Juliet Samuel:

We can’t afford any more short-sighted policies that fail to exploit our brilliant scientific talent

Twenty per cent. That is the proportion of the whole British economy that disappeared in April. In other words, we saw 20 years of economic growth wiped out in one month. We know, of course, that this great tranche of GDP has not simply died. Some of it lies dormant and will slowly come back to life over the coming months. But like a tree that loses a mighty branch, the economy will bear a huge and lasting scar for many, many years.

Yet even as this catastrophe plays out, the ever-restless spirit of invention and improvement is still pushing forwards across the world. Two weeks ago in the US, a private company for the first time launched a manned rocket into space. In China in December, scientists sequenced the genome of a brand new virus in record time (even if it took Beijing weeks to admit it). In Switzerland, South Korea and Kuwait, 5G networks are now up and running at ten times the speed of our fastest, older mobile networks. Innovation, the impulse behind all economic progress, surges on even during the pandemic.

Britain’s problem is that while we pay lip service to the importance of science and technology, we systematically ignore and undervalue both. Our leaders boast endlessly about our “world-beating, best-inclass” scholarship and they mouth platitudes about “following the science”, while letting our universities atrophy, churning out arts graduates with no job prospects and leaving the development of critical technology to foreign states and companies. Like a developing nation that finds itself selling raw materials for a pittance and then buying back the expensive finished product, we sell off our scientific crown jewels on the cheap and then buy back new technology for a fortune.

One way in which this happens is through our broken grants system. If a

British scientist wants to get public funding for a research project, for example, there is a very clear playbook. The proposal needs to have a good prospect of publishing a paper in a prestigious old journal, like Nature or Science – a so-called “four star” rag. Ideally, the research should also promise to make some great, inspired leap forwards in understanding, perhaps dangling some vague, distant prospect of winning a Nobel Prize. It should avoid like the plague words such as “industry” or “incremental”.

The predictable result of this approach is that scientists working on the essential bread and butter of technological advancement – refining the energy efficiency of tiny motherboards or tweaking the shape of an antenna to see if it works better – have found themselves starved of resources and pushed to the margins. Many have simply had to leave Britain or leave academia. Universities keen to continue this line of work have had to look for other funding sources.

Into this mix, now add a far-sighted and rapacious foreign government run by the Chinese Communist Party. Where our Government sees boring little science projects and expensive laboratories, China sees a bunch of chumps presiding over a brilliant university system strapped for cash in all the wrong places and wide open to train its budding AI programmers, military scientists and tech nerds. Research and institutions our bureaucrats arrogantly dismiss as second-tier, tedious, technical places doing things like electrical engineering or database management have been inundated with foreign interest and cash, helping to push Chinese science to the forefront in dozens of fields. But alas, most of the returns from the outlay don’t stay here. They go straight back to China.

In so many areas of critical national interest, you see British early-stage research leading the pack and then, one way or another, left for dead or sold on the cheap. This country is the biggest market for offshore wind on the planet and boasts some of the world’s best research in the field, yet precious few of the owners and operators of our offshore plants are British. Uk-based companies like ARM or Imagination Technologies have welcomed Chinese investment with great hopes of exchange and cooperation only to find non-chinese managers pushed out and marginalised. We have some of the world’s best nuclear physicists and engineering minds, yet we can’t for the life of us develop a functional domestic nuclear power sector even though South Korea has shown the way. We have one of the world’s biggest centralised healthcare systems generating an invaluable stock of data, yet it indulges an absurd aversion to innovation.

Repeated policy failures hinder those trying to turn this brilliant raw material into material progress. Energy policy chops and changes with the wind, constantly undercutting long-term investment. Our telecoms policy requires companies to pay huge amounts at spectrum auctions rather than giving out licenses for free in return for mandatory investment in better, wider coverage, as the US and China do. Our universities have become dangerously reliant on foreign fees, especially from Chinese students, leaving them in dire straits as the pandemic cuts off travel and accelerates us into a new Cold War.

I wish I could be optimistic that the Covid crisis will change all of this. The last budget promised a big rise in science spending and the Government keeps talking about new infrastructure. But the country isn’t gripped by a new sense of mission and can-do spirit. As we whirl into an economic death spiral, we are boarding up statues of our greatest leaders and arguing over absurd demands from teaching unions. How will we explain all of this when companies start filing for bankruptcy en masse and cohorts of schoolchildren leave education barely literate?

We cannot defend our ideas and freedoms without a basic level of prosperity. We cannot afford to keep wasting talent and opportunities, taking on ever-greater debts and thinking only about the next month, rather than the next decade. This recession is a calamity, but it could also be an opportunity to adapt, discover our fragilities and understand the mistakes that underlie them. If we don’t change our ways, it will instead be the moment when Britain entered a terrible and precipitous decline.

While we pay lip service to the importance of science and technology, we ignore and undervalue both