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Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I don't have numbers, but Horizon Europe is both a research funding scheme and an industry innovation funding scheme. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding... says "This is 70% of the budget earmarked for SMEs."

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.

View on HN

Maybe. This whole brexit thing happened by ignoring researchers and listening to whoever spoke louder :)

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.

>This whole brexit thing happened by ignoring researchers and listening to whoever spoke louder :)

When it goes the way someone wants they call that "democracy" ;)

Democracy isn't a magical word that automatically makes every decision made democratically good, nor does it stop being democracy if people are lied to and tricked into voting against their own interests.

Remainer here, but we lost fair and square. Politicians and campaigners definitely have a responsibility to be honest, but equally the electorate have a responsibility to inform themselves and make a reasonable judgement on the arguments made to them. Correcting for mistakes is what new elections are for.

> elections are for.

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.

I completely agree, the referendum was deeply misconceived from the start. I'm just pointing out that the electorate also have a responsibility to evaluate that and factor it into their decision. I certainly did.

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.

You could say that about any election, ever. The Brexit Referendum was no more or less honest than any general election.

> The Brexit Referendum was no more or less honest than any general election.

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.

Don't forget the bus that promised 350 million extra per week for the NHS !

"Turkey is negotiating its accession to the European Union (EU) as a member state, following its application to become a full member of the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor of the EU, on 14 April 1987.[1]"

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...

You have to be ignorant on this topic or a liar to say that Turkey is going to join the EU for the foreseeable future. I accept that you might be ignorant (no shame in that), but the people that created that campaign material were lying because they did know better.

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.

So you agree the EU lied to Turkey then?

No, and Yes and No.

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.

> 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.

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.

Not at the time. The situation changed, though.

Did I say "never joining"?

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.

Did the remain campaign point it out?

So, here's the thing about lies.

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.

They did, repeatedly, at the time.

And the scurrilousness of the leaflet was pointed out, too.

But xenophobia sells.

It was the pointing out which was the problem, as it brought prominence to the lie. There were plenty of other lies too, the one about NHS funding was especially egregious.

I got in my mail box flyers warning about Syria ending up in the Schengen free movement area. It was not just some creative interpretation of facts about Turkey. Who had at the time (and still now) no prospects of finishing the integration process short of getting rid of Erdogan anyway. And that the UK could have basically vetoed anyway.

Turkey is joining the EU. All in progress now....

I'd argue that it was less honest on the basis that the Leave side didn't have the equivalent of a general election manifesto. Cameron had his negotiated deal and Remain was continuity his government. But Leave didn't present any concrete document of what they wanted to happen next if we left, and if they had created such a document the referendum wouldn't have given them the power to put their plan into practice. The whole referendum design made it impossible for them to be honest IMO even if they wanted to.

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.

I take your point - it wasn't like Labour was Remain, and Conservatives were Leave - in reality all major parties and much of the establishment was remain.

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."

The point as I understand it is that there was no unified vision for what leaving the EU would look like. There was instead a multitude of voices making (in many cases) grandiose and outlandish promises. For example:

"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.

As other people have pointed out in this thread, though, there were equally outlandish claims made by the opposition of what would happen after a vote to leave by the likes of George Osbourne and Mark Carney.

Sure, which adds further weight to the argument that it was a particularly dishonest process.

That's fine if you are saying both sides were equally "dishonest" but the implication seemed to be from the original post that only Leave lied.

I don't think the implication was that only Leave lied. The point is that there was a clear plan of action if Remain won, but nothing of the sort if Leave won. That means that no one really knew what they were voting for beyond the technicality of leaving the EU.

That's what happens when you all of The Establishment in favour of one policy. I don't think you can blame Leave for that. It's more the fact that the main parties were (demonstrably) out of touch with the majority of the electorate.

Well, Vote Leave was the official campaign. And they did set out a post-Brexit plan. They had the opportunity to define what Brexit meant, but they didn't do it.

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.

> wasn't like Labour was Remain, and Conservatives were Leave

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).

Except the leave campaigns lied and/or mislead about the consequnces of leaving or their own intentions for the exit negotiations and post-brexit policies for everything from single market access, fishing rights, to net immigration reductions.

Citation needed.

See my other reply about Turkey being "set to join" the EU.

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.

> 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.

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.

It actually goes back further than that -- they wanted to join the EEC in '87.

36 years. This is actually higher than the median age of Turkey's population.

The claim that Brexit would redirect 350m/week to the NHS was a particularly egregious example.

https://archive.ph/D2Yq4

Did that not happen? [0] shows an increase of £47bn on the department of health and social care from 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. That's £900m/week. If you compare to post-covid years then it's more like an increase of £28b or £540m/week. From the article linked in your comment, it seems to make a overly large "smoking gun" out of the fact that a referendum campaign website changed their website to reflect the fact that the referendum was now over.

[0] https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-w...

No it didn’t, inflation alone is a poor adjustment for health spending when the populations keeps increasing. Thus explaining the net increase every year from 2010 to 2019.

