Image: Daniel Oberhaus [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr
Science needs to rethink its relationship with business and the state, says William Cullerne Bown
Dorothy Bishop’s resignation from the Royal Society has brought to the surface a tension that is becoming ever harder for the society to manage. In essence, the society has, for the past century or more, ridden two horses: as a voice for science and as a soft arm of the state. These horses are now pulling in different directions.
As an arm of the state, the society does not want to pick a fight with Elon Musk, who is set to be a powerful voice in president-elect Donald Trump’s administration. But Bishop is looking at the other horse.
Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Oxford, resigned over the society’s failure to expel or otherwise censure another of its fellows: Musk. One reason she gave was a perceived lack of transparency and ethical standards at Musk’s company, Neuralink, which is working to develop brain-computer interfaces. This is a traditional kind of complaint, which university ethics processes are set up to deal with.
But another reason was what she saw as Musk’s use of his social media platform, X, to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories and attack individual scientists. This kind of complaint is quite new and it reflects political shifts that pose an existential challenge to science by undermining its general acceptance as a source of trustworthy evidence.
If the society is truly science’s leading academy, it has the responsibility to lead the response to that challenge. In that role, Bishop is right—it must repudiate Musk.
Back to 2018
To understand how we got here, you need to go back to 2018. That was the year that Musk’s mastery of important technologies, through his companies SpaceX and Tesla, earned him a fellowship of the Royal Society.
Also among that year’s intake was David Willetts. As the Conservative science minister in the 2010-15 coalition government, Willetts pushed through a new regime for universities of high tuition fees, uncontrolled student recruitment, privatisation of the student loan book—and increased funding for science.
Today, Willetts remains notable in two ways. First, he is uniquely influential in the science world. As well as being the only politician with FRS after his name, he holds or has held influential positions in a variety of other bodies, such as chair of the Foundation for Science and Technology, the main Westminster venue for discussion of scientific issues.
Second, Willetts has developed a political position characterised by the phrase ‘cross-party consensus’. He is the president of the Resolution Foundation think tank, which is committed to such an approach, and a past director of Policy Exchange, another think tank usually seen as Conservative but which has long sought to reach out to Labour.
Cross-party consensus
Willetts also talks frequently of a cross-party consensus on science policy. He seems to have persuaded Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, to publicly endorse this idea. But what does it actually entail? There are three parts to it: factional, ideological and commercial.
The cross-party consensus’s most influential articulation is in the report A New National Purpose, authored by former Tory leader William Hague and former Labour prime minister Tony Blair in February 2023. The report, which Willetts has endorsed, argues for making science and technology the UK’s national purpose, urging “a new cross-party consensus that can survive any change of government”.
Since then, Hague has used his columns in the Times to bang the drum for issues such as exascale compute and regulatory innovation. Greg Clark, another former Conservative science minister, has argued for a cross-party consensus on industrial strategy.
On the Labour side, the Tony Blair Institute has produced more than 70 reports extolling the virtues of tech, especially in areas currently overseen by the two most Blairite secretaries of state: Peter Kyle at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and Wes Streeting at the Department of Health and Social Care.
Dsit itself can be seen as a product of this movement. It was born in February 2023, the same month that the TBI called for the creation of just such a department.
Among Dsit’s responsibilities are digital strategy across government and forthcoming regulation on artificial intelligence. Like the department itself, the form of this regulation emerges from the Blair-Hague movement: Kyle has promised to do no more than give legislative force to the voluntary approach pioneered by the previous Conservative administration.
The political contours of this movement are both impressive and limited. They don’t include members of the Reform-friendly wing of the Conservative Party, such as the former minister and Brexit negotiator David Frost, who in a recent House of Lords debate on climate change described Willetts’ views as socialism. And they don’t include Keir Starmer’s dominant faction in the Labour Party. So the idea of a cross-party consensus on science in fact encompasses only a faction in each of the two main parties. To achieve their goals, therefore, its adherents must use their leverage to control Dsit, regardless of which party is in power.
One reason for the cross-party consensus’s limited reach lies in the ideological component of A New National Purpose and its sequels. It argues for a small state and increased power for the prime minister, aiming for “a fundamental re-ordering of our priorities and the way the state itself functions”. This alienates politicians as diverse as Starmer and former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson, both of whom see a bigger role for the state.
Just as important are two things that are unsaid but implicit in the report. First, it upholds the principle set down by Margaret Thatcher that the state should get out of near-market research. Thus Clark’s plea for a cross-party consensus on industrial strategy is a plea for a 40-year status quo that, in policy on net zero at least, Starmer has already rejected.
Second, the consensus eschews the kind of populism espoused by Musk, Frost and Trump, which accepts neither constitutional nor epistemic constraints, including those imposed by scientific evidence.
Big tech, big money
The commercial aspect of the cross-party consensus on science comes from its dependence on funding from big tech firms, its zealous prioritisation of tech as the solution to practical problems and its determination to run the government departments closest to big tech’s interests. Larry Ellison of the database company Oracle, for example, has bankrolled the Tony Blair Institute with more than $100 million. An Oracle director, Awo Ablo, is the institute’s executive vice-president.
The embrace of big tech extends to the Royal Society. As far back as 2018 it was running a programme called You and AI. Funded by DeepMind, by then part of Google’s parent company Alphabet, this worked towards the shared goal of managing social attitudes towards AI to avoid the popular revolt that doomed genetically modified crops.
Again, this limits the movement’s appeal. In a pointed divergence from the TBI’s techno-zealotry, Starmer has said that the role of technology in public services is as “a tool not a magic wand”.
So, by endorsing the idea of a cross-party consensus on science, the Royal Society has actually taken a factional political position. This position excludes Trumpian, unconstrained populism and allows it to defend science against those undermining its trustworthiness. It can be understood as an attempt to remain in the saddle of both science and the state.
However, because this position is also bound up with big tech and excludes anyone opposed to a small, Thatcherite conception of the state, it makes a truly united front—including, say, Starmer and Johnson—impossible. It also excludes those, like me, who believe the Thatcherite approach to industrial strategy has failed.
Looking at the commercial interests of big tech and its increasingly Trumpian outlook, the public could be forgiven for asking whose side the scientists are on.
William Cullerne Bown is the founder of Research Professional and a former adviser to Labour’s science team. This article is based on posts on hisSubstack.