U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme
science.org
science.org
It has both direct research grants (ERC grants), and funds for big consortium projects, where most of the money goes to big companies, with some money also going to SMEs and researchers (It probably has intermediate funding like direct SME fund, I don't really know the full extent).
I wouldn't be surprised that UK joined Horizon Europe because of industry lobbying rather than research.
On the other hand, since brexit happened most international research teams in UK have lost key members to other countries so maybe someone finally took notice.
When it goes the way someone wants they call that "democracy" ;)
Making an effectively irreversible decision after single vote won with a slim majority seems like not the brightest idea.
They should’ve had a referendum to approve the negotiated deal and if that failed started the entire process all over.
Blaming politicians, other than as individuals, doesn't work. The electorate put those politicians in their positions in the first place. The responsibility always lies with us. If a voter votes for an arsehole who lies and deceives them, yes the arsehole is responsible for the lies and deception, but ultimately the decision to trust them with power is on the voter. It's on us to do our homework.
Sorry, no. It was profoundly* dishonest.
I have a leaflet that was dropped through my door talking about Turkey joining the EU as if it was something imminent and guaranteed (it is neither).
It featured a map that prominently suggested this was a gateway to all things nefarious by showing Turkey as a coloured region without a label, surrounded by Iraq and Syria, which were.
It's the single most dishonest thing I've seen in politics in my life.
* I'm actually not sorry. This claim is ludicrous.
It's officially classed as a candidate. That doesn't seem consistent with "Never joining" unless the EU knowingly lied to Turkey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Turkey_to_the_Eur...
Even back in 2015 it was pretty clear that Turkey was probably never going to join the EU - at least a generation off if ever. They have nominally been trying to join since the 1980s and its going nowhere in large part because of a lack of progress on Turkey's side and also signficant skepticism of further expansion on the EU side.
There is a lot of talk about Ukraine joining for instance, but its far from clear despite the expressed political will on both sides that it will ever happen for various reasons. These include the question of Ukraine meeting entry thresholds or EU members willing to absorb a member the size of Ukraine and the funding implications its entry would bring. Despite that, Ukraine is signficantly more likely to join than Turkey was in 2016.
No because there is nothing wrong with the EU telling Turkey these are the entry standards for membership. Turkey didn't meet those standards and were backsliding on lots of issues esp around human rights and political/media freedom. It also had unreasolved territorial issues with other member states namely Greece which completely block ascension.
Yes and No because the politics of this are complex both within the EU and in Turkey. Focusing just on the EU side:
There are lots of voices in the EU that want to see Turkey join the EU. Its an important (if sometimes difficult) NATO partner, and in many ways esp in its cities, a very European nation in its history and culture (Istanbul and Antalya are both great hoilday destinations btw - I recommend). We have a lot in common with Turkey. Its also a large econmy and an important bridge to central asia and the middle east. This is why Turkey was accepted as a candidate in the first place.
However there were real voices against Turkey's membership motivated from concerns over the impact to the balance of power within the EU, funding implication for bringing in such a large member with lots of regional depravation, doubts over Turkey ever meeting entry requirements, and the more ugly outright islamophobia and racism.
If you want to cut to the chase then yes the EU kinda sorta lied to Turkey because its officals know these facts, but Turkey's officals themselves are in on it for their own internal politics which I won't get into in part because I know much less about it. It suited both nations to play this ascension dance and technically it was possible that conditions might change and people's minds might be changed. Its a process not a binary.
An important missing piece is that not that long ago, when it officially became candidate, Turkey was seen as a secular, progressive state in the Middle East. Its recent backsliding into autocratic medieval theocracy pretty much ended the idea that Turkey would join without serious changes in government policy and constitution.
I said it was not imminent (it isn't) or guaranteed (and it isn't).
Nobody lied to Turkey. They know there are economic, political, social etc. targets that they have to meet before they progress to EU membership.
I've been a candidate for lots of things I didn't get. Haven't you?
They first applied in 1987, 29 years before the Brexit vote. It has been more than seven years since that vote.
The very Wikipedia page you're pointing at shows how badly it is going for Turkey after we left. Basically, the process is as close to ended for good as it can be. Turkey is less likely to succeed in joining the EU than the UK is to rejoin.
