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Kenneth Clarke, the minister renowned for his bruising encounters with
ambulance drivers and teachers, has now turned on scientists with a brutal
verbal assault on ‘the science lobby’. In a little noticed meeting of an
obscure committee in the House of Lords in November, Clarke, the Secretary
of State for Education and Science, spelt out his feelings towards scientists,
and towards the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.

The transcript of the discussion, with the Select Committee on the Committee
Work of the House, shows that Clarke is extremely dubious about the claims
scientists make for their work. He said: ‘The underlying difficulty .
. . is one has highly distinguished enthusiasts out there who are seeking
a mandate for the pursuit of whatever they perceive they require in their
own particular area of activity, and there is no way you can comfort people
from academia or industry with any response that modifies their demands.’

In Clarke’s opinion, the Lords committee, responsible for a string of
reports critical of the government in recent years, is ‘not far away’ from
a complete waste of time. ‘I do regard it, I have to say, as part of the
science lobby.’

Clarke kept up a barrage of criticism in the same vein. He returned
frequently to the committee’s inquiry into last year’s science budget and
the decision to close the Nuclear Structure Facility at Daresbury. ‘I harp
on about the last time I appeared as if I was particularly wounded by it.
I was not. It was all part of life’s rich tapestry as far as I was concerned,’
he says.

‘But when you know when you appear what they are going to say, and they
know what they are going to say, and they know you are going to take no
notice of it, and you know you are going to take no notice of it, we might
as well have had an exchange of letters in which they said ‘We think the
public spending round this year was not good enough and we wish to be seen
in public saying so’.’

‘The final report . . . had, in my opinion, plainly been written before
I ever appeared to give evidence, by someone using the select committee
as an instrument of lobbying.’

Not suprisingly, the comments have caused deep offence among members
of the science committee. Clarke concedes, however, that the committee has
sometimes been useful: ‘On the occasions when I agreed with them they made
some very positive recommendations.’