Read:

The Labour Party is increasingly emboldened and now thinks it has a real change of winning the next general election.

How does the UK science and technology sector view the prospect of a Labour government?

The difficulty with all these things is, at the moment, you don’t quite know what it would look like. And so, there’s some hope that the understanding that has been around from Blair onwards of the importance of UK science continues, and I think there’s every reason to believe that.

I think what UK science is looking for is two things. It wants the ability to do the amazing work it has done up until now protected. And, of course, the difficulty there is that mechanism is all built up with the Horizon programme which was a European Programme. The first thing science wants is some certainty because if you’re doing a five-year research project and you want to get people in to do it, then you need to have that.

And I think what science would like to hear from Labour is something that really flags that commitment. We want to do the research and we understand that, in science, it’s a collaborative game. So, we’re happy to welcome some people to come and do it with us and were going to work with other people. Not just in Europe, we can do it around the world now. But we must have that open approach and I think people are hopeful that that might come from Labour.

And the other side of it, which is slightly more on the applied side, is continuing the approach to fixing this ability to turn our amazing achievements here into jobs and into economic activity in the UK. And some people are looking towards labour to take that at a more fundamental level. Sometimes the debate in the UK gets very skewed by the fact that the UK is a financial centre and that’s such an important part of the economy. Well, what we’re seeing with the demise of the FTSE is that we do need to move on now and some people think that Labour might have some new ideas in that area. We will see.