UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs The UK government has launched formal consultations with the EU over the failure to secure its inclusion in the EU's €95.5 billion ($97.6 billion) research funding program since the island nation left the world's richest trading bloc. Ministers said they wanted to end persistent delays to the UK's access to EU scientific …
Wasn't this all part of the 'ready-made' deal with the EU' that Boris the 'Brave' bragged about?
Many of us predicted that the laws of unintended consequences would hit us hard w.r.t BREXIT but were shouted down...
The brain drain will be next, as will lots of funding for research at top UK Universities.
@Warm Braw
"Funny how it was only when we left, despite being a net contributor, that taxes went up to their highest ever proportion of GDP."
Almost as if there was a massive blow out of spending when the gov put a large chunk of the economy on hold while panicking over a virus. And the rise in the so called 'divorce bill' where the UK now must pay more for the EU pensions because we were in it.
Except the scheduled NI increase was supposed to pay for the Social Care policy that has been promised for years and never delivered and the rise in Corporation Tax doesn't take effect until the next financial year. The non-indexation of the personal allowance will soak up even more of GDP than planned as inflation has soared way beyond expected levels.
Most of the coronavirus spending has come from borrowing so far, not taxation. Though it will no doubt feed through into taxation shortly.
The real issue, unfortunately, is the sluggish recovery of GDP - even the Tory leadership candidates would agree with that. And it's about to slump further.
@Warm Braw
"Except the scheduled NI increase was supposed to pay for the Social Care policy that has been promised for years and never delivered"
I can believe that. I am not a fan of rising tax either but it does feed into your comment-
"Most of the coronavirus spending has come from borrowing so far, not taxation. Though it will no doubt feed through into taxation shortly."
"The real issue, unfortunately, is the sluggish recovery of GDP - even the Tory leadership candidates would agree with that. And it's about to slump further."
Probably. Shutting down the economy (and the world doing similar) while printing money and spending like a drunken sailor will do that. We couldnt even manage to get austerity after the last recession.
OK - most of the UK inflation is not due to:
- Printing money (though we have done quite a bit of of that, you will note we've stopped)
- High Taxes (that's deflationary)
- People working from home (please play nicely with the other public servants, Jacob)
- The economy restarting after COVID (although I'll concede that probably has made money chase scarce goods)
It is largely due to:
1) The absolutely effing enormous jump in the cost of fossil fuels after a bare-chested, oil-soaked dictator decided to do a reverse-Barbarossa. This is the big one.
2) The slide of the pound in relation to most currencies that matter, which started, curiously enough just as soon as the money-markets realised just shy of 50% of the UK electorate had lost their marbles
@MyffyW
"OK - most of the UK inflation is not due to"
That is a difficult one as what is causing the most inflation or what proportions is due to what isnt known even by the central bankers. However-
"- Printing money (though we have done quite a bit of of that, you will note we've stopped)"
Is inflationary. It is. Its the point of printing it out beyond productivity. The value of the money declines as its availability increases without subsequent productivity. Even stopping isnt reversing.
"- High Taxes (that's deflationary)"
Yup.
"- People working from home (please play nicely with the other public servants, Jacob)"
Not sure what effect that would have. I am sure it has some but I dont know how it balances.
"- The economy restarting after COVID (although I'll concede that probably has made money chase scarce goods)"
Pent up demand for scarce goods. Add this to the flood of printed money and its not good.
"1) The absolutely effing enormous jump in the cost of fossil fuels after a bare-chested, oil-soaked dictator decided to do a reverse-Barbarossa. This is the big one."
Yup. This has hit food as well. Yes this is a biggie.
"2) The slide of the pound in relation to most currencies that matter, which started, curiously enough just as soon as the money-markets realised just shy of 50% of the UK electorate had lost their marbles"
Eh? The Euro was below parity with the USD at one point recently and isnt much above it now. USD is the global currency and the GBP isnt that bad. Depending on the flavour of ECB suicide it could get a lot worse.
As a Brit living in Aus, my UK GBP savings crashed in value relative to the AUD immediately after the referendum result was known. Dropped from about 2:1 to about 1.7:1.
It hasn't recovered since. Still only at about 1.74:1. So yes, the referendum had a massive impact on the value of the pound.
If you don't believe the facts stated, feel free to check any cash conversion site to see the precipitous drop in value minutes after the referendum result as well as the current rate.
As someone who was transferring cash at the time, it was more than an abstract fact. For every 100 pounds transferred, I got 30 Australian dollars less the day after the referendum than I did the day before.
I am confused. Why, when talking about the strength of the pound are you comparing the Euro to the USD? Wouldn't it make more sense comparing the Pound to the Euro?
The day before the referendum, a Pound would buy you 1.3 Euro. Immediately after the referendum, it dropped down to 1.15. At the moment, 1 pound will buy you 1.17 Euro. At times between then and now, it sunk as low as 1.06.
So what you are saying is that the Euro is apparently an incredibly weak currency, yet the pound will still buy you less of this (allegedly) weak currency than it did the day before the referendum.
Incidentally, there are 2 reasons why the USD is currently stronger against the Euro (and almost every other currency):
1. Investors are fleeing risky currencies, especially the Yuan and going back the USD, which is considered a safe haven when times are uncertain.
2. The Fed raised interest rates faster and harder than most other central banks, pushing the currency higher.
Back in 2012/13, the Australian dollar reached parity with the USD. 1 AUD would buy you more than 1 USD, up to as much as 1.05. At the moment it will only buy you about 69 US cents. That has bugger all to do with the AUDs rate against the pound, which is substantially higher now than it was before the referendum.
