now recognised (quite why it took him so long is a mystery) that “there are real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities and UK grant giving roles within a single Research Council” and will find a solution by the end of February. A number of solutions have been presented some of which are summarised in Jon Butterworth’s Life and Physics blog.  Some more detail can be found in these slides from Paul Crowther’s STFC funding crisis webpages.

Given the current situation, all of these suggestions are reasonably sensible and we may well end up going down one of these routes in the near future. One problem I have is that none of these really intend to even try to resolve the real problem :  for the foreseeable future, Astronomy, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics (PPAN) will be funded at a level that barely makes them viable. The projected level of exploitation funding suggests that only 1 in 4 academic staff will be funded at any one time and that grant success rates will be something like 1 in 12. As pointed out in Mike Cruise’s (outgoing Chairman of the Astronomy Grants Panel) slides, also on Paul Crowther’s STFC page, this means that on average most academics will only hold two STFC funded research grants during their career. What is more likely is that some will be more successful at holding onto grants (especially if they are successful early on in their careers) and many others may never have a successful grant application. Some of these may still have successful research careers, but with the inclusion of Full Economic Costing it is going to become increasing difficult to sustain a research career without funding.

Over time one would expect Physics (and Astronomy) departments to slowly move from PPAN research areas to areas that are more likely to receive funding, potentially reducing the number of PPAN staff by as much as three-quarters (the most extreme scenario admittedly). Some of you may note that this is roughly in line with a recommendation of the Wakeham Review of Physics , namely :

The Panel recommends to the Funding Councils and Research Councils that they work together to consider how they can encourage physics departments to reclaim the intellectual leadership in the broader spectrum of physics supported across the full science base.

Although the Wakeham review was generally well received, I do have one problem with it.  Rather that reviewing Physics in the UK, it reviewed Physics Departments.  One of the conclusions (implied by the above statement from the review) is that there is too much fundamental physics taking place in Physics Departments (or more correctly, Physics Departments are too reliant on STFC funding). In fact, I have heard, that this has resulted in a general view that too large a fraction of UK Physics funding is spent on fundamental physics and not enough on applied physics.  In truth this view may have been held prior to the Wakeham Review, but the Review certainly didn’t help.  The problem with this view is that it ignores all the physics taking place in other departments (Engineering, Medicine, Chemistry, Biology, Geosciences, Mathematics, etc.).

The idea that a lot of fundamental physics research takes place in Physics Departments and that applied physics research moves out into other departments seems perfectly reasonable to me.  This isn’t to say that Physics Departments shouldn’t do applied research, but just that being dominated by fundamental research may not be unreasonable. Certainly changing the makeup of Physics Departments because of some misconception about physics research in the UK seems like the wrong reason for doing it. It seems important to me that we should be making the case that not only is the fraction of physics funding spent on fundamental physics not too high, but that Physics departments being dominated by fundamental research areas is perfectly fine (as long as the applied research is being done effectively and in the appropriate place).

What is more, I think we also need to make a passionate case for the value of fundamental research itself.  Brian Cox in his two articles in the S word (here and here) has done a really good job of making the case for fundamental science, and so have others. It just doesn’t seem to be having any impact with those who are making the decisions.

We need to convince people that the reason we do this is because we are fascinated by the subject and that it is curiosity driven. What is more, society in general is fascinated and we are a much better society as a result of our understanding of the universe and the world around us than we would be if we were ignorant of these things. At this stage some might argue that this places us in the same positions as the arts, who are not funded nearly as well as the sciences. The difference is that we also know that physics itself underpins something like 6% (~ £40 billion a year) of our economy. The ability to attract students into physics degrees to sustain this sector of our economy is crucial and there is good evidence that a fascination with fundamental physics is a prime factor in students deciding to do physics. Spending less than £1 billion per year to underpin a sector of our economy worth about £40 billion a year seems like a really small price to pay.  I am convinced that the damage being done today to research in fundamental physics will have a negative impact on our ability to attract good students into physics degrees.

