Thanks for the reply - I fully agree and support your approach! I was also interested to see that CaSE chose to attend the Reform UK conference this year, something that I think most of the academic community still finds difficult to contemplate...

and now that I think of it, the fact that @sciencecampaign.bsky.social is not on X exactly encapsulates this problem

I think this is smart messaging. I do worry that it will be hard to find messengers compfortable with it, though - how many scientists or researchers are willing to stand up and say "yes, we need researcher immigration, but not other kinds" or use phrases like "we need to fix broken Britain?"

I’ll be even more cynical. We have been given many many opportunities over the past decades to have a tau/charm factory, but never actually wanted one enough to fund it or build it. So no chance.

And now that FCCee has no competition either, I don’t expect CERN council to be in any rush to move forward. They’ll keep things warm, but will want to wait until HL-LHC has successfully turned on before making any firm construction go-ahead on FCC.

One of the problems here is that, quite aside from the question of QR, UKRI and its predecessors have always tried to use research funding to maintain a broad UK university base, as well as to deliver innovation. In fact maintaining the base has often seemed more of a goal than the innovation

Unfortunate subtitle in the article - whenever we seem to yearn for "guardrails" to stop troublesome people saying things we don't want them to say, we lose a little bit more of the argument