There will be a general election in the UK this year, and it is not impossible (to say the least) that the Labour opposition will form the next government. What might such a government’s policies imply for science and innovation policy? There are some important clues in a recent, lengthy speech – the 2024 Mais Lecture – given by the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, in which she sets out her economic priors. In the speech, Reeves sets out in her view, the underlying problems of the UK economy – slow productivity growth leading to wage stagnation, low investment levels, poor sk ..read more

Here is one of the foundational papers for the modern world – in effect, reporting the invention of optical fibres. Without optical fibres, there would be no internet, no on-demand video – and no globalisation, in the form we know it, with the highly dispersed supply chains that cheap and reliable information transmission between nations and continents that optical fibres make possible. This won a Nobel Prize for Charles Kao, a HK Chinese scientist then working in STL in Essex, a now defunct corporate laboratory. Optical fibres are made of glass – so, ultimately, they come from sand – as Ed C ..read more

In 2019 I wrote a blogpost called The challenge of deep decarbonisation, stressing the scale of the economic and technological transition implied by a transition to net zero by 2050. I think the piece bears re-reading, but I wanted to update the numbers to see how much progress we had made in 4 years (the piece used the statistics for 2018; the most up-to-date current figures are for 2022). Of course, in the intervening four years we have had a pandemic and global energy price spike. The headline figure is that the fossil fuel share of our primary consumption has fallen, but not by much. In 20 ..read more

In the last decade, the UK has had four significantly different sets of technology priorities, and a short, but disruptive, period, where such prioritisation was opposed on principle. This 3500 word piece looks at this history of instability in UK innovation policy, and suggests some principles of consistency and clarity which might give us some more stability in the decade to come. A PDF version can be downloaded here. Introduction The problem of policy churn has been identified in a number of policy areas as a barrier to productivity growth in the UK, and science and innovation policy is no ..read more

On the 22nd November, the Government published its Autumn Statement. This piece, published in Research Professional under the title Economic clouds cast gloom over the UK’s ambitions for R&D, offers my somewhat gloomy perspective on the implications of the statement for science and innovation. This government has always placed a strong rhetorical emphasis on the centrality of science and innovation in its plans for the nation, though with three different Prime Ministers, there’ve been some changes in emphasis. This continues in the Autumn Statement: a whole section is devoted to “Supportin ..read more

To scientists, machine learning is a relatively old technology. The last decade has seen considerable progress, both as a result of new techniques – back propagation & deep learning, and the transformers algorithm – and massive investment of private sector resources, especially computing power. The result has been the striking and hugely publicised success of large language models. But this rapid progress poses a paradox – for all the technical advances over the last decade, the impact on productivity growth has been undetectable. The productivity stagnation that has been such a feature of ..read more

My father, Robert Cecil Jones, died on Friday 8 September 2023. His 90 year life spanned a childhood and youth in Aberystwyth, 16 years service in the Royal Air Force, a spell as an adult educator in Birmingham and a second career as a priest in the Church in Wales. He is survived by his wife of 67 years, Sheila, and me, his only child, Richard. Robbie’s mother, Gladys Jones (née Williams), was from Yspyty Ifan, in the Conwy valley; Len Jones was a journeyman butcher from Conwy. Robbie was born in Colwyn Bay in 1932, but the family soon moved to Aberystwyth, where Len carried out his trade for ..read more

The UK’s economic geography, outside London, is marked by small, prosperous cities in the south and east, and large, poor cities everywhere else. This leads to a dilemma for policy makers – should we try and make the small, successful, cities, bigger, or do the work needed to make our big cities more successful? The government’s emphasis seems to have swung back to expanding successful places in the South and East, with a particular focus on Cambridge. Cambridge is undoubtedly a great success story for the UK, and potentially a huge national asset. Decades of investment by the state in researc ..read more

Everyone now agrees that the UK has a serious problem of economic growth – or lack of it – even if opinions differ about its causes, and what we should do about it. Here I’d like to set out the scale of the problem with plots of the key data. My first plot shows real GDP since 1955. The break in the curve at the global financial crisis around 2007 is obvious. Before 2007 there were booms and busts – but the whole curve is well fit by a trend line representing 2.4% a year real growth. But after the 2008 recession, there was no return to the trend line. Growth was further interrupted by the covi ..read more

The UK is now well into a second decade of sluggish productivity growth, with far-reaching consequences for people’s standard of living, for the sustainability of public services, and (arguably) for the wider political environment. It has become usual to date the beginning of this new period of slow productivity growth to the global financial crisis around 2008, but I increasingly suspect that the roots of the malaise were already in place earlier in the 2000s. UK Labour productivity. Data: ONS, Output per hour worked, chained volume measure, 7 July 2023 release. Fit: non-linear least squares ..read more