And everyone knew how serious those problems were, particularly regarding human rights, and the direction of travel.
The Leave campaign absolutely lied about Turkey's chances of joining, because only the spectre of Turkey being a member soon fit with the idea of Syrian refugees fleeing across the border into, thus, the EU, from their very current conflict.
It was never close to true.
If I start shouting to millions of people that you've been beating your wife, there's literally nothing you can say to undo this damage.
If you deny it, you'll just bring further attention to the lie.
If you ignore it, I'll keep bringing further attention to the lie.
Politics only works well when everyone follows some basic decorum.
And the scurrilousness of the leaflet was pointed out, too.
But xenophobia sells.
The Scottish referendum in 2014 didn't have the same problem because the SNP campaigning for independence were in power in Scotland and had negotiated the referendum with the UK government.
But I'm not sure that's dishonesty in that people were deliberately saying things that were not true - people were instead saying "These are the things made possible if we leave the EU and you vote for a party that wants this in a general election."
"So within two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete, and therefore before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU." - David Davis [https://conservativehome.com/2016/07/14/david-davis-trade-de...]
Coming to a free trade agreement with the EU should be "one of the easiest in human history" - Liam Fox [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-40667879]
Brexit would leave arrangements on the Irish border "absolutely unchanged" - Boris Johnson [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-35692452]
This meant that even when Leave won, there was a great amount of confusion and turmoil over what that actually implied. That's why the Chequers deal fell through despite fulfilling the outcoem of the referendum.
I wouldn't have minded this so much if there was a continued democratic process to decide between various possible Brexits. There's an argument that the decision of elected MPs constitutes a democratic process, and I am sympathetic to that argument. I guess I would counter that this was such a momentous change and that very few people had elected their local MP on the basis of what their position on the EU was.
I wouldn’t even say that Labour’s top leadership was really pro-remain at the time. Cameron was at least being honest (in this instance).
Turkey has never been "set to join" the EU. They'd like to join, sure.
There are significant criteria they would need to fill to join, and everyone knows they won't do it any time soon; they were going backwards on some at the time of the campaign and are arguably further back eight years on.
If Turkey met all the criteria they'd be a perfectly viable member of the EU. But then if I had the physiology, brains, feathers, gait and quack of a duck, I'd be a duck.
https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/enlargement-p...
"On 13 December 1999 the Helsinki European Council adopted the Commission proposal to grant Turkey the status of an applicant for EU membership."
Coming up on 24 years ... and counting. Great job, everyone involved.
36 years. This is actually higher than the median age of Turkey's population.
[0] https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-w...
There’s many ways to calculate what that expenditure should be but looking at the most recent pre Brexit numbers, 2018 was 150.7B, 2019 was 158.3B. Extrapolate that trend and 2023 would be 7.6 * 4 + 158.3B ~= 188.7, where the real number is projected at 186.7B.
PS: That link only specifies 2020 and 2021 as seeing COVID specific spending but the UK health system was still being slammed in 2022 while also trying to catch up on delayed procedures etc. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
NHS Funding Act 2020
The lie was that we save that much by leaving the EU, the fact that our health service was underfunded and has had budget increases in line with inflation and population growth doesn't change that it was a lie - we could've (and would have) increased NHS spending regardless of the Brexit vote.
Because the net contribution to the EU was (significantly!) less than £350M.
It wasn't a suggestion to spend more money on the NHS. It was a suggestion to spend the money they claimed we gave the EU every week.
So it was actually a lie on a bus.
The figure was closer to £250M (after the rebate), but when they were given the amicable opportunity to restate the original claim around the correct figure, they doubled down on the £350M lie.
Is limited choice democracy?
But democracy today is reduced to a limited choice with limited input of just a simple X in a box of those limited choices once every so many years/decades/lifetime.
The original 51% attack
So the Leavers were right about that in the end. Horizon isn't important compared to constitutional issues, but this is one more argument that just didn't turn out right.
We rejoined the exact same framework we were already a member of and this is a score counted in Leave's column?
This is wild logic.
Horizon is a framework. We rejoined it. End of argument.
