A bit player
Four US cities, Boston, New York, San Diego and San Francisco have between them 113m sq. ft. of laboratory space.
The UK’s golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge has 1/20th of that and occupancy rates are running at 99%.
Heaven alone knows what the figures for China, Taiwan, Japan or the EU are.
This tells us two things.
The first is obvious, the UK is no longer a major international force in science. Don’t get me wrong we punch above our weight, we have excellent firms, brilliant universities and top scientists, some research labs and institutes are world class. But we have too few of them, top scientists have been saying for years that we have a few very good research bodies but they are thinly spread and politicians who fool themselves into thinking we have breath and depth in science and technology are fooling themselves.
Secondly Brexit was a disaster, the idea that we could go it alone was a farce, Rishi Sunak’s reluctance to even rejoin Horizon+ and instead think about going it alone with a UK version was a sign of just how out of touch the government is.
But Horizon+ is only one thing that the EU does in the realm of science and technology, and the UK has left almost all the rest.
It is just one of the many things that were lost when we decided that we could go it alone. We are competing with the USA, China and now with the EU. Economies with hundreds of millions of people, huge economies of scale, vast levels of research and development spending, global companies, and a coordinated and planned approach to future technologies.
The UK has none of these.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media