In 2014-2016, GBP/EUR ramped up anomalously high* at 1.3, and caused massive problems for us as exporter companies. We were massively undercut at that level, many companies (including mine) had experienced 50% drop in order flow due to high exchange rate, and would likely have gone out of business had it continued even a year longer.
During the period 2009-2013, GBP/EUR traded in the range 1.10-1.20, which was comfortable equilibrium.
It crashed in 2008 from Highs around 1.50, for rather obvious reasons: the Global Financial Crisis particular hit the U.K. which was dependent for much of its strength on Financial Services. Neither exchange rate nor country have recovered since 2008, because most of the “wealth” we had in 2008 was fictional.
If you want to go back to GBP/EUR of 1.3, that would be incredibly painful for the U.K. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but the mechanism could only be: crash in eurozone means that eurozone workers are prepared to work for peanuts. Then U.K. gets undercut again, and we either work for peanuts too, or have high unemployment. In other words, contagion of Eurozone Depression. I wouldn’t look forward to that, and neither should you.
@codejunky
Hard life codejunky, who do you suggest paid British pensions when you left the EU.
But as I am sure you know it's more than just pensions and it was all agreed upon years ago.
Stop whining, some day father Christmas will bring you all those Brexit gifts.
All about this annoys me as it's so damned stupid and unnecessary but I would still try to point out that all this idiocy took place with a Tory government in place and it seems to just get madder by the day.
@Lars
"Hard life codejunky, who do you suggest paid British pensions when you left the EU."
British pensions? This is EU pensions because we were in the EU project.
"But as I am sure you know it's more than just pensions and it was all agreed upon years ago."
We could have negotiated for brexit instead of attempted BINO but that would have upset you guys to much.
"Stop whining, some day father Christmas will bring you all those Brexit gifts."
Your kidding. Delivered very quickly. Almost right away, but I am sure you forgot that.
Absolutely no benefits have come from brexit apart from for a very privileged few... i.e. disaster capitalists, and they have already cached in and made their short term profits. For everyone else it has been the predicted disaster that it was always and only ever could be.
We always got more out from the EU than we ever put in. The collapse in our economy, even adjusted for covid, has been much higher than the total paid to the EU over the entire time the UK was a member. That we have now hit a world recession after this has made the situation worse.
Add in the rampant corruption and incompetence from your beloved Tory party and the UK is rapidly heading for a total collapse where short term money making and greed trump anything else. The energy company greed is one of these results, the transport infrastructure is another, the destruction of the UK's research and university system is underway and what little there is of a government are "on holiday". Again.
@Nick Ryan
"Absolutely no benefits have come from brexit apart from for a very privileged few"
Such as all those who got vaccinated while the EU searched for its arse with both hands and a map?
"For everyone else it has been the predicted disaster that it was always and only ever could be."
The predicted disaster of a recession as soon as the leave vote is in... fail. Ah but it will when we sign art50... fail. The banks will all leave... fail. London wont be the global financial centre of Europe... fail. The FUD was exposed and not much of a disaster. Then we look over at the EU and yeah we see disaster.
"We always got more out from the EU than we ever put in"
Eh? Bought more yeah but got more... questionable.
"The collapse in our economy, even adjusted for covid, has been much higher than the total paid to the EU over the entire time the UK was a member."
Adjusted for covid how? It buggered and continues to bugger economies around the world. As bad as the UK situation looks its still better than the EU proper.
"Add in the rampant corruption and incompetence from your beloved Tory party"
Erm, beloved? Eh? When?
"The energy company greed is one of these results"
What greed? You may have noticed the GLOBAL shortage where Germany is trying to figure out how to keep the lights on due to a certain invasion going on?
@MJI
I said- "Such as all those who got vaccinated while the EU searched for its arse with both hands and a map?"
And you point to just authorisation?- "https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-vaccine-brexit/"
The UK ordered vaccine independently. There is no reason beyond believing in UK superiority to think the UK would have done that had we remained. All member countries agreed to this consolidated approach which includes approval and so only through believing in UK superiority could anyone believe we wouldnt have waited for the EU to approve the vaccine.
That last point being a problem for ROI who could only watch as NI got vaccinated and they couldnt. A minister suggesting driving over the border and bringing some vaccine over was told NO by the EU.
The problem in the EU was resolved when members abandoned the joint approach and even Germany breaking its agreement to the consolidated negotiations and ordering themselves.
100% the UK benefited from brexit when it comes to the covid vaccine. To believe otherwise is to believe in a benevolent EU who wouldnt lie and steal as they did in reality, but also in UK supremacy that our government is somehow better than every member gov and the EU gov. I certainly dont believe in that.
I’d actually be keen to know more detail about the UK Vaccine Taskforce.
I’d like to hope feted (Venture Capitalist) Kate Bingham - who was it’s initial chair - did not have. Strategy of just slap a wad down on the table - indeed many tables - regardless of the cost to fuck over anyone else.
That’s belatedly what happened with PPE.
How the UK Government behaved over cancelling Valneva’s supply contract was shameful.
What greed? You may have noticed the GLOBAL shortage where Germany is trying to figure out how to keep the lights on due to a certain invasion going on?
'Renewable' energy companies have been making money hand over fist. The 'global' energy crisis hasn't really affected their costs, