Westminster warns against Scottish independence. Again.

Minister says the UK is second only to the US for the quality of its research but that could be under threat, writes Alison Goddard.

Scientists and academics in Scotland would lose access to billions of pounds in research grants and the UK’s world-leading research programmes if it became independent, the Westminster government warned yesterday. David Willetts, the UK science minister, said that Scottish universities were "thriving" because of the UK’s generous and highly integrated system for funding scientific research, according to a report in The Guardian today. We have also published a report on the latest "Scotland analysis" publication to emerge from Whitehall, which is exclusive to subscribers to HE.

Our sister publication reports that Wales also claims it has performed well in attracting research funds from the rest of the UK, however, the metrics used by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales exclude Oxford, Cambridge and London universities from the data and concede that Wales gains 4.8 per cent of the total funding from the UK research councils while it has 4.9 per cent of the UK population. The Welsh press looks at some similar data published yesterday by Research Councils UK, which paint a gloomier picture.