UK universities lashed out today against inevitable science and higher education spending cuts in the debt-ridden country, charging that they could lead to ‘meltdown’ in the sector.

“It has taken more than 800 years to create one of the world’s greatest education systems and it looks like it will take just six months to bring it to its knees,” write Wendy Piatt (director-general of the Russell Group of 20 leading UK universities) and Michael Arthur (who chairs the group’s board) on The Guardian’s site.

The cuts have been guesstimated at anything from hundreds of millions to billions of pounds. Nobody is quite sure how much they will end up at – and politicians are reluctant to spell out the issue in an election year – but the pre-budget report request for £600 million in “efficiency savings” across the research and education budget gives a ballpark starting point. Business secretary Peter Mandelson has asked for further multi-million cutbacks from the sector; Piatt and Arthur say the damage could eventually reach £2.5 billion

Also anticipating a gloomy future, the departing chief executive of the Medical Research Council, Leszek Borysiewcz, tells The Times that, were the axe to fall, it would be better to completely close down some areas of research than ‘cheese-pare’ from across the board.

And when it’s about to pour, it rains: the chairs of five panels on the Science and Technology Facilities Council say that existing cuts to that body (which oversees spending on hard-core physics) will damage the UK by creating a brain drain and will waste existing investment. “Even worse, as things stand, there is practically no vision, let alone support, for research that would keep the UK at the scientific frontier beyond the next 5-10 years,” the University of Oxford’s Philip Burrows tells the Times Higher Education.