The UK Independence Party is not anti-immigration, and its policies would certainly welcome scientists and engineers, one of the party’s MEPs has claimed during a science-policy debate.
Julia Reid, who has a PhD in pharmacology and used to be head of research at a diabetes laboratory in a hospital in Bath, said: “We’ve never said we’re against immigration per se; we have said we’re in favour of a points-based system similar to what the Australians use.”
She said that under this system, prospective immigrants who have the skills the UK needs would be welcome, adding that this would include scientists. “I can’t see that would be an issue,” she said.
Reid, MEP for the south-west and a self-described climate-change sceptic, made the remarks at a science-policy debate in the UK parliament on 11 March. The debate was organised by several learned societies and included representatives of the following parties: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and Ukip. The Greens were invited and wanted to field a representative but could not find one, according to one of the organisers.
Immigration was a popular subject during the debate. Lib Dem MP for Cambridge Julian Huppert said that the UK must get its immigration system right for the future of its science base. He said that the Home Office’s ‘go-home’ vans had sent out a “devastating message”.
Huppert also argued that the tier 1 exceptional talent visa was failing to attract the superstar scientists it was created for because they were worried that the Home Office would not be able to handle their applications. “What I hear from the University of Cambridge and others is that people don’t want to go through [the exceptional talent route] because there’s so much risk that the border agency will decide they’re not excellent.” However, the purpose of the scheme is to circumvent Home Office involvement, with the national academies conducting peer review to adjudicate the excellence of the applicant and endorsing their applications on behalf of the Home Office.
Labour’s Liam Byrne and Conservative Greg Clark also clashed over student immigration, with Byrne claiming it was in decline and Clark saying other measures showed that it rose in 2014.
On science funding, Byrne said the UK was “not in a good place”. He said Labour’s position was to look at four lines: the overall research budget, departmental R&D budgets, funding from the European Union, and the university finance system. “You can’t think of science budget in isolation,” he told the audience of invited guests. Byrne said he would like to raise science funding in the next parliament but that the party’s policy would only come in its spending review, due to be completed after the election.
Labour is, however, considering commiting to a ring fence for the research budget as part of its election campaign, as reported in Research Fortnight on 11 March.
“You can move the science budget up over the course of the next parliament,” said Byrne, “but first you’ve got to seek a balance between recurrent funding and capital. Second, you should…connect your deficit reduction plan to a mixture of public sector savings and tax rises.” He claims that the Conservatives’ deficit reduction plan is based solely on making public sector cuts, perhaps up to £55 billion.
Clark, however, said that his government has done what it could for science given the poor public finances. He said that when the coalition took office the “public sector was spending too much” so the decision to ring-fence the science budget and keep it frozen in cash terms was the most sensible thing to do. If you want to increase funding, he said, “You do need to depend on a strong economy”—which, he pointed out, the country did not have in 2010.
The debate also touched on tuition fees and the relationship between government and scientists in deciding what science to pursue. Byrne said there was a risk that the government was eroding the Haldane principle, noting: “There is a lot of concern around the lack of transparency around some of the decisions taken over the last year.”
Byrne said he hoped Paul Nurse’s review of the research council system would recommend a mechanism to make big science policy decisions more transparent.
“We do lack a mechanism for scientists and policymakers to rationally make decisions on the balance of spending between different research councils,” he said. “That’s been unchanged since 1970s. Maybe it’s right, but the evidence and debate around that isn’t there.”