I took part in a panel discussion at the Royal Society last Thursday 20th November, with the topic ‘The future role of the state in a changing R&D landscape’. Here is a slightly expanded version of my opening remarks. My intention was to be provocative; other more optimistic views are available (and were presented by the other panel members).
The UK has seen a long period of consensus about the role of the state in the R&D landscape – and that consensus has actually been very positive for academic science. I think it’s not improbable, even quite likely, that this consensus will come to an end in the next few years. This will have huge consequences for the R&D landscape, potentially very negative, and I think it’s really important that we start to think this through.
The consensus
There’s been a great deal of continuity in UK science policy over the last twenty years. The 2004 10 Year Science and Innovation Investment Framework set out the foundations of an approach that has persisted through governments of different flavours, overseen by a series of influential science ministers – from Lord Sainsbury, through Lords Willetts, to Lord Vallance.
This is fundamentally a supply side science policy, with a focus on correcting market failure. Government supports basic science, ensures a pipeline of skilled people (including through skilled migration), and supports commercialisation of university research. There’s been some gradual change – a bumpy path to a more explicit industrial strategy since Mandelson’s return to government in 2008, to the current fully developed version. But the basic assumptions remain the same.
The consequences have been significant real terms increases in government R&D budgets, and a system dominated by research in universities.
Auguries of a breakdown
Why might we think this consensus is at risk? If we look internationally, we see the USA, often seen as the natural partners of the UK in science as in other areas, we see direct attacks on the autonomy of funding agencies, and on the position of leading research universities.
In China, we see a country that has for some years been the world’s leading manufacturing power, now arguably taking technological leadership in more and more areas – in green tech and consumer electronics. More futuristically, China is taking a leading position in some advanced fields, like quantum technology, and there is no reason to suppose it won’t soon be a leader in many areas of basic science too. This science leadership would take place in a very different political system to ours, operating under a very different set of assumptions – a Leninist technocracy, the Engineering State.
Back in the UK, the two mainstream parties have sunk to unprecedentedly low levels of public support. The two mainstream parties are polling at about 35%, while we see a surge in support for the right wing insurgent party Reform – now polling at 30%, and a newly radicalised Green Party is polling at 13%. We know from recent work by CASE that supporters of both Green and Reform parties have a significantly lower support for, and trust in, science, than either Conservative or Labour voters, and there is no reason to suppose that a government in which either Reform or Green has significant power will buy into our current science policy consensus.
The drivers of change
The decline of mainstream parties, and the corresponding rise of insurgent parties on the right and left which reject consensus, broadly liberal views, seems to be a universal feature in Western democracies at the moment. It’s probably a mistake to think this is a transient, because there are some deep drivers of change. Here are a few of those drivers:
- The return of energy as a driver of geopolitics
We’re currently in a paradoxical time when the consequences of climate change are starting to look frighteningly real, at the same time as we see an end of the international climate change consensus. Energy security has long been a major driver of geopolitics; a period of energy abundance, low fossil fuel prices, and largely free trade in the 90’s, 00’s, and 10’s led to complacency, but the invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated brutally why energy matters in geopolitics.
The world is now effectively splitting into petrostates dependent on fossil fuel exports, run (uncoincidentally) by personalist authoritarian regimes, and energy importers seeking to develop non-fossil alternative energy sources. Russia and Saudi Arabia are being joined by the USA in the former category; China is making a bold push to become a clean energy superpower, developing huge industrial and innovation capacity in solar, wind, nuclear and electric vehicles.
Where does the UK find its place in this world? On one side, there’s nostalgia for North Sea oil, and the days the UK was a petrostate too, together with an enduring urge to line up with the USA. On the other is the push for the net zero target, which until recently was a goal shared by both major parties. But, in an environment of punishingly high energy costs contributing both to cost of living, and further deindustrialization in energy intensive industries, this net zero consensus is fracturing.
- Security
The end of the Cold War allowed the UK, like other countries, to cash in a huge peace dividend. In 1990, UK defense spending accounted for about 3.3% of GDP. This fell below 2% in 2015; it’s since risen to about 2.3% and further increases are planned.
In science, for example, this resulted in a substantial transfer our resources from defense to life sciences and health related research. In an insecure world, with a major war on European soil and growing concern about the reliability of the Western alliance, this dividend is going to have to be paid back.
- Culture wars
Sour politics in the UK has led to more polarisation, with universities – and, by association science – being seen by some cultural conservatives as homes of a “woke elite”. The expansion of university education is increasingly questioned, with assertions that we have too many graduates, and not enough lower level technical training. Meanwhile, the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and vaccine efficacy and safety is increasingly questioned by minorities who “do their own research”, relying on dubious sources widely circulated through social media.
- AI
The current AI moment presents us with a true wild card. On the one hand, we have the Silicon Valley consensus that we’re approaching “artificial general intelligence”. We’re close to creating “god in a box”, a true deus ex machina that will solve all our problems. The CEO of Anthropic, for example, believes that AI will cure most forms of cancer, prevent Alzheimer’s, and double the human lifespan, all within 5-10 years. In this world, the conventional science enterprise is essentially obsolete, so there’s no need to worry about the US administration neutering the National Institutes of Health.
But we’re increasingly hearing worries that AI, and especially the build out of data centres to serve it, represent a trillion dollar misallocation of capital – a bubble whose bursting will cause systemic damage to the global financial system and a massive loss of wealth.
- Failure of the UK economic model
The failings of the UK economy become more and more obvious, as we move into the second decade of flatlining productivity, leading to stagnant wages, and declining public services, in the context of profound regional inequalities.
Successive governments are learning that their tools don’t seem to be equal to the scale of the problems, and that their freedom of action is highly constrained – not least, by the international bond markets. It’s a paradox that the UK left the EU in order to gain more sovereignty, but finds itself in a world where its economic sovereignty is limited. There is now no national capitalism, there is no “UK plc”.
Re-build, Re-energise, Re-arm, Re-industrialise
However the politics unfolds, the drivers of post-liberal populism are real, and there’s going to be more and more focus on what I’m going to call the 4 R’s – calls for the UK to re-build, re-energise, re-arm and re-industrialise. These discussions will increasingly move us away from recent political consensus, and this could go in positive or negative directions.
- Re-build. For several decades, the UK has underinvested in the future – and the future has now arrived. There has been much focus from growth-focused think-tanks on the need to build more houses and more physical infrastructure. There needs to be just as much – or more – focus on the intangible investments we have neglected – particularly in business and applied R&D.
- Re-energise. The UK is in danger of ending up impaled on all three horns of the energy trilemma, with energy that is expensive, insecure, and not yet carbon-free. International cooperation looks increasingly like a lost cause, so it’s going to be raw cost that is the essential driver of the uptake of low carbon energy, and we need to use innovation to drive those costs down, whether that is in the energy storage that’s going to be needed to make intermittent renewables work, or in new nuclear and (maybe) fusion.
- Re-arm. The need for the UK to rearm is obvious, but we need to understand how dependent our defense technology is on international supply chains that look increasingly unreliable. To build resilience, we’ll need to build manufacturing capacity and the ability to scale up production rapidly. This resilience will come at a cost.
- Re-industrialise. Rebuilding, re-energising, re-arming – all will need a degree of re-industrialising. We’ll need to be realistic about our place in the world, with less than 3% of the world’s high tech economy. The big question will be, how can we achieve security, given that autarky is both undesirable and impossible.
“You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows”
We’re entering a post-liberal era, and in UK science policy, as in so many other areas, we’d better start thinking seriously about how we’re going to navigate that.