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U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme

• tetris11 3y ago
  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.
  • O_nlogn 3y ago
    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.
    • misnome 3y ago
      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.
    • bojan 3y ago
      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).
    • ovi256 3y ago
      > permanently ended A 7 year funding hiatus is pretty bad
      • arrowsmith 3y ago
        We left the EU 3 years ago, not 7.
        • KaiserPro 3y ago
          Yes, but since 2016 new EU funds have been hard to get, for obvious reasons.
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      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.
      • jjgreen 3y ago
        Possibly by accident?
      • FiniteField 3y ago
        >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.
        • badcppdev 3y ago
          '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.
      • walthamstow 3y ago
        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.
    • notahacker 3y ago
      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...
      • blibble 3y ago
        > 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
        • notahacker 3y ago
          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
    • rsynnott 3y ago
      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)
    • walthamstow 3y ago
      Except we did surrender sovereign control over our country. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/trading-and-moving-goods-in-and-out-of-northern-ireland 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.
      • FiniteField 3y ago
        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).
      • mrbadger 3y ago
        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.
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    • Mordisquitos 3y ago
      > 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.
  • physicsguy 3y ago
    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.
    • tetris11 3y ago
      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.
• mytailorisrich 3y ago
  > And it will be able to recoup funding if U.K. scientists receive “significantly less money” than the U.K.’s annual contribution, according to the government’s announcement Has the UK managed to negotiate another special treatment (like when it had its 'discount' when an EU member) to ensure that it can only benefit from the scheme? If so, that sounds like a good deal.
  • PeterStuer 3y ago
    All members closely track their in/out on the framework programs. This is nothing new.
  • etiennebausson 3y ago
    That doesn't mean they can only benefit from it, it mean they can't be completely shafted. If they get 2.4~2.5 Billions every year, or a year at 2.8 followed by a 2.1, it would be less, but not significantly less (the law of average make this last option a lot less likely). The idea of the program is not to get all the money attributed to your country, I imagine the interest is also to pool specialist to evaluate the grant requests. In particular in small countries that just don't have enough people to have available specialists for everything.
    • mytailorisrich 3y ago
      'significantly' is obviously a weasel word that is opened to further arguments, and I suspect it was added on purpose so that both parties can claim 'victory'. Your comment is your personal interpretation, for instance. I could also say that if I paid 2.5 billions in and only got 2.1 billions out over a single year that is significantly less (16%) so I demand a refund or guaranteed extra funding to make it up the following year. > The idea of the program is not to get all the money attributed to your country Whatever the idea of the program is, the aim of the UK seems not to be a constant net contributor, i.e. to ensure that on average it receives at least as much as it contributes, which was also the aim of various 'discounts' it got within the EU.
      • 3y ago
• hkt 3y ago
  Ah, I see we've discovered that yet another element of our EU membership has needed reconstituting after we've found life lacks a certain something after leaving. Ho hum.
  • dan-robertson 3y ago
    I think remaining a member was always something the uk wanted but it seemed to get caught up in the negotiations. The screw up here is not that this is some U-turn but that rejoining/not-leaving didn’t happen much earlier.
    • makomk 3y ago
      It was - and in fact, associate membership of Horizon Europe was part of the original withdrawal agreement, it was just held up by the EU for years over issues with Northern Ireland. Similarly, the parts of the Brexit deal that are currently causing problems for car manufacturers were opposed by the British side but insisted on by the EU, though that didn't stop the British media spinning them as somehow being the UK's responsibility.
      • KaiserPro 3y ago
        > parts of the Brexit deal that are currently causing problems for car manufacturers were opposed by the British side Its more complex than that. The issue is that we are outside of the customs union, so building stuff outside and re-importing it (as in multiple factories specialising all over continental europe) becomes expensive in paper work, even though there may not be specific import taxes. Paper work in shipping takes time, money and a bunch of people to do, it makes everything much more expensive.