We then have the additional benefit that some fundamental research produces completely unexpected results that change the way we live and have an economic benefit that completely dwarfs what has been spent funding the research itself. This is particularly unique to fundamental research, since applied research is inherently predictable. Again, I’m not arguing against applied physics, but arguing that we must not undervalue the importance of fundamental research (I should clarify here that my definition of fundamental research is research that is curiosity driven, while my definition of applied research is research with a particular, well defined goal – i.e., the result is essentially known and the research is trying to work out how to get there).

My concern for the near future is that although people are making these type of arguments, the general view is that the Science Minister wants to make a decision by the end of February and that there is no chance of extra money.  What will therefore happen is that – rather than making a passionate defence of fundamental physics and putting pressure on the government to protect a research area that is crucial for our society and economy – we will essentially give the Science Minister what he wants in order to protect the small amount of funding that remains.  In a sense we would rather keep what we have than take the risk of damaging it further by annoying the government and the Science Minister.  To a large extent I believe that, as publicly funded scientists, if we feel that what we do is important and that the current cuts will do immense damage to our society and economy, we have an obligation to fight against it.  We should not sacrifice the future to protect the small amount of funding we have today – it is selfish and cowardly.

The one thing I have not mentioned is, who does the fighting?  There have been plenty of very good articles in newspapers and on blogs making the case for fundamental science, but this doesn’t seem to be enough (although they have clearly had some impact).  Even David Mitchell has been in on the act. One person would be the head of the research council responsible for funding research in fundamental physics. However, since he doesn’t seem to believe in the value of fundamental science (my opinion admittedly, rather than a fact) and seems to think we spend too much money on exploitation grants anyway, this is unlikely to happen. Although I believe strongly that we should continue to fight for fundamental physics because we believe in its intrinsic value, I am not particularly hopeful of much success.

Science Advisors cont…

I posted a comment about the firing of David Nutt (here) in which I suggested that it was probably justified in the sense that his position was no longer tenable. I have learned a little more since then and it does appear that he was treated very badly by the home secretary, but I don’t think my general view has changed. I think he should have resigned earlier, although forcing the government to fire him has brought the role of science advisors into the spotlight, which is certainly a good thing. The fact that David Nutt is now forming an Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (outside of government) is, however, something I find slightly worrying. It seems incredibly arrogant and the concern I have is that David Nutt’s arrogance will lead to him to do something that will ultimately undermine the position of future government science advisors. I’m sure he must have some enemies who are just waiting for him to fail. I think he should slip quietly into the background for a while and let the process evolve without him. He’s already done his bit by getting fired.

What motivated this post was, however, a comment by Adam Afriyie during Tuesday’s CaSE Science and Engineering Policy Debate to the effect that government ministers should be allowed to fire advisors whenever they like. This has received quite a lot of coverage (here and here) and in general it appears that most are critical of this view. I must admit that although I don’t think much of Adam Afriyie, I tend to agree with him on this. Assuming that he is referring to unpaid advisors, then I see no real reason why ministers shouldn’t be able to get rid of them at will (this may not be entirely relevant to the David Nutt case as – I believe – he was chair of statutory body, rather than simply a science advisor) . The caveat, of course, is that this should be done publicly and ministers who regularly ignore advice or fire advisors for no good reason should pay the ultimate price. We, the electorate, have to be willing to not re-elect people who do not listen to well founded advice and who are willing to fire people whose advice they don’t like. Giving ministers this freedom also means that the process will be more honest and they will be more likely to give away their true views and will give us a chance to judge them accordingly.

