Brian Cox Deserts Labour Party

You have to be a really popular physicist when the possibility that you will vote for a different political party made the news. This is the case for Brian Cox, who has indicated that he will no longer support the current UK's Labour Party and will vote for Liberal Democrat instead.

He said that the Labour government’s investment in research and development was worse in real terms than it had been under Margaret Thatcher. In Cox’s view, the 2007 funding crisis that struck the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which supports research into physics and space technology, had been a “cock-up, the biggest screw-up in science policy in the past decade”.

Britain’s international reputation for science had been damaged, he said. Overall, Labour’s record on science funding was “not as good as it should have been”.

It's one of the more interesting scenario for the UK, where it seems to go the opposite way of the US, France, Germany, China, Japan, South Korea, etc. during this tight economic times. All of those countries significantly increased spending in the sciences during the past year with the hope that this is a future investment that will invigorate the economy in the long run.

Zz.