It's extremely clear what's meant here: the EU is a big thing with problematic parts, and parts that are OK. Horizon is OK and uncontroversial. The UK wanted the useful low risk collaborations without the dangerous lets-unify-Europe-into-a-megastate parts, and that is what is now happening. The Leavers said this could be done, the Remainers said it was all or nothing, the Leavers are being steadily proven correct.
Now this is delusional. The "prime Leaver", Nigel Farage, thinks Brexit has failed and has said so. The press is full of Leavers saying the country is broken right now.
The only thing that marks out the current government's version of Brexit as fundamentally different to Farage's version of Brexit is that they have to stay on planet lucid -- e.g. with regard to the Northern Ireland agreement.
And he is not the only Brexiteer to say that Brexit has failed to deliver; they are all at it. The thing is it has failed to deliver stuff that they were all too stupid to understand it could not deliver.
And many of the worst things happening at the moment are the very predictable consequence of backing out of agreements; the "small boats crisis" for example.
The EU is one big collaborative project. I'm pro EU for this very reason, so surely the leavers argument has to be 'some, but not too much collaboration makes sense'.
Of course that assumes a coherent argument from brexiteers...
Taking this Horizon story as an example, the fact that we've rejoined shows that EU membership isn't necessary for it, but it still has "years out of the deal" as a negative for Brexit and I don't think any improvement to count as a positive?
No. The most you could claim is that we were a few weeks earlier with a vaccine than the rest of Europe, but then we'd have been developing our vaccine within an EU framework if we'd been in, so who knows what additional benefits that would have brought.
I was then surprised to see American cereal is now sold in the UK, and it's packed with the colourings and additives British parents in the 1990s would have refused to have in the house. Pre-Brexit, "No artificial colours or flavours" could be pretty much assumed for all cereal sold in Britain, even the colourful, sugary ones.
That's no longer the case. Example: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/282819954
Contains Tartrazine (E102)*, Sunset Yellow (E110)*, Brilliant Blue (E133), Allura Red (E129)*
E102 — in the EU, not allowed in cereal
E110 — allowed, although the UK government previously asked manufacturers to stop using this
E133 — not easily determined from Wikipedia, although there's an example of British manufacturers stopping its use in the 2000s.
E129 — allowed I think.
They were commonplace in drinks aimed at kids (Tizer for example) for years.
Putting them in breakfast cereals is IMO mindblowingly irresponsible; the food producers know for sure (because the link has been established with little doubt) that tartrazine and sunset yellow worsen child behaviour.
Exporting to the EU is hard: lots of standards checks.
Importing from the EU is easy: whole categories of imports are left unchecked, because new rules aren't being enforced as a matter of policy, which is the only way we have food security, for example.
As such it wouldn't surprise me at all if both your perspective and GP's perspective are true - cheaper imports would be better for everyone but the government doesn't "want" them because they'd politically inconvenience a relatively small number of people very visibly.
For the EU I can understand, a larger budget means more science done, means more results. Who cares if some of it happens in the UK, since we are getting paid for it anyhow.
How do you get your brightest to stay in UK (or come here from other places) if all your research are isolated to your island??
But nothing prevents the UK from being part of international collaborations in general.
While you can still do it outside the EU programs, it will require a lot of administrative work which most universities cannot handle.
Let's not kid ourselves, this is geopolitics and influence, not just generous cooperation.
Edit: Very strange to observe the reactions to my comment... many of you seem have a knee-jerk, black and white, if not naive, reaction to Brexit and the EU. Both sides are playing games and both sides are trying to further their interests, including indeed geopolitical and international influence ones. I am not claiming more than that and not passing judgement on Brexit here.
> If driving on the road suddenly makes car trips possible, then I'd say that the road is indeed designed to make things more difficult for those not driving on the road.
This is obviously silly, because the road makes car travel easier, not harder. Schemes like Horizon Europe make scientific research easier in similar ways.
For funding agencies to give money to universities, they and the univerisities have to make a whole bunch of critical but basically arbitrary decisions about how to handle the impedance mismatch between their respective organisations' internal finance procedures. Doing this over and over is wasteful of time and effort, and one benefit of big cross-national research funds like this is that a university can make these decisions once, and then don't have to do it over and over again, once for each funding agency in Europe.
Also, generous cooperation is an important part of geopolitics. Cooperation is how you convince your neighbors you are an ally rather than a threat.
