We have sleepwalked into an age where the scientific method is being dragged into the culture war. It is increasingly treated not as a rigorous process of discovery, but as a badge of political allegiance. Certainty is rewarded, nuance is dismissed as a hedge, and legitimate scientific disagreement is recast as conspiracy. For a global economy built on the predictability of data, this erosion of the truth-seeking mechanism is a systemic risk.
The Trust Deficit
Diminishing trust in science is now a leading indicator of economic stagnation. While public support for science remains, the translation of that science into tangible daily benefits is failing: fewer than half of people feel that scientific breakthroughs are meaningful to them.[1] When transformative technologies exist but remain out of reach for the many, the social contract underpinning innovation frays.
In the US, a 25-point trust gap has opened between voters on both sides.[2] In the UK and Europe, we risk a similar rupture if we continue to communicate evidence with brittle, unwarranted certainty. During the pandemic, guidance was often framed as absolute, only to be revised later without sufficient explanation. In climate science, we saw a swing from cautious observation to policy-heavy advocacy that sometimes blurred the line between data and mandate.
Trust does not weaken when evidence changes. That is the scientific process in action. Trust weakens when institutions appear uncomfortable acknowledging uncertainty or being contested. This matters because trust is foundational to long-term investment and GDP growth.
The Economics of Resilience
Investment in science is central to a national resilience strategy. When knowledge is underfunded or politicised, capital retracts. Long-term investment dries up, and national sovereignty withers. As Mark Carney warned at Davos this year, the era of “going along to get along” is over. Complacency now carries a premium we can no longer afford.
The consensus among the IMF and OECD is clear: R&D investment is the primary driver of Total Factor Productivity. For every £1 invested in public R&D, the wider economy sees a perpetual annual return of up to 30% [3] via spillovers, where a single discovery fuels multiple downstream industries. Conversely, the reduction in R&D investment accounts for up to 25% [4] of the growth slowdown in major economies.
Despite this, governments succumb to the sugar rush of budget cuts and increased taxation, depleting societal gains and forcing high-growth companies to relocate their intellectual property to more hospitable jurisdictions.
A New Digital Colonialism
We need not look far to see the wreckage of short-termism. In the UK, public R&D funding has dropped to just 0.46% of GDP [5] in recent years, placing the economy 27th among 36 OECD nations. The government’s recent signal toward ten-year budgets is a necessary, if belated, admission that science and growth need generational planning.
This is a recurring British malady. By failing to capitalise on post-war leadership in computing, the UK traded technological sovereignty for a service-heavy, low-productivity model. Today, a form of digital colonialism is taking hold: over 90% of our data resides on US-owned servers and our energy costs are the highest in Europe [6]. This has matured into a stark AI divide. Nations lacking domestic compute capacity, energy security, and large-scale models risk becoming permanent digital colonies of global powers.
The UK is waking up to find itself at the receiving end of a geopolitical playbook it helped write. The party is over; we are nursing a significant hangover. Having spent decades credulously outsourcing our industrial chassis to the East and West, the existential question is now one of strategic regrouping.
We must learn once gain to pair scientific excellence with societal wellbeing – making breakthroughs palpable to the taxpayer – to reclaim agency and lead with the only sustainable kind of power: knowledge converted into shared, resilient prosperity.
This article originally appeared as a shorter column in UKTN.
References
[1] Ipsos on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Public Attitudes to Science (January 2026). Available at: pas.ipsos.com
[2] Pew Research Center, Americans’ Confidence in Scientists (survey, January 2026). Available at: pewresearch.org/science/2026/01/15/americans-confidence-in-scientists/
[3] Three sources: (a) UK Government (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) reports that the average £1 of public R&D investment generates a sustained boost to private sector productivity worth 20p each year, in perpetuity. (b) Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), “How R&D Investment Drives Economic Growth”: public R&D investment returns 30p a year for every £1 invested. (c) The Academy of Medical Sciences: for medical research, the return is 25p every year for every £1 invested.
[4] IMF (2025), Did R&D Misallocation Contribute to Slower Growth?
[5] Paul Nurse, “A Manifesto to Make the UK a Science Superpower”, Nature. Available at: nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02025-0
[6] Does the UK have the ‘most expensive’ electricity in the world? – Fullfact.org
