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Pakistan is a modern country. It has nuclear weapons, its own space programme and one of the world's largest militaries. Yet Britain still sends it £133 million a year in foreign aid while defunding the Jodrell Bank telescope after more than 70 years of pioneering scientific research. This is exactly the kind of investment Britain should be protecting. You don't build a stronger future by dismantling your own scientific infrastructure.

Jodrell Bank is the most visible causality of UKRI’s short sighted ‘vision’ for science, but as you’ll see below, there are many other valuable UK facilities and collaborations at risk. We became aware of the problem in the autumn of last year. It is not a result of the overall funding settlement for science after the spending review, which was quite generous I would say in the circumstances. Neither as far as we can tell is it a direct decision by ministers (all of whom have now gone in any case). Rather the problems appears to have been caused by senior management at UKRI focusing on short term economic ‘impact’ (whatever that means) rather than doing their job as custodians of the foundations of science. What must happen now is that the new ministerial team make the time (and space ;-)) to review the upcoming catastrophe, and instruct UKRI to do their job and focus on making Britain the best place in the world to do science, now and in the future.

No money for the telescope. Meanwhile, taxpayers have been charged for these projects under the UKRI: The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000 — £841,830 Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives — £136,909 Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection — £805,769 Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism — £185,627 Trans Archiving Network (TAN) — £23,556 Diverse alarums: centering marginalised communities in early modern plays — £805,745 (De)colonial Ecologies in 21st-century insular Hispanic Caribbean film — £205,543 Transnational Anti-Gender Movements and Resistance — £35,285 Comics and Race in Latin America — £759,293 Listening to the 85%: underwater sounds and environmental awareness on the Isle of Man — £81,635 Sports media and identity: a theory-practice network — £24,292 Decolonizing South East Asian Sound Archives — £123,470 Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet — £786,083 MAUSI Net: Menopause Activism in the UK, Sweden and India — £29,956 Decolonising the Page: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Postcolonial Arabic Publications — £200,462 The Tipuna Project: Intergenerational Healing, Settler Accountability and Decolonising Participatory Action Research — £310,724 Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the Present — £802,442 The Cultural Legacies of the British Empire: Classical Music’s Colonial History (1750–1900) — £1,183,769 South African Modernism (Follow-on Funding): Decolonising English Literary Studies — £80,192 The Future of Indigenous Rights and Responsibilities — £307,021