Roads allow any vehicle anyone built to work on them. Having EU-specific roads that cars built in the EU can easily drive on, while other cars require significant modification, would be a better analogy.
The Horizon research framework exists to make it easier to form research projects across a set of countries. Everybody from a thirdparty country is at a disadvantage. But that is not because they, somebody in Brussels, wants to exclude someone. It is because the thirdparty country didn't put in the work to align it's local rules to the rules of the treaty.
I don't think this contradicts my analogy. You could say non-EU cars just haven't put in the work to be compatible.
If the UK wants to stay outside, they are more than welcome to keep their funds and do so. However, I can tell you exactly how happy my academic colleagues have been about the enormous mess that has been the UK government promises regarding EU funding over the last few years and that several of them have left or are in the process of leaving due to what Brexit did to the funding climate and academic opportunities in the UK in general.
Go make research on air purity in the UK. Buy your captors, your GPU, data storage, all that stuff.
Or,and this is crazy, participate in a project across Europe. Paris already have captors a'd the data is already accessible. Munich make their air data accessible, like Rome and Berlin. Now you buy captors for a dozen small cities accross Europe, Warsaw and London. You still only need one computer, but you can have the Italian team working on prevision, the UK team working on health outcomes with the French, and probably other team working with other use of the data.
In the end, it's cheaper, you get more data, and are able to do more with it.
[edit on response to your edit] : listen, you're the one making it a brexit thing. I've worked with UK researchers after brexit, they weren't kicked out of H2020. A team from Tunisia was a part of the research too, and they aren't in the EU. Obviously it's better to be part of research initiative than alone, I don't get your point at all in fact.
The UK joining now means a group at Manchester University can lead the work on health outcomes, not just be a part of it under someone else.
Britain lost that opportunity for several years, which will have caused people and groups to move to the EU.
I would take issue with the notion of the EU having any geopolitical capabilities, though.
You don't disagree with my point re. 'club rules'...
EU might have geopolitical aims, but not much capability, so I see Horizon as not very strong in that area, if at all.
The EU has quite some capacity to project power worldwide. Especially when it comes to trade and regulation. Surely not like the US or China, since it doesn't have it's own military. But much more than any of it's member states alone or other mid-sized countries like the UK.
(It's a shame that Gove has largely dropped out of front-line Brexit advocacy; he looked the part).
In the UK (and I believe everywhere with a well functioning research culture), the 'Haldane principle' means that research funding is decided by researchers (not politicians / the civil service). https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmdi...
Funding UK science via the ERC, means you are making use of the network effects for peer review & processes. So the individual funding applications are being reviewed to a higher standard, and better decisions are made about what science to fund.
So the EU's institutional agenda is indivisible from what gets funded via the ERC. That's why they fund stuff like research into disinformation, which the EU defines as more or less anything that goes against its own narratives or agendas, or cultural stereotyping:
https://erc.europa.eu/projects-statistics/stories/why-people...
https://www.adinaakbik.eu/projects/2702-eurotypes
Cultural stereotypes are often present in the political and media discourse on European Union (EU) governance: e.g., the lazy Greeks, the tax-dodging Italians, the stingy Dutch, and so forth. Especially when stereotypes are negative, they create conflict between national governments, fuel Euroscepticism among voters, and can lead to the discrimination of citizens or Member States.
To address this gap, EUROTYPES sets out to investigate how cultural stereotypes impact cooperation and effectiveness in contemporary EU governance.
For some comprison with Switzerland where I currently live, and who also has a rocky relationship with the EU - we have InnoSuisse which every startup seems to get money from, and SNSF which is the massively oversubscribed science funding agency.
So not a case of the UK joined the Horizon Europe, but was allowed to resubscribe.
I do know, that whole mess really upset many scientists, not only UK nationals, but others who saw them cut-off from the collaborations saw pain not only in the UK.
Politics is often science's best friend and worst enemy.
EU scientists do not have freedom of movement to the UK, nor do their families and any dependents. The bureaucratic obstacles to movement are considerable and there are no signs that this is about to change.
UK scientists are still applying for jobs abroad in droves. Irish universities receive a great many applications from the UK for every job advertised (UK scientists can move to Ireland freely because of the Common Travel Area).
