EU Membership: UK Science

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my membership of the Science and Technology Committee and add my tribute to the chairmanship of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. I also declare my fellowship of the British Academy and my professorship of contemporary British history at Queen Mary, University of London.

When violence strikes, as it did yesterday, taking lives, injuring individuals and assaulting the central institution of our open society, it scarcely seems right, in the shadow of tragedy, to return to our disagreements over Brexit. Yet today we find ourselves on a significant patch of the post-referendum landscape, where I hope we can find more to fall in about than to fall out over. By this I mean the desirability—more than that, the powerful necessity—of our country remaining a world-class player in science, technology, the arts, humanities and social sciences; in short, the indispensability of continuing to think heavier than our weight in the world.

We may agree on this crucial shared purpose, but how best to sustain it—even to burnish it still further—in our new geopolitical circumstances, raises a host of questions, many of which are captured in the Select Committee report before us. Ours really is, as other members of the committee have said this afternoon, a time for boldness, not timidity, for building purposefully on past achievements and striving for an even greater national performance.

A powerful contributor to this cause will, I hope and think, be a knowledge of how we acquired our existing prowess—how it has been achieved over many decades. I am delighted to say that the British Academy, encouraged by your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee, is working on precisely this, analysing the singular and, I have to admit, rather baffling mixed economy that supports the life of the mind in the United Kingdom. I look forward to the results of that study with keen anticipation. We each have a kind of idea of the key factors in our prowess, ranging from the admirable Haldane principle, which helps keep the state an indispensable sponsor but not an unwelcome, overdirecting intruder into the free play of independent inquiry, right through to the dual support system for our university research.

Critical, too, I am sure, to past and current success is the scope given in the UK universities to young researchers to question orthodoxies and to open up new lines of thought; in other words, to not defer to their seniors. Crucial to this is the free movement of talent, not least to and from the nations of the European Union. There can be no tariffs on the exchange of knowledge. Nor should there be post-Brexit any barriers to the free movement of scholars who carry these ideas. The most precious of all common markets has always been the common market of the mind.

In the unfolding cartography of Brexit, the avoidance of boundaries on the scientific, technological and scholarly fronts is therefore a first-order question. Both the Department for Exiting the European Union and the Department for International Trade will need bespoke chief scientists of polymathic gifts to patrol the new rimlands, providing early warning of both problems and possibilities ahead and helping to ensure that our requirements and existing prowess are safeguarded during the great repositioning to come. For the free trade of the mind, in both people and knowledge, is as critical to our fortunes as the free trade of goods and services. Our intellectual and economic well-being depend upon it. It is a question of both funding and spirit—of recognising the sense of urgency required—and it links the uncertainties of Brexit with the wider industrial strategy that Mrs May has striven to make such a shining badge of her premiership so far.

Of all the eight previous industrial strategies since the Second World War, science and technology has more prominence in this one—if last January’s Green Paper is a guide—than in any since the early 1960s, when Harold Wilson used the “white heat” of his wished-for technological revolution to illuminate his path to 10 Downing Street in the autumn of 1964 and his promulgation of Labour’s National Plan a year later. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Prior, for whom I have the greatest respect, could promise us a bespoke debate on this, the ninth industrial strategy of his and my lifetimes. I hope he will forgive me if I make plain to other noble Lords that he and I have been engaged in a rolling conversation about what the magic ingredients of the 2017 version might be that were lacking in the previous eight. He might like to give us a little hint of that when he winds up.

What I am sure of is that when economic historians in the 2050s look back on the anxious, neuralgic politico-economics of the early post-referendum period through which we are now living, they will notice just how much was riding on the UK’s science and technology—on Britain as a knowledge power. If we do not get this aspect of our national life right this time, those historians will not spare us, and nor will our people, whose current and future needs this Parliament exists to serve. We have here a consensus in the making. We should act on it—and seize the hour.