      • morelisp 3y ago
        I mean, yes, obvious the UK's position would be "give us all the good stuff without any of the responsibilities". That's not "held up by the EU", that's just the actual negotiation.
  • stephen_g 3y ago
• lwhi 3y ago
  Sounds like we're going backwards! Soon we'll be collaborating with other nations about other things too!! /s
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    Maybe we'll make a trade deal with countries in our geographical proximity, so we can trade without barriers. Perhaps even allow people to go there and work, and people from there to come here. Who knows what the future brings.
    • gadders 3y ago
      If only that was all that the EU was or intended to become.
      • toyg 3y ago
        Free trade without substantial political union is useless. Look at the Commonwealth for an example: broken, decaying, unpopular, a walking zombie of an institution.
        • tgv 3y ago
          The Commonwealth has a rather different history; I don't think it is a good analogy for the EU. Substantial political union isn't required per se, just enough common interest. That at least was the original thought behind the predecessor of the EU, and it seems to have worked through sharing economic interests.
          • toyg 3y ago
            The common economic interest was always seen as the best key to persuade countries to eventually federate. Read the arguments from early leaders of the ECSC and it's all very plain. The vision was always to reach a full political union, through the lever of an economic union that is necessary to remain competitive with the US and (the USSR back then, but today) China. Because in a superpower world, European countries alone are utterly irrelevant. You can take any trade bloc out there - none has the influence or the prospects of the EU, they are all fundamentally weak. You need shared political force to make a difference.
• phh 3y ago
  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-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe_en 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.
  • isaacfrond 3y ago
    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.
    • linuskendall 3y ago
      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.
    • kramerger 3y ago
      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??
      • 3y ago
• atemerev 3y ago
  And Switzerland is still out, without any pathway for getting back, negotiations have stalled. This is an absolute disgrace for our country.
  • bacchus123 3y ago
    Well it isn't that we wouldn't want to participate but the EU is connecting our Horizon participation with other topics that have nothing to do with it. So I don't really see us rejoining it anytime soon.
    • atemerev 3y ago
      As a small country, Switzerland will not be able to finance its world-class scientific infrastructure independently. It is a catastrophe. International cooperation is crucial in science.
      • bacchus123 3y ago
        Wrong. We paid as much as we got from the program. The collaboration between scientist from across Europe was the more important thing. Sadly science got politicized.
      • Longhanks 3y ago
        Absolutely agree. It is a disgrace how the EU tries to blackmail smaller countries. Imagine if Switzerland prohibited all EU scientists from accessing CERN.
      • sealeck 3y ago
        Switzerland is a pretty rich country, and spends roughly 22bn CHF per year on R&D (about half that of France with around 1/8th of the population). Swiss universities are also a _lot_ better than their continetal European counterparts.
  • exar0815 3y ago
    Switzerland flushed tremendous amounts of goodwill in all of europe, especially eastern europe, with their ridiculous stance on weapons deliveries - or non-allowance of deliveries tangentially related to switzerland. Don't know whether this especially is related, but expect more of that.
• bowsamic 3y ago
  I'm not surprised. This was one of the aspects of Brexit that seemed completely untenable and disastrous. Some aspects of Brexit are "bad but acceptable" but this was an "if we don't revert this one British R&D and science are screwed" aspect
  • blibble 3y ago
    staying associated with horizon was part of the brexit agreement Boris signed the EU delayed implementation in order to use horizon as a stick to apply political pressure in an unrelated area (as it continues to do with switzerland)
    • rwmj 3y ago
      Groupings of countries have great leverage over single countries, who knew!
      • FiniteField 3y ago
        "Might makes right", the last word in every argument on the EU.