Before Brexit I gave up trying to take my wife on a couple of business trips in the EU as they were too short notice to arrange the supposedly free visa, which in theory shouldn't have been even needed but definitely was in practice.
Nothing to do with science, but one exception is school children. It used to be easy for a class of children from France to visit the UK with a special group passport for school/youth groups, which could include the Syrian refugee child etc. That's no longer possible, so these trips (to help learn English) now mostly go to Ireland.
That same experience in Germany? It's there, sure, but the effort to integrate is doubled.
And the UK remains an "associated country", allowed to participate but probably excluded from decision-making (a guess, it doesn't explicitly say in the article, but the UK now has the same status as countries like New Zealand, Ukraine, Kosovo or Israel).
That is exactly what has happened here.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/trading-and-moving-goods-in-and-...
> Before you move goods between Northern Ireland and non-EU countries (including Great Britain)
We started with borderless free trade from Iceland to Greece and we ended up with customs guidance that pretends that GB and NI are in different countries.
The Brexit Trilemma is alive and well today.
As for "our" country, here's your reminder that all of Ireland was coerced into the UK by colonisation and oppression and that NI is a contingent part of the UK not an integral part of it.
A majority of its people voted against Brexit; a majority favour the NI protocol and the Windsor agreement; and a majority will vote in due course to end the imperial gerrymander imposed at gunpoint on the Irish people (likely within 15 years, now that unionists are a minority in decline).
It was the UK govt and parliament's decision to separate NI so that GB could go "buccaneering". As for "surrendering" the English will get over it, just like they got over losing most of Ireland and the rest of the empire.
The fact we can later renegotiate access to a particular programme on the same basis as NZ doesn't mean we're getting access to other EU perks like free healthcare on holiday or the right to live in Spain, or that London hasn't fallen behind Paris for size of equities market. The "sovereignty" argument put forward by Leave was much more misleading. Ask the fishermen how many of the hated EU rules they're still required to follow as part of our "independent" fishing deal...
this couldn't be more inaccurate
Boris Johnson negotiated as part of the brexit treaty to pay in, in the normal proportion
the EU even says as much on its FAQ page
Then we had more dick-waving about not adhering to what we'd signed over NI, so membership wasn't ratified whilst the Science Minister talked about the lost funding being "the freedom to go global", and consortia felt their decision not to invite UK participants over the risks associated with the UK govt was vindicated
I was living in the UK during the referendum and voted remain [0], and that sentence that I quote does not align with my experience and I dare say it sounds like revisionist history.
It was never a part of the Remain campaign to claim that the UK would 'permanently' end the 'good bits' of EU cooperation. It would be bad enough to abandon the EU, so what would be the point of Remain claiming that the loss of the 'good bits' of EU membership (surely all of them in their view!) would be permanent?
What's more, what I do remember is many of the Leave campaign's talking points insisting that the UK would NOT leave the 'good bits', many of which are open to non-EU members (Horizon, Erasmus, customs union, freedom of movement, etc.)... and then guess what happened?
[0] Before anyone is confused if they see other comments of mine, I'm a dual Spainish–British citizen.
"Oh, right, must all have been Project Fear" is a weird take on this.
(This particular one was actually part of the withdrawal agreement but was held up due to Boris et al fucking about on Northern Ireland)
> There is clearly room for close cooperation in many areas without surrendering sovereign control over your nation.
Are you sure you voted remain? This is basically the prototypical pro-leave argument.
Given the argument for undoing Brexit is that the EU is "just a trade agreement" and not worthy of any discussions on democracy and sovereignty, I'm always surprised that so many Europeans, even high-level politicians, seem to have taken the decision to leave in such an incredibly personal way. Even the leave campaign itself was squarely against the EU as an institution, not a judgment on the EU member states and the people who make them up.
The mistake I see here is that you are saying "The argument" and "is" implying that there is a singular argument/factor/opinion in play. This kind of simplification is not the way forward.
A 7 year funding hiatus is pretty bad
Substantial political union isn't required per se, just enough common interest. That at least was the original thought behind the predecessor of the EU, and it seems to have worked through sharing economic interests.
You can take any trade bloc out there - none has the influence or the prospects of the EU, they are all fundamentally weak. You need shared political force to make a difference.
