@ChrisMayLA6 This doesn't need to be an art Vs science thing. Both have been underfunded for a long time. Jodrell bank has been existing on supplemental donations for a long time.

I wonder what the government thinks their job is? Our cultural and scientific exports to the world have been huge, but they show no desire to invest.

@ChrisMayLA6 The defunding of eMerlin is a travesty, I remember reading about it in the early 90s as a teenager in the pages of "Astronomy Now". I got further into software engineering and developed more of an interest in networking precisely because professonal astronomers in the UK were using PCs and Macs to talk to UNIX systems running the X11 Windowing System, all described in the pages of that magazine. This was when Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) needed to be cooled sub-zero often to be most effective and did not fit in mobile phones which had only just begun to exist.

@ChrisMayLA6 What strikes me about this (appaling as it is) that Jodrell Bank and the telescope are iconic images of British scientific history. The telescope represents our long-term historic involvement in astronomy and science in general.

The possibility of losing it is about saying that we no longer have a place in scientific progress. We are ceding this to Europe and China. That is not good.

@ChrisMayLA6 The timing of the decision to defund looks suspicious. It was presumably agreeable to ministers and officials in a department that has since been abolished - and the two most senior ministers in it - #LizKendal and #patrickvallance - have left the government. This looks like the - equal and opposite - mirror image of a practice known as 'tombstone funding' whereby an organisation in the course of being abolished finds ways of making financial provisions for 'legacy projects.

@ChrisMayLA6

like the arts defunding, this is deliberate, targetted harm.

by a group of people who want to know the cost of everything, but do not know the value of anything.