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/

Nope. The 350 million was supposed to be from money saved from not being in the EU.

How can you say it's not? Money is fungible.

The DH&SC isn't the NHS. How much of that money went from DH&SC to the NHS, vs to Tory pals selling defective PPE? Or private hospitals?

that did happen

NHS Funding Act 2020

Sorry, I don't need to provide citations for the non-stop BS peddled for years and years in UK politics or list all of the policy positions of the last 5 conservative governments we have enjoyed for the past 8 years.

The Big Red Bus is difficult to miss.

The Big Red Bus wasn't a signed contract. It was a statement of possibilities that the UK could spend their savings on. And it looks like the NHS budget went up by that amount anyway.

If "signed contract" is your requirement then we can agree that no politician has ever lied in their campaign promises, because they don't make them signed contracts... that seems irrelevant?

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.

The big red bus was a lie in a crucial way: the £350M per week they were talking about (from our contributions to the EU) could not have been funded the way the bus slogan claimed.

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.

It sounds like most of what you've listed, especially immigration reductions, are in the general sense things that the government now has the power to change, it just chooses not to. I'd put complaints about post-brexit policies at the government's feet rather than the leave campaign. That's not to say that prominent leave campaigners didn't mislead people with certain statements, but I also remember the Cameron-Osborne remain campaign saying that merely voting to leave would instantly plunge the country into a huge recession. People like Nick Clegg also dismissed and scoffed at (IMO) legitimate concerns from the leave side, like saying that the prospect of an EU army was a conspiracy theory, when in fact there have since been lots of higher-ups in the EU pushing for this.

Sorry, I just assumed that if the leaders of the main leave campaign were to shortly become the government then they might share some responsibility. Apparently Johnson, Gove, Cummings and Sunak have no responsibilities for the things said and done for their cause in 2016. My bad.

I believe that foreign actors had a far greater influence than most other elections in British history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

I was more interested in facts that conspiracy theories, especially as those claims were found to be libellous: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/20/observers-caro...

"and remains unproven"

Probably because the then PM decided to not follow the recommendations of the Russia report and order an investigation. Would have been good to know either way.

Probably because PM understood this was complete garbage?

To be fair, some people ought to be jailed for this sort of blatant lies. It was not dodgy interpretation of facts or anything like that. It was pure disinformation. The fact that some other elections are also bad is beside the point. Democracy depends on people being well informed and engaged. Disinformation and disenfranchisement are crimes against democracy.

Democracy is not a binary question.

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.

Democracy is just a word. True democracy as people like to think of it does not exist.

> listening to whoever spoke louder

The original 51% attack

Or phrased another way, by listening to whoever spoke better? A key remainer argument was of the form, "we have to remain in the EU to be a part of pooled research (and other such schemes)" and the counter-argument was "no, collaboration makes sense regardless and better deals can eventually be reached".

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.

> So the Leavers were right about that in the end.

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.

Rejoining the exact same framework would mean rejoining the EU, wouldn't it? Horizon isn't the whole shebang and was never the parts that people had problems with. It's really not hard to understand this, unless you're trying not to!

This is a weird, lazy, bad-faith mischaracterisation of what I said.

Horizon is a framework. We rejoined it. End of argument.

Same back to you! You're totally misrepresenting what this is all about.

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.

> 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.

He thinks the government hasn't used its new powers in the way he wanted, which is different to it not having those powers.

But they absolutely have.

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.

It would be if by choice rather than mandate.

>no, collaboration makes sense regardless

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...

All or nothing?

Would you like to expand?

Is there an example area where the UK actually is in a better situation thanks to Brexit, or has agreed a deal with anyone that's better than the previous situation?

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?

> Is there an example area where the UK actually is in a better situation thanks to Brexit, or has agreed a deal with anyone that's better than the previous situation?

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 mean the big selling point is flexibility in regulation. The trouble is that using that flexibility would be bad for exporters so it's pretty tricky to use effectively.

I seem to recall the latter being expected, that the UK would drop regulations on imports, leading to low-quality American foodstuffs (corn syrup) flooding the market

A Facebook ad caught my eye recently, as it was a British newspaper's "Least healthy breakfast cereal" and the picture was something I didn't recognize at all.

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.

I was an awful, temperamental, argumentative child, and there were moments where my mood would be severely worse for no logical reason until I understood -- discovered for myself, in exasperation -- that both E102 and E110 actually triggered my bad moods.

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.

I'm not convinced that's actually seen as a benefit by any government either though, because it'd be bad for UK companies that sell here and also export - which is what you want really. Those companies can't lower their standards to compete with lower quality imports without losing their export business.

The outcomes have already penalised exporters relative to importers.

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.

Protectionism often seems politically appealing because its beneficiaries are highly visible and benefits are concentrated amongst a few larger firms. The beneficiaries of cheaper imports and freer trade are usually greater in total but thinly spread out - everyone benefits a little bit.

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.