-wait why are you running away? This is exactly the same thing as a trade deal!
The country with the entirely unelected unremovable upper house has no business complaining about this.
Besides, short of violent revolution there's nothing the UK population can immediately do about the HoL. The Brexit vote was something that the people could directly do to at least de-abstract power and bring it closer to home. This was one of the most-advertised perks of the EU by the remain campaign: It's not the same as a nation superstate because you're able to voluntarily leave. Brexit was just the UK population exercising that right.
The other point is that the Lords really doesn't have that much power when all's said and done. Yes, they can quibble and send bills back for review a few times, but they're nothing like the US senate for example, the commons have the final say over everyone else. Compare to the EU commission, who have much more power, and actually make the laws.
But only in a few domains, and they always require approval. From wiki: "Most legislation needs to be proposed by the European Commission and approved by the Council of the European Union and European Parliament to become law." The former consists of the national governments, which usually has a popular mandate, the latter is chosen directly.
Both the UK and the EU are only nominally democratic.
Neither is really relevant, though. At best this agreement brings the UK back to previous status quo in one area. Where are the Brexit benefits that were supposed to balance out the other side of the equation and eventually show a net positive? Even immigration isn’t actually down compared to EU membership days. All that’s left seems to be those vague ramblings of sovereignty.
I get most of the UK scientific community was against Brexit, but the truth is the majority voted what they voted, yes it's a terrible mistake even seen from Pluto but it is what it is. If you want in again, then make the political transformations first like anyone else. Yes, nothing was ever by the book and perfect but this type of loopholes, Northern Ireland deals, etc. will come out as net-negative in the end.
If you scroll down there's a list of countries which can participate and who are automatically eligible to apply for funding too. So the EU, at least bits of it, despite all the talk of gardens and jungles, is still a force for good in the world.
I'm not against this particular deal, in fact I'm moderately in favor. However IMO these kinds of 100 separate deals so the UK can get the "goods" while still being out are not good in the long run. ( the UK always had kind of a special deal since the 60s, but there is so much bad blood and misinformation it's pointless to acknowledge that )
See Article 16 in [1].
For Horizon, it'd have been a major diplomatic "fuck you" if the UK was refused given the wording of Article 16.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2021/695/oj Regulation (EU) 2021/695 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 April 2021 establishing Horizon Europe
The most frustrating thing about the EU is that there are both great and awful things about it. Some things almost all EU nations agree on, such as having strong trading relationships and joint research programs, but often this comes bundled with stuff there is far more disagreement on the Schengen Area and the Euro.
I think the EU would be stronger if was purely an opt-in / opt-out model. Forcing such a diverse group of nations to all adopt a single system is neither in the interest the people living in EU or in the interest of the long-term viability of the EU.
Post-Brexit wrangling crystallized something for me: the EU should be seen as the venue for solving problems rather than the solution. Leaving the EU does not make problems go away, they still need to be resolved; (re)joining it does not solve problems either, but it provides a series of discussion and agreement mechanisms which can be used to solve them.
The EU isn't some sort of perfect organisation and is _badly_ in need of reform.
To quote Veroufakis:
> As he spoke, Schäuble directed a piercing look at Sapin. ‘Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy,’ he began. ... Of course he had a point: democracy had indeed died the moment the Eurogroup acquired the authority to dictate economic policy to member states without anything resembling federal democratic sovereignty.
Scientific collaboration can obviously not only survive but is enhanced by the EU dropping its xenophobic institutional barriers to non-EU countries working with them.
What you mean is that if European countries realize they can leave the EU and still work together, then the EU itself as a political institution can't survive long. But if you believe that then it is another way of saying the EU isn't actually useful and exists only due to its cartel-like "all or nothing" stance. In which case good riddance, Europeans and the rest of the world can work together much better without it.
The EU have been reneging on this agreement based on the rather dubious pretext that the UK wouldn't allow them to take control over Northern Ireland.
There is no agreement at all that there would be no border between NI and the ROI.
Even when we were part of the EU, the UK (including NI) and the ROI were separate countries with separate laws, currencies, taxes and languages. There was a border when we were part of the EU and there's still a border now.
