> ... If I understand your nonsensical ramblings correctly.
If you think they are nonsensical, you do not understand what I am saying.
Yes, countries can "work together without being part of the same trading bloc" but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed.
Brexit removes us from the international legal agreements that underpinned that trade. It also removed us from the free movement clause, which is crucial to a lot of science-industry collaborations (the free movement principle was essentially invented to allow professional collaboration in the energy industry).
Finally it also removed us from the legal frameworks that underpin several European science funding agreements.
Every agreement has to be rewritten, at cost to the process. And every time it is rewritten, the net result for Britain is substantially worse than if we'd not done it. Because you cannot hope to get full membership of any club without agreeing to all the rules.
From the article:
> The UK is a participant, too. Its full involvement in ITER, however, will require first for Britain to "associate" to certain EU science programmes, something that so far has been held up by disagreements over post-Brexit trading arrangements, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland.
Here is just one example of that:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/08/uk-and-euro...
From that article:
> The EU agreed to associate membership for the UK as part of the wider Brexit trade deal struck on Christmas Eve 2020 but it has still not ratified the deal or a similar one with Switzerland, held up by a dispute over a draft treaty binding the country to the bloc.
We didn't need to do any of this, there have been no benefits from any of this, and there are no meaningful projected benefits for any of this in our lifetimes.