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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

This is great news. I remember when Brexit was announced in my last lab, and at first everything seemed okay, but as the months went on I saw more professor bashing heads or colluding to get those rare precious grants as it became clear that the well was drying up.

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My former PhD supervisor almost immediately started looking and returned to Germany, and most of the other staff in the department who were European have since left to go back to continental Europe. It was such an own goal.

Yep. The lab fell apart a few years later (albeit with some help from other power struggles happening within the university at the time). UK universities are/were(?) chock full of European talent all speaking the lingua academia (English). Easy to integrate and write papers at the same time. Huge cultural and academic win.

That same experience in Germany? It's there, sure, but the effort to integrate is doubled.

Disclaimer: I voted to remain, but this is a great example of misleading/fear mongering by the remain campaign. They very vocally claimed that all the "good bits" of the EU cooperation would be permanently ended by leaving the Union. As evidenced by this news and others, that is untrue. There is clearly room for close cooperation in many areas without surrendering sovereign control over your nation.

I didn't hear that. I heard vocal claims that _getting rid of all of the things_ would cause problems, and that we'd either have to expensively replicate or just sign up for it separately anyway.

That is exactly what has happened here.

I don't see how it was misleading. The scientific co-operation was stopped, just as they said it will be, and it took three years to re-negotiate, without it ever being certain that the negotiation will be a success.

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).

> permanently ended

A 7 year funding hiatus is pretty bad

We left the EU 3 years ago, not 7.

Yes, but since 2016 new EU funds have been hard to get, for obvious reasons.

Your attitude is strange. If you break a friendship in a painful way, you don't at the same time think "oh but I can surely resume borrowing his record collection in the future".

> 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.

Possibly by accident?

>If you break a friendship in a painful way

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.

'Given the argument for undoing Brexit is that the EU is "just a trade agreement"'

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.

If everyone on the internet who claimed to have voted remain actually did so, we wouldn't be having any of these conversations and I wouldn't have so many bloody stamps in my passport.

No, they correctly predicted that the research funding was one of the things the government would kibosh with its "not paying the EU a penny" dick-waving, which is what happened.

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...

> No, they correctly predicted that the research funding was one of the things the government would kibosh with its "not paying the EU a penny" dick-waving, which is what happened.

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

After four years of talking about how we didn't need to do a deal because they'd miss our money more than we'd miss them, we got the possibility of associate membership of Horizon included provisionally with the deal we did at the last minute. This didn't exactly help orgs who'd already lost collaboration opportunities because of the uncertainty involved in Mr No Deal being in charge. Their participation for the next year was already kiboshed.

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

Years later, Britain manages to rejoin one thing.

"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)

Except we did surrender sovereign control over our country.

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.

Having to pretend GB and NI are different countries seems like the inevitable outcome of the Good Friday Agreement (or at least one interpretation of it) that requires you to pretend that parts of two different countries (NI and IE) are the same country. That was obviously not going to last indefinitely as long as the two places are ruled by different sovereign states (in this case, the UK and EU).

Nonsense. There is no pretense that GB and NI are in different countries. They are in different trade zones.

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.

> They very vocally claimed that all the "good bits" of the EU cooperation would be permanently ended by leaving the Union.

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.

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