Please Dave, I want some more science...
at 6:50pm on Thursday, 20th September 2007
The Tories have just let another policy review report slide forth. They're notoriously difficult to find, so here's a link. This one is on Science. And their radical recommendation is that we should have more of it. All very white heat of technology.
No new budgets, of course. Just shuffling around of money. But, considering that the upward Brownian motion of Labour's science budget has followed years of Tory cuts, this isn't so surprising.
Beneath the headline, if anyone gets that far, there's some detail. But most of it is years behind where the government already is. The Tories want a department for science. We've got one, and it's separate from business. And yet they see science in almost entirely economic terms - fuel for the economy's fire. Government are at least starting to think about the public value of science.
In the last five years, we've seen government embrace arguments for public engagement with science - not just scientists shouting about how good science is, but also reflecting on the social context of their work. The Tory science report has a section on "public engagement" that takes us back to decades. They say the Research Assessment Exercise doesn't reward public engagement. They're right of course. But why do they want public engagement in the first place? "To raise the status of STEM in Britain
I would have thought that, from the party - and indeed the former science minister who chaired this review group - who were kneecapped by BSE, there would be at least some discussion of the governance of science, some consideration of what we want from science and some thought about how to manage science in a complex, uncertain world. Instead, we have the most dessicated possible politics of science. Cameron's response: “On every level science and technology must be boosted and supported." Jolly good.
No new budgets, of course. Just shuffling around of money. But, considering that the upward Brownian motion of Labour's science budget has followed years of Tory cuts, this isn't so surprising.
Beneath the headline, if anyone gets that far, there's some detail. But most of it is years behind where the government already is. The Tories want a department for science. We've got one, and it's separate from business. And yet they see science in almost entirely economic terms - fuel for the economy's fire. Government are at least starting to think about the public value of science.
In the last five years, we've seen government embrace arguments for public engagement with science - not just scientists shouting about how good science is, but also reflecting on the social context of their work. The Tory science report has a section on "public engagement" that takes us back to decades. They say the Research Assessment Exercise doesn't reward public engagement. They're right of course. But why do they want public engagement in the first place? "To raise the status of STEM in Britain
I would have thought that, from the party - and indeed the former science minister who chaired this review group - who were kneecapped by BSE, there would be at least some discussion of the governance of science, some consideration of what we want from science and some thought about how to manage science in a complex, uncertain world. Instead, we have the most dessicated possible politics of science. Cameron's response: “On every level science and technology must be boosted and supported." Jolly good.
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