I just assumed every nation has a government funded cutting edge research institute. Crazy not to. Australia has the over 100 year old csiro for example. Paid for itself many times over (eg. viruses that kill rabbits, high tech breakthroughs like wifi, selective crop and livestock breeding).
The problem the UK has is it spent so long pretending to be far less sophisticated than it was that now it has become so, to the point their security at air bases is ridiculous https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24nppdx0lo . That is the level of competence that remains in that part of their industry, and consider that in tech you basically go into videogames, finance, or defence. (Or ARM, but there are only so many people there).
Would you care to elaborate?
I think the UK might be the only country that developed, and then fully abandoned, its own capability to launch satellites. Now being slowly recreated, fifty years later.
And lots of other grant services and loans.
Most with very little in the way of measures of success... As will be the case with Aria I imagine.
There were large COVID scandals with funding directed to government ministers mates, how many of these get awarded to their mates too.
Wish the UK would have their version of the SBIR/STTR program too -- and open to all, not just Oxbridge and other elites. Mandatory small business set-asides, especially for large defense procurement, has outsized effects on innovation.
One of the most important factors for ARIA’s success will be whether its leadership can protect a culture that accepts that some bets won’t pay off until after their term ends. Short-termism plagues government leadership roles, and it's exactly the kind of thing that could kill a program like this.
In other words, pick bold leaders that don't have an ego.
YOShInOn shows me a lot of articles on synthetic biology and one major theme is that people have figured out a lot about how gene regulation works in Eukaryotes (e.g. what that "junk DNA" does) which is going to make it possible to make much better GMOs then we've had so far. (It's not just getting a gene into a plant, it's getting that gene to be expressed vigorously)
The Prime minister and Chancellor spend their time going cap in hand to BlackRock and others begging for money.
One spends money on speculative projects when they have money to spare.
This is nonsensical. Public debt is nothing like private debt, you can't apply prudent financial advice from the context of an individual to that of a currency issuer. The difference being that they are a currency issuer. The Bank of England is a great starting point: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
Key points:
You can't save in a currency you issue. If a state issues its own fiat currency, it does not need to save in that currency because:
- It cannot run out of its own currency.
- It can always credit accounts via fiscal or monetary operations.
- “Saving” in the conventional sense implies a constraint that doesn’t apply to sovereign issuers.
The limits to pay attention to are real resources in the economy, not money; you can have all the money in the world but if you can't procure steel then you simply can't build that bridge.
That's only true in a very technical, but overall unimportant sense.
If you then have to tax people's earnings in order to control inflation from government spending, then the effect is the same - I had to lose $x so that the government could spend $x on something other than my own needs.
I can't overstate how much i disagree that it's unimportant. But first, let me try to steel-man your argument further. It'd be that fiscal freedom doesn't actually solve the harder problem. The harder problem being allocating finite real resources in the economy.
To build upon your "i had to lose $x so that the government could spend $x on something other than my own needs":
Let's say for example, your needs were to buy the only remaining steel available for your construction project but the government would also like that steel for their project. We've reached an impasse, so we still need to calibrate public spending with what the economy can produce. All spending, public or private, carries inflation risk but the problem here is that without the invisible hand, you've sleep walked into a planned economy with the entirely obvious and predictable result that you have broken it - your economy can no longer produce enough steel.
So there's no free lunch to be had here and further, you risk catastrophically unsettling a complex system that kinda mostly works. It's not that by meddling with how things work, you risk a bump in the economy. Instead the risk is some kind of disequilibrium, a snap away to a self-reinforcing runaway feedback loop that totally destroys the economy. So don't fiddle with big things that we don't really fully understand.
Decent steel man attempt? I'm still learning in this space, critique wholeheartedly invited.
Now to why i disagree with your assertion that it's unimportant. Quick recap - you can't beat inflation, when that alarm bell rings you have to redirect public spending, you might also want to encourage private spending to redirect too (the role of taxation, i.e. destroying privately held dollars) but that's a policy decision for the government of the time.
What you CAN do, is spend on things that aren't at capacity. And there's a LOT of unused capacity in the economy.
Want to pay some nurses to fix up some long term sick workers to get them productive again? Go for it. The public good doesn't always align with profit. Outbidding your luxury condo's steel to build a hospital is a contrived example but the demand-pull invisible hand still exists, it's just no longer omnipotent. Supply side economics will still attract steel making capacity in that example. The market and its prices are still the primary signal.
Edited: many times.
Inflation, its all about working within the bounds of inflation. Balance the economy not the budget.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/28/britain-no-m...
