This Wednesday Vince Cable is considered to announce the retreat from the empire of knowledge. The UK has a comprehensive capability in many disciplines of its scholarly research and only the US can match the UK in the variety of its expertise in many spheres. Other counties are mainly concentrated on those spheres that are crucial for their commercial ecosystem, e.g. German has a strong scholarly research capability in engineering.
In Britain both Conservative and Labour governments have increased funding for conducting research and gaining the expertise in institutes of higher education for a long period. Money allowed the academics to make researches in diverse spheres of knowledge. Nowadays it is considered that the Treasury will cut 35% in research funding. As a result, many fields will be left without being investigated and Britain’s empire is likely to fragment.
In case one of the government’s two main channels of funding for academic researchers, the quality-related fund provided by the Hefce, is squeezed, then researches in such disciplines as science and engineering will be stopped as there won’t be enough money. A fear that this may happen caused Royal Academy of Engineering recommend ministers to cut the budget in physics.
On Wednesday Vince Cable will make his first major speech regarding the research. He is expected to be frank talking about the abandoning of the UK’s empire of knowledge. The business secretary is supposed to be diplomatic in his speech and say that whether we like it or not cutting the budget is a political fact that is necessary to be implemented.
Macmillan noted in his essay: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.”
If the business secretary says what he is expected to announce in his speech, then it will become clear that deep cuts are approaching, the battles with the Treasury are over and Britain is not trying any more to maintain expertise across the entire empire of knowledge.