      • blibble 3y ago
        in this case: as a result of the conflict the UK received a better deal on the clawback terms and achieved exactly what it wanted on the NI border (which the EU had formerly said was impossible) so I'm not sure that reality reflects your point
        • rwmj 3y ago
          After being out for 2 years while the EU held us to terms of the TCA. And if you think literally putting a border between two parts of the UK while all our agricultural goods are held up being inspected when going to the EU is a good outcome, I don't know what you'd think is a bad outcome.
          • 3y ago
• zzbn00 3y ago
  Good Q & A here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_23_4373 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... Including interesting details of the over/under performance condition.
• clarada 3y ago
  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.
  • emptyfile 3y ago
    [dead]
  • pjc50 3y ago
    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.
    • clarada 3y ago
      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.
      • mrbadger 3y ago
        NI is recognised as a "contingent" part of the UK. (contingent because as a gerrymandered legacy colony imposed on the Irish people it is a disputed territory). There certainly is an implied agreement that there will be never again be a hard border with customs controls. Both govts accept this and the UK parliament voted for the NI protocol because of this. Disputing this is simply absurd and pointless. Pointless because the days of unionist dictation to the rest of the population are over and they won't be coming back. Get over it.
  • mrbadger 3y ago
    Utter claptrap. The UK govt announced its intention to abrogate the withdrawal agreement. The EU did not renege upon the agreement -- which specifically includes terms about the EU's rights to punish non-compliance. And the UK's "compliance" included repeated unilateral abrogations.
• PedroBatista 3y ago
  This is "great news" for researchers and UK universities in particular but this is also "terrible news" because it's yet another instance of special treatment that weakens the overall system. What I mean by that it's the notion of "we can be out while still be kinda in". No system can survive for long if this is widespread. I get most of the UK scientific community was against Brexit, but the truth is the majority voted what they voted, yes it's a terrible mistake even seen from Pluto but it is what it is. If you want in again, then make the political transformations first like anyone else. Yes, nothing was ever by the book and perfect but this type of loopholes, Northern Ireland deals, etc. will come out as net-negative in the end.
  • physicsguy 3y ago
    Eh? The UK has 'rejoined' as an associate member, in the same way that a number of other countries are associate members.
    • smackay 3y ago
      Here is a list of associate members, https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/common/guidance/list-3rd-country-participation_horizon-euratom_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs... which also lays out some of the terms. If you scroll down there's a list of countries which can participate and who are automatically eligible to apply for funding too. So the EU, at least bits of it, despite all the talk of gardens and jungles, is still a force for good in the world.
    • PedroBatista 3y ago
      Yes, but the deal is not really as a clean-slate external member just joined. Of course there are many pending issues from the past, as it would be expected, many long term investment and commitment were made and then one could colorfully say "the UK took the money and run" ( I know it's much more complicated than that ), and this deal kinda addresses that. I'm not against this particular deal, in fact I'm moderately in favor. However IMO these kinds of 100 separate deals so the UK can get the "goods" while still being out are not good in the long run. ( the UK always had kind of a special deal since the 60s, but there is so much bad blood and misinformation it's pointless to acknowledge that )
• j7ake 3y ago
  The UK has taken such a nosedive recently that news of rejoining Horizon Europe (something they have had for many years) is met with wide celebration.
• nairboon 3y ago
  The EU still keeps science as a hostage for political games. Think about, who looses when you prevent science from happening? All of society. This is very self-destructive.
  • bluehatbrit 3y ago
    To be fair, the offer to rejoin Horizon has been on the table to the UK for a long time now. The UK government have been the ones dragging their heels on actually doing the work to kick off that process. Scientists like Sir Paul Nurse have been very outspoken for several years about this. That's not to say there aren't failings in the EU, there definitely are, but this is heavily on the UK.
    • nairboon 3y ago
      I don't know the details about the UK. But the EU has been playing this game with Switzerland since 2013. Switzerland can bankroll the costs, but it's the scientists and science overall tha slows down due to this.
