Brian Cox was not faced with the toughest audiences at the Old Monk in Westminster last night. His talk was delivered to Westminster Skeptics; an assorted rabble of scientists, sceptics, bloggers and journalists led by legal blogger Jack of Kent, who meet once a month to discuss issues dear to rationalists. Brian's message - that science funding must be protected and ideally increased - was not a particularly hard one to sell to such an audience.

Continuing reading here or, read an edited version at New Scientist

Those familiar with Cox, either through television or the many public talks he delivers, may have been surprised by his slightly subdued manner. This was not the boyishly-enthusiastic, floppy-haired advocate we're used to seeing, drawing diagrams of the solar system in the sand of some exotic location for the BBC or effervescing over images of distant stars and planets. Instead we saw a scientist under siege, a man rattling through a series of dry statistics with the subdued and slightly disbelieving air of a man who can't quite understand how it is that we come to the situation that we find ourselves in.

As a young twenty-something musician, Brian's band D:Ream were responsible for Labour's 1997 election anthem, "Things Can Only Get Better." Thirteen years later, the middle-aged Professor stood disillusioned in front of a projector, iterating through the many ways in which things have gotten worse.

Funding in many areas has stagnated or been cut, important programs have been curbed and as Britian tries to cut the budget deficit created by the banking bail-out, further hundreds of millions are at risk across education and research. Britain has been forced to withdraw from international projects like Gemini, failing to live up to promises made and seriously damaging our reputation in the international scientific community.

This in order to shave pennies from a total science budget that, in spite of our economy's dependence on science, technology and British innovation, is less than one quarter of one percent of our GDP.

As Cox points out, it is a false economy. Science, technology, research and innovation drive much of British industry, they clothe us, feed us, and carry us to the work they provide. Almost everything you do today will in some way benefit from science, and on a grander scale many of the greatest challenges we face, from pandemics to water security, obesity to global warming, are fundamentally scientific problems. 'Blue skies' research makes economic sense too - the Apollo Program for example paid for itself several times over.

Cutting scientific programs that are likely to generate such enormous value for our society seems to make no sense. When I look at the figures Brian presents, I see an obvious way to strengthen our economy and Britain's position as a world-leading nation; yet politicians seem to see a luxury or burden.

Science seems at times to be undervalued by our society, to an extent that is bewildering. Tabloid newspapers report scientific findings as the claims of 'boffins', while MPs queue up to sign an Early Day Motion attacking scientific inquiry into homeopathy. At the top of government, there is a feeling among many that the message just isn't getting across. One blogger sums up this feeling:

"We – the public – realise the value of, for example, healthcare, education, social services, etc. The fact that he wants us as individual researchers to justify what we do implies – in my view – that in some sense research is viewed as some kind of luxury and that we are in some way privileged."

And that's the heart of the the problem that Brian Cox, myself, and other science advocates and communicators face. It's all very well lobbying politicians to make science an election issue, but when the public perception of science funding is of money spent on the luxury of catering to boffin's whims, it's hard to see something like the STFC debacle swinging many votes.

Brian's talk was excellent, and in conversation afterwards he was as ever passionate, engaging and a pleasure to talk to. He has succeeded in raising the profile of science generally through television and literature, and he has rallied the scientific community to put unprecendented pressure on the science representatives of the three main parties.

But it's hard to escape the feeling that a vital element is missing from this campaign. If we really want to make science an election issue, somebody needs to bring the public on board and ensure that the anger of physicists is translated into votes lost.

Apropos of nothing, when an MP like Tim Farron, with a majority of just 267, signs an EDM supporting homeopathy, it doesn't take much cunning to spot an interesting opportunity for supporters of science to make a point.