My citations are a central bank, an authority (perhaps THE authority) on money.
Your citation is a newspaper and therefore i haven't clicked it.
These types of highly speculative projects are inherently risky, making them unappealing for profit-driven investors. That’s why it’s important for non-profit organizations and governments to fund them.
Scientific breakthroughs don’t happen in a vacuum. They are the product of dedicated research requiring years of consistent funding.
You say the UK has a budget of a trillion, but around 70% comes from consumer spending. As consumers have been hooked on debt and hit with annual increases in every indirect tax they can think of.
Do you think that the return on investment into science is really less than 4.5% (interest rate on gilts) per year?
> You say the UK has a budget of a trillion, but around 70% comes from consumer spending.
70% of government expenditure is consumer spending??? This statement is nonsensical.
But I don’t think the 0.08% line item for scientific research is where I’d start.
Science is already deeply underfunded despite a disproportionately large impact on society in my opinion.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-backs-uk-rd-wi...
BlackRock as one example https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/blackrock-urges-uks-starmer-...
UK stock market has failed https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/are-uk-stock-markets-facin...
Now 10th in world for gdp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
Prisons declared full, shoplifting pseudo-legalised. I could go on and on.
40% of the worlds dirty money goes through UK. It's USP is now mainly money laundering
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/dirty-money-laundering...
You could have created a unicorn company by now my friend, but instead you are writing python code in excel, or automating regulatory submissions and investor communications or something else similar.
The (Edwardian) liberal, who tolerates The Grauniad, & the (neo/classical) liberal, who tolerates the FT
It is brutal
https://x.com/LBC/status/1701292018037825571?t=WMi0Hys_vnYfj...
The Japanese, Koreans and China have been spending billions over last decade.
The UKs second biggest industry is entertainment and thats because they lured Hollywood over via generous tax breaks.(Which Trump has sid he will be addressing).
UK needs to pay down debt, invest in education and hope the next generation of talent choose to remain in the UK and not leave for another country.
We've been here before.
UK has it's legacy advantages, UN permanent seat, nuclear weapons etc but the empire is long gone and it grows weaker by the year.
After the war, Germany was at its lowest point and the UK squandered it's lead and fell below Germany.
All of Europe + USA failed to bring Russia to it's knees no matter what they tried.
The world is changing and in the new world order UK is slipping down the ladder.
So what? You can see people however you want, but you still have to live with them in your world and they have a vote on what happens next. This is what Russia discovered in Ukraine, and the USA in Iraq before it. China may want to boss everyone in the world, but it can't - it can't have everything it's own way and run the world as a Marxist Leninist 1984 style nightmare, we won't allow it.
>UK has it's legacy advantages, UN permanent seat, nuclear weapons etc but the empire is long gone and it grows weaker by the year.
Well after WW2 we had 270% GDP to debt ratio and the country was bombed into bits. British industry had retooled for a war economy and there was no capital to retool meaning that the fundamental disadvantages for industries like shipbuilding where British yards were located in the wrong places on the wrong rivers became sharply plagent. I grew up in the 1970's and there were still bomb sites in London and Portsmouth then. If that was a legacy then you can keep it.
>After the war, Germany was at its lowest point and the UK squandered it's lead and fell below Germany.
I agree, we should have kept Germany as an agrarian low population country so as to dominate continental europe... oh no, wait: I just realised! That would be both evil and stupid! Instead we should have Germany develop into a liberal democracy full of enlightened well educated Germans and make sure to be good friends with them so that we can work together in the world to shape it for the common good.
>All of Europe + USA failed to bring Russia to it's knees no matter what they tried.
Or we were trying the "Germany mark 2" move, but the Russians are so stupid that they invaded Ukraine and manged to ruin themselves for the rest of the 21st century? Time will tell. Perhaps ask the guys with no hands and faces begging on the Moscow underground what they think?
>The world is changing and in the new world order UK is slipping down the ladder.
For sure, but who cares? No one serious in the UK wants to be in charge of the world and frankly that's been the case since about 1919.
What we want is to sit on our little island with our nice wind turbines and good internet and make interesting things while enjoying our gardens. I think that fundamentally that's what 99% of the worlds population would like to do but there's 1% playing "lets kill the XYZ" or "I am due the respect and tribute of the people of YZX" as if this was 1850 and no one has nuclear weapons.
It's not like a personal finance regime.
"Fiat" means "let it be". All you have to do is make sure that everyone else believes you. That is also largely the basis behind a public offering for a company.
Keep up!