      • nerdyadventurer 3y ago
        > But the EU has been playing this game with Switzerland since 2013. Switzerland can bankroll the costs, but it's the scientists and science overall tha slows down due to this. Can anyone please elaborate this situation?
  • FatherPaulStone 3y ago
    couldn't you simply apply the same logic to any aspect of the EU? The EU still keeps trade as a hostage for political games. Think about, who looses when you prevent trade from happening? All of society. This is very self-destructive. The EU still keeps free movement as a hostage for political games. Think about, who looses when you prevent free movement from happening? All of society. This is very self-destructive. etc.
    • 3y ago
• FatherPaulStone 3y ago
  good, but the damage has already been done. We've missed out on work, had lead scientists leave the country and had to take a back seat on European research just to be involved. Whole thing is a sh*t show.
• jll29 3y ago
  Welcome back, UK! (The UK should not demand special conditions after causing cost and temporary instability by leaving the EU.)
  • rob74 3y ago
    The UK has always demanded (and received) special conditions, not just on Horizon, but on lots of other things too, even while it was still in the EU.
    • FiniteField 3y ago
      Which was entirely fair considering that extremely significant, costly parts of the EU structure and policies are essentially special conditions to other countries. The Common Agricultural Policy was/is basically a free fund of N billion EUR/year to France. It all goes back to the fact that the entire EU has grown out of what was ultimately a deal between France and Germany, which has always left the UK out as the other one of Europe's big 3 countries. In fact France even blocked the UK from joining at all in the first place.
• andy_ppp 3y ago
  Sigh, Eurasmus, Euratom, mutual visas for people in the arts wanting to work in Europe etc. etc. need not even be associated with being in the EU but we needlessly harmed ourselves and left them all. The UK electorate has been told a fiction about sovereignty for decades, I’m not sure how to stop the lies and conspiracy theories that have permeated a lot of society now. We are set to become a very poor and unhappy country if we keep being unable to discuss reality and focus on how people feel.
• pavlov 3y ago
  The Brexiteers are convinced this shows it’s possible to cherrypick the parts you wanted from the EU. The Remainers are convinced that the interval when Britain was out of Horizon shows the dangers of Brexit. Neither is really relevant, though. At best this agreement brings the UK back to previous status quo in one area. Where are the Brexit benefits that were supposed to balance out the other side of the equation and eventually show a net positive? Even immigration isn’t actually down compared to EU membership days. All that’s left seems to be those vague ramblings of sovereignty.
• mrbadger 3y ago
  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 great many applications from the UK for every job advertised (UK scientists can move to Ireland freely because of the Common Travel Area).
  • anonymousDan 3y ago
    Regarding your last point, is that from your own experience or can you point to some online resource. I ask as an Irish academic working in the UK who would potentially like to return home at some point!
    • mrbadger 3y ago
      Personal communication from someone in the know in NUI.
  • Symbiote 3y ago
    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.
    • tomatocracy 3y ago
      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).
      • 3y ago
• wdb 3y ago
  "And it will be able to recoup funding if U.K. scientists receive “significantly less money” than the U.K.’s annual contribution, according to the government’s announcement." Why? Why would you need to get your money back when you get less out of it than you contribute?
  • jacobjwebber 3y ago
    The reasoning was (not my opinion) that the EU had a rule saying that uk institutions could never withdraw more than the uk contributed to the scheme. The uk wanted this to be reciprocal
• alex201 3y ago
  Brilliant! After years of delay and uncertainty, €2.6 billion per year to regain access to a program they were once part of? Who needs that extra money for healthcare, education, or infrastructure anyway? Is this a hint that someone's tail is between her legs and wants another change?
  • okeuro49 3y ago
    > €2.6 billion per year to regain access to a program they were once part of? You always had to pay, before Brexit it was in the form of the EU budget contribution. The UK was also a net contributor.
  • xsdu 3y ago
    The UK never wanted out of Horizon, it was part of the brexit agreement. The EU is back-pedalling here, not the UK.