Haldane Principle

The long-standing British doctrine, traced to Richard Haldane's 1918 machinery- of-government report, that decisions on individual research funding should sit with researchers and independent research councils rather than with ministers. Matters to this vault as the doctrine Victor Rothschild's 1971 report explicitly measured itself against and set aside for applied government R&D — Miles Parker's account frames the report as treating Haldane-style research-council autonomy as having little bearing on how applied work should be managed. The Haldane/Rothschild tension is the older half of the UK-science-funding-autonomy argument this vault's Rothschild and Lighthill material keeps circling; it has not yet been read against its own 1918 primary.

References

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