Pros and cons, you can't look just at this example. Also, a project as big as Brexit takes many years to play out; the transition has barely begun, the conversation is futile at this point, and will be for years.

That's how people sold communism.

It's exactly what I'm wondering. The deal seems to stipulate that on average you'd spend about as much as you receive. If so, why not spend the same amount of money on your own scientist? That way you have full control. I don't get what the UK gets out of it.

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.

UK researchers can participate in larger Horizon projects if UK is a Horizon members. Much more easy to have joint research projects if the budget can be shared across the project, rather than split up with research outcomes/outputs having to be accounted for across UK/Horizon boundaries. In reality many UK institutions that were part of Horizon projects simply left them or didn't join as partners on applications.

Because research projects are multinational collaborations.

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??

They are isolated because that scheme is designed to isolate non-members.

But nothing prevents the UK from being part of international collaborations in general.

No, the scheme is there to simplify collaboration across borders and connect research teams with very different skills.

While you can still do it outside the EU programs, it will require a lot of administrative work which most universities cannot handle.

If being part of the scheme suddenly makes everything possible then I'd say the system is indeed designed to make things difficult for those not part of the scheme...

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.

Let's translate your comment from scientific research to driving:

> 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.

> Schemes like Horizon Europe make scientific research easier in similar ways.

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.

This analogy doesn't work, because it assumes that "roads any vehicle can drive on" is the default position outside the EU. But that's precisely not the case here - the default position in the Non-EU world is that cross-border cooperation and financing bears prohibitive problems. So Horizon is a significant improvement on the default position.

If you want roads as metaphor. Here it is: Roads profit those who are based along the road. A road between cities A and B profits those living and doing business in A and B more than anybody else living in a third city which is not connected to the road. That is just a matter of fact not a deliberate design decision to exclude someone.

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.

> 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.

Roads only help people who are in that location. The EU-specific roads (or programs) only help people driving (or researching) in the EU (and affiliated countries).

So you are suggesting what? That the UK would be allowed to join a scheme that hands out a large pot of money drawn from EU tax payers without pitching in? Give me a break. Framing this as some sort of ominous plot requires leaps of logic that is far beyond what I can even imagine.

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.

He's suggesting that the scheme should not exist at all, and researchers should just collaborate with whoever they want via project-specific setups.

I'm not suggesting that at all... I am not suggesting anything.

I don't think you appreciate how H2020 (the previous Horizons Europe) worked imho.

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.

As I understand it, it's not allowed for a third-country institution to lead part of an EU project. They can collaborate on specific tasks.

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.

Thank you very much for this explanation, I was confused by TFA (I skimmed through it, its my fault). Like I thought then, it's not a brexit thing at all.

It is a result of Brexit, as leading part (or all) of a Horizon project is a significant goal of many scientists' careers, and usually brings in much more funding than doing the smaller parts.

Britain lost that opportunity for several years, which will have caused people and groups to move to the EU.

Like an club, things for members are different than for non-members. Having a common and agree set of rules makes it easier for the members and more difficult for non-members.

I would take issue with the notion of the EU having any geopolitical capabilities, though.

The EU is a geopolitical entity with geopolitical aims. that has always been the case.

You don't disagree with my point re. 'club rules'...

No disagreement on rules, but I don't see that as particular exclusionary in the sense that whenever people cooperate they do that under some set of rules anyway.

EU might have geopolitical aims, but not much capability, so I see Horizon as not very strong in that area, if at all.

> 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.

Not that I can imagine it happening, but in a hypothetical where neither side had nukes how would a war between China and EU nations play out? Your comment seems to suggest that the combined militaries of EU states isn't a match, which isn't what I would have assumed but it's not an area I know anything about.

If you use a somewhat wider view on geopolitics that includes regulations, yes, agreed.

The scheme is designed to help members, the scheme doesn't care about non-members just like you don't care about non-customers or people you don't know exist.

This is like saying the local tennis club is "designed to isolate non-members"; no, anyone can apply.

LOCAL science for LOCAL people.

(It's a shame that Gove has largely dropped out of front-line Brexit advocacy; he looked the part).

Why would you want control? That means more bureaucracy you need to do yourself.

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.

What the ERC does is controlled by the Commission like everything else in Europe, it's not independent regardless of what it claims. The people making the decisions on what to fund are directly selected by the Commission itself.

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.

The UK government could be funding SMEs directly. The issue, I think, is indeed research institutions, which could also be directly funded, but would still be excluded from most EU programs if not part of the scheme.

The UK does fund SMEs, that's the Innovate UK program. It's a good pot for domestic money and relatively easy to get (or used to be, you'd see the same companies at every conference). It has money for solo industry and industry/university projects. It's under the same umbrella (UKRI) that also funds academic research (STFC, EPSRC, AHRC, etc).

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.

The UK always wanted to carry on as partnership in many things including the Horizon, alas red-tape of the `brexit` deal saw the whole Ireland border customs handling becoming a sticking point that saw lots of things put on ice.

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.

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