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.