Sir

Last May you ran an Editorial headlined 'Never had it so good?' (Nature 447, 231; doi:10.1038/447231a 2007). “The Blair–Brown era has been a golden one for British science,” it said. I found this surprising, as the nadir for R&D funding (as a proportion of gross domestic product) over the past three decades occurred under the Blair government. Funding fell from 2.38% in 1981 to an average of 1.85% between 1997 (when Blair came to power) and 2003, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Factbook 2006. UK funding remains well below the average, both in the 27 countries of the European Union and the 30 countries in the OECD.

I wasn't moved to write at that time, but the recent announcement by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council of an £80-million (US$156-million) shortfall in its budget (see Nature 450, 1127–1128; doi:10.1038/4501127b 2007) has made me change my mind. This is going to translate into a (minimum) 25% decrease in grants for the next three years, with no prospect of improvement after that — a situation that will be catastrophic for physics, astronomy and planetary science in the United Kingdom, and for the morale of those research communities. As a UK planetary scientist, this does not feel like a golden era.