CaSE Science Debate

I watched and listened – last night – to the Science and Engineering Policy Debate between Adam Afriyie (Shadow Science and Innovation Minister), Paul Drayson (the current Minister for Science and Innovation) and Evan Harris (the Liberal Democrat science spokesman).  The debate was organised by the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) and was chaired by Roger Highfiled, the editor of New Scientist.  I was a bit disappointed as I was rather selfishly hoping that the STFC situation would be discussed in more detail and that there would be more discussion about including the assessment of “impact” in future funding decisions.   Both of these were covered, but only briefly, and the debate was explicitly steered towards more of a discussion about future science policy, rather than a discussion of existing issues, and each candidate was pushed to give their partys’s views on various topics.  This was okay, but it did mean that a broad range of topics were covered and that nothing was really covered in any detail.  The three speakers were all extremely polite and complimentary about each other, so nothing particularly exciting happened.  Adam Afriyie even commented that Paul Drayson was a good Science Minister who was probably in the wrong party. As good as Paul Drayons may or may not be, I’m somewhat disturbed by the fact that the he is unelected, and the fact that one can qualify to be a government minister by being made a Lord seems somewhat archaic and undemocratic.  The same is true for Peter Mandelson and the less said about that the better.

Overall I thought Adam Afriyie was a little benign.  Didn’t say anything that I particularly liked or disliked.  Paul Drayson was disappointing.  I quite like the fact that he’s on Twitter and that he seems to be trying to listen to others and to actually take on board what they are saying, but whenever I listen to him I get the impression that he really doesn’t get the subtleties of scientific research.  He also seems to be spouting more and more of the standard party rhetoric and had to be pushed to use the word “cuts” rather than “efficiency savings”.  He still regurgitates the rather simplistic arguments about why including impact statements is a good thing and that it won’t have a negative impact on fundamental research.  He also stated that the government needs to fund more applied research in order to help the economy as if this was obvious and didn’t really merit much discussion.  I don’t have a problem with applied research at all, but nothing the government does now regarding research funding (apart from possibly using a Keynesian approach and increasing it) is going to fix the current recession, so increasing funding for applied research to help the economy now is almost certainly not going to work.   Another issue I have with increasing the amount of government funding for applied research is that it could further discourage industry (which in my view is where a lot of applied research should take place) from investing in research.  The government should really be putting more pressure on industry to take more risks, not spending taxpayers money on research that will be of short or medium term benefit to industry.  As decent as I think Paul Drayon is trying to be, I personally don’t think he’s a particularly good Science Minister and I’m not particularly confident about the outcome of his review of STFC that is due to be completed by the end of February (although I am at least pleased that he has recognised that there is a problem).

Evan Harris, on the other hand, was fantastic.  He was very well informed and a lot of comments were hard-hitting and direct.  He was also hilarious.  Maybe he shouldn’t try quite as hard to be funny, but he is pretty good at it.  Could almost be a comedian.  I was really impressed by how he performed and by what he presented as the Liberal Democrats’s views about how science should be funded and what kind of role it should play in society.  I particularly liked his argument that politicians who misuse data and statistics should be hammered for doing so.  I’m really hoping that the Liberal Democrats do well in the upcoming elections, but am not particularly hopeful.  The media seems to largely write them off as having no hope and I’m not quite sure why this is.  I’m starting to suspect that the various media outlets are too strongly tied to individual political parties and as a result the different parties are not getting objectively represented (I may be saying something patently obvious here).  I suspect the fact that the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to form the next government gives them the freedom to say what they like and to make promises that they might never have to keep, but I’m not sure we should hold that against them and I’m quite prepared at this stage to take them at face value.  Labour and the Conversatives have proven that when they’re in government they can’t keep their promises, so maybe it’s time to give the Liberal Democrats their chance.  Really can’t be any worse, can it?

Science funding after the next election

While following the #stfc comments on twitter, I noticed that someone made a comment along the lines of “who’ll vote for the Labour party now”. To a certain extent, I agree. I certainly have no desire to see Labour win the next election. They have ultimately managed to do immense damage to some very productive areas of British science, and the UK doesn’t appear to be a better place to live now than it was before Labour came to power in 1997 (as an aside, my father – who left the UK many years ago – commented, when visiting recently, that politicians used to say “continue to serve” but now shamelessly say “remain in power”).

