I watched the General Election results in Oxford with great interest.

On Thursday the people of Oxford West and Abingdon voted against the Liberal Democrat science spokesman Dr Evan Harris, which has left many people across not only the United Kingdom but the world feeling his loss.

It is very rare to have a truly scientifically-literate MP, especially someone who gets praise from the very critical science writer Ben Goldacre, along with Simon Singh and even the Australian musical comedian Tim Minchin.

While clearly voters have the right to make decisions about their MP, I really feel that they have made a mistake.

No MP has worked so hard for evidence-based policy, and, while it may seem obvious to back up important policy decisions with factual information, it is something almost every government worldwide lacks.

There are few MPs whose presence has so profoundly improved Parliament. He will be sorely missed.

In his place, voters have elected a Conservative whose formal training is in singing and who claims she “mainly reads Vogue magazine, occasionally The Economist”.

Her campaign was backed by right-wing, American style anti-intellectual, anti-atheist and anti- science groups which hideously refer to Dr Evan Harris as “Dr Death”, in a campaign so obviously vicious and sleazy that I assumed it would back-fire.

Clearly it worked perfectly, and it has now dented progress for those who believe in fairness, free expression, the need for libel law reform and the importance of scientific enquiry.

Virtually the only argument against his work is that he is a humanist, and it stuns me that atheists, agnostics and humanists are still being seen as unfit to stand in Parliament purely because they don’t believe in magic.

Stephen Hunter

Student