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U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

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Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#211

Post by grumpyprole »

bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #138
gadders wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, surrou…

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

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#212

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

gadders wrote: post #150
inamorty wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#213

Post by clarada »

pjc50 wrote: post #96
clarada wrote: post #63

A lot of the comments here ignore the fact that Horizon membership was agreed as part of the original Brexit negotiations. 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.

The EU would not allow the UK to break its agreement with EU member Ireland that there should be no border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Heck, even the Americans are on the Irish side of that particular dispute.

Northern Ireland is recognised as being part of the UK as per the Good Friday agreement.

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.

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#214

Post by gadders »

n4r9 wrote: post #204
gadders wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." -…

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.

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#215

Post by tomatocracy »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #143
IntelMiner wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#216

Post by Gud »

pjc50 wrote: post #93
FiniteField wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and maybe after that we can create a new supranational government that has fundamental authority over our own government, is free to write laws for us, can overrule our courts, removes all sovereignty over immigration, has a parliament with many degrees of democratic separation from the electorate, has an unelected commission that makes all the laws, has ever-expanding centralisation of power written into its co…

> parliament with many degrees of democratic separation from the electorate The country with the entirely unelected unremovable upper house has no business complaining about this.

Uhm, why not? Wouldn't it be better to work on changing both?

Both the UK and the EU are only nominally democratic.

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#217

Post by tomatocracy »

Symbiote wrote: post #207
mrbadger wrote: post #128

What's overlooked by many commenting on this is that cooperation with UK science will not revert to pre-Brexit levels. 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 grea…

Additionally, EU residents no longer even have the right through their residence to visit the UK. That makes organizing collaboration with Britain more complicated if you have a PhD student from Iran in the group, or a postdoc from China.

Unless I missed something at the time, EU residents (not residing in the UK) who were not EU citizens never had an automatic right of entry to or right to remain in the UK by virtue of EU residency (with some very narrow exceptions like accompanying an EU citizen spouse - though the UK made exercising this right very difficult in practice so that it was usually easier just to apply for a visa).

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#218

Post by orwin »

Symbiote wrote: post #206
orwin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accros…

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.

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#219

Post by Zenst »

phh wrote: post #14

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 resea…

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.

Re: U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

#220

Post by Zenst »

swores wrote: post #117
FiniteField wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

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