Something that concerns me, however, is the impression I have that many people’s automatic alternative to Labour is the Conservatives. The reasoning seems to be that the only other possible party is the Liberal Democrats, but they’ve never been in power and so the Conservatives are the only viable alternative. This really doesn’t make sense to me. As far as I’m aware the pre-1997 Conservative government was at least as bad as the current Labour government, if not worse. We surely cannot want the next government to contain any of those who were involved in the pre-1997 Conservative government (I’m referring here to ministers rather than backbench MPs). Admittedly I suspect very few – if any – of the current Conservative shadow ministers were in the pre-1997 cabinet, in which case they have as much experience as any of the Liberal Democrat shadow ministers. Therefore why is there a general assumption that the Conservatives are capable of running the next government, while the Liberal Democrats are not. It’s true I guess that there are currently more Conservative MPs than Liberal Democrat MPs, but all (or at least most) of those who would actually be in the next cabinet are probably currently experienced MPs.

As far as current performance is concerned, I think the Liberal Democrats have been quite impressive. Vince Cable seemed to have a good handle on the financial crisis well before either Alistair Darling or George Osborne. Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat Science Minister, seemed to perform quite well in an event discussing the future of UK science, certainly better than the Conservative Shadow Minister Adam Afriyie (there’ll be another debate in late January). Phil Willis has also, in my view, been a very good Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee (what used to be known as the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills). In fact, it was their report on STFC that prompted me to write this post. Maybe I’m biased, but the report seemed remarkably honest and straightforward and pretty much confirmed what many people had been saying. In particular, it essentially confirmed that a primary issue is that STFC was not formed with sufficient funding to maintain current programmes, saying

We remain concerned that the former PPARC community has been saddled with a £75 million (at 2006/07 prices) funding deficit derived from CCLRC to meet the additional running costs of Diamond and ISIS TS2, despite assurances from the Government that STFC would be formed without any legacy issues. We conclude that the combined budget of PPARC and CCLRC was never going to be sufficient for STFC to manage Diamond, ISIS TS2, the other large facilities and all the PPARC research programmes. This was noted by the National Audit Office in January 2007, and therefore the Government should have known and should have acted upon it. The fact that it did not has had unfortunate consequences. We believe that the Government should ensure that its original commitment to leave no legacy funding issues from the previous Councils is honoured.

Somewhat surprisingly, for what is essentially a government report and might normally be expected to be somewhat restrained, it was also very critical of the way in which STFC was being run, stating explicitly

Substantial and urgent changes are now needed in the way in which the Council is run in order to restore confidence and to give it the leadership it desperately needs and has so far failed properly to receive. This raises serious questions about the role and performance of the Chief Executive, especially his ability to retain the confidence of the scientific community as well as to carry through the necessary changes outlined here.

Of course, some changes have been made, but I suspect many would argue that these changes weren’t sufficient. The Science Minister – Paul Drayson – has now agreed in a recent press release that there are problems with the structure of STFC and intends to find a solution within a few months. My suspicion is that a solution to the structural problems will be found (even one that we may be happy with), but no real attempt will be made to resolve the legacy funding issues.

I guess this post started with a discussion of which party may end up forming the next government and has ended up back with a discussion of STFC. Let me finish by saying that I’m not arguing that everyone should choose the Liberal Democrats, rather than the Conservatives, as an alternative to Labour, or even that people shouldn’t vote Labour. I don’t belong to the Liberal Democrat Party and, in fact, am not a fan of party politics – I think the Three Line Whip is completely undemocratic. I am, however, worried that we’ll end up with a Conservative government primarily to punish Labour, rather than because everyone who voted for the Conservatives believes in their policies (maybe I’m not giving the general British public enough credit though). I also think that, as far as science funding is concerned, a future Conservative government may result in us harking back to the good old days of Labour. In truth, since party politics is here to stay I would actually rather we had three strong parties, than two parties who seem to be essentially the same as each other, or at least very similar. I might even be happy with a hung parliament. They can spend more time booing and hissing at each other in Westminster and less time messing about with things more to suit their political goals than to really make things work more effectively.