There certainly is an implied agreement that there will be never again be a hard border with customs controls. Both govts accept this and the UK parliament voted for the NI protocol because of this. Disputing this is simply absurd and pointless. Pointless because the days of unionist dictation to the rest of the population are over and they won't be coming back. Get over it.
Imagine if Switzerland prohibited all EU scientists from accessing CERN.
Don't know whether this especially is related, but expect more of that.
Switzerland has already abandoned lots of its neutrality policies when we (rightfully) joined EU sanctions against Russia, in full. But weapons reexports are the final red line. Otherwise Switzerland will not be able to consider itself a neutral country, which will create a lot of undesirable consequences.
Has the UK managed to negotiate another special treatment (like when it had its 'discount' when an EU member) to ensure that it can only benefit from the scheme?
If so, that sounds like a good deal.
Edit: those corrupt uni ranking lists mean nothing.
Alternatively, the UK has 6 universities in the global top 40, while the rest of Europe has two (one in the EU, one in Switzerland.)
This isn't new. The British higher education sector has been a world leader for a long, long time. And that's despite the last few decades of funding cuts and declining educational standards - I can only imagine where we'd be in a more sensible timeline.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/se...
Jounal output: https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?order=itp&ord=desc...
University rankings (7 out of 10 in Europe, 3 out of 10 worldwide): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universiti...
"The conditions determining the level of financial contribution shall ensure a regular automatic correction of any significant imbalance compared to the amount that entities established in the associated country receive through participation in the Programme, taking into account the costs in the management, execution and operation of the Programme. The allocation of the financial contributions shall take into account the level of participation of the legal entities of the associated countries in each part of the Programme."
So this sounds at most like a clarification of the rules expected in any association agreement for Horizon.
If they get 2.4~2.5 Billions every year, or a year at 2.8 followed by a 2.1, it would be less, but not significantly less (the law of average make this last option a lot less likely).
The idea of the program is not to get all the money attributed to your country, I imagine the interest is also to pool specialist to evaluate the grant requests. In particular in small countries that just don't have enough people to have available specialists for everything.
Your comment is your personal interpretation, for instance.
I could also say that if I paid 2.5 billions in and only got 2.1 billions out over a single year that is significantly less (16%) so I demand a refund or guaranteed extra funding to make it up the following year.
> The idea of the program is not to get all the money attributed to your country
Whatever the idea of the program is, the aim of the UK seems not to be a constant net contributor, i.e. to ensure that on average it receives at least as much as it contributes, which was also the aim of various 'discounts' it got within the EU.
This is from the government announcement. I am 99.9% sure that when you read the actual text of the agreement there will be a process with exact cutoffs with the scenario laid out for how the funding would be recouped, and by whom.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
Including interesting details of the over/under performance condition.
the EU delayed implementation in order to use horizon as a stick to apply political pressure in an unrelated area (as it continues to do with switzerland)
so I'm not sure that reality reflects your point
that's an easy one, remaining in the EU
Why? Why would you need to get your money back when you get less out of it than you contribute?
(The UK should not demand special conditions after causing cost and temporary instability by leaving the EU.)
It all goes back to the fact that the entire EU has grown out of what was ultimately a deal between France and Germany, which has always left the UK out as the other one of Europe's big 3 countries. In fact France even blocked the UK from joining at all in the first place.
You always had to pay, before Brexit it was in the form of the EU budget contribution.
The UK was also a net contributor.
Ho hum.
Its more complex than that. The issue is that we are outside of the customs union, so building stuff outside and re-importing it (as in multiple factories specialising all over continental europe) becomes expensive in paper work, even though there may not be specific import taxes. Paper work in shipping takes time, money and a bunch of people to do, it makes everything much more expensive.
Even Bojo himself was ambivalent about the EU pre-2016, and famously wrote a pro-Leave and pro-Remain version of the same article before publicly announcing his position. It's pretty clear that he was motivated more by opportunism and personal advancement than by any strong belief in Brexit's merits.
Can anyone please elaborate this situation?
The EU still keeps trade as a hostage for political games. Think about, who looses when you prevent trade from happening? All of society. This is very self-destructive.
The EU still keeps free movement as a hostage for political games. Think about, who looses when you prevent free movement from happening? All of society. This is very self-destructive.
etc.