Britain's Research Circuit

The Politics of British Science. Martin Ince. Wheatsheaf Books, Brighton, Sussex, 1986. 227 pp. £18.95 HB, £8.95 PB. The British government spends about 4.5 billion pounds (about $7 billion) a year on R&D. This is a little more than 2 percent of GNP—not much different in percentage terms than most other advanced industrial countries. The difference, as Martin Ince and others point out, is that more than half of the British expenditure goes to military research; only the United States spends proportionally more, and most other countries much less. Apart from the Ministry of Defence, the civil funding agencies are an untidy mix. There are the ministries themselves, from agriculture to transport, and the five research councils. Civil science spending is supposed to be coordinated through advisory committees, but there is virtually no integration between military and civil research. This funding structure, which worked modestly well in times of relative affluence, is now creaking badly. It is not merely the starvation of funds that has weakened the British research enterprise during the Thatcher years, but the decapitation of its policy-making processes through the abolishing or devaluing of the central advisory groups. The result, as is well-known, has been a catastrophic loss of morale throughout almost the entire scientific field. Ince, features editor of the weekly magazine The Engineer, treads familiar ground throughout most of this book, threading his way through the interstices of Britain's science-funding institutions. He does not, however, delve into the politics of these institutions in the sense of either an historical or theoretical analysis of their development. It is really only with his account of military (defense) science that the book suddenly comes alive. Here it is clear that Ince has an agenda. Defense science, he implies, is largely a waste of money; what is needed is a radical redirection of military to civil work. Surprisingly, he makes no reference to the fact that the Labour Party is now publicly committed to just that redirection—1,000 million pounds of it in the lifetime of a parliament, according to Labour's science spokesperson Jeremy Bray. As it is not clear that, beyond this programmatic statement, Labour has thought very hard about how redirection is to be achieved, Ince's chapter may contain a few modestly helpful suggestions. But what does Ince himself want to do with a redirected science? One has to read between the lines to discover. The clues come in his account of the Alvey program in information technology and the more modest biotechnology program, comparisons with the more effective use of science by Britain's industrial competitors like Japan, and descriptions of the embryonic European collaborative efforts such as the glamorously acronymed but obscure Eureka program, launched by France's President Mitterrand as a counterweight to President Reagan's Star Wars. Ince's implicit goal is more efficient use of science for national economic goals. The final chapter shows the extent to which Ince's agenda has been touched by the demands made by the radical science movement— national scientific efficiency is not enough without a greater measure of democracy in scientific decision-making. The Lucas shop stewards' alternative plan for redirecting the company's military output, the Dutch science shops, and the creation of a new Community Science Research Council to work as a "super science shop" all put in their now almost ritual appearances. What is lacking here is any analysis of just who is to bell this particular cat. If the institutions of science have grown as the creations of real interests, of class, of economy, of power, then it must equally be the task of real political forces to transform them. There is not likely to be much opposition to the idea of grouping civil science within a single ministry, a reconstruction that the Labour Party seems to be committed to, but touch its hierarchical structure with demands for more democracy and you begin treading on vested interests; threaten to cut off the flow of military money for more and more sophisticated and deadly toys—to say nothing of the associated comfortable and assured profit margins—and the opposition will begin to mount. This is where the real politics of science begins. Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK, has written extensively on the politics of science.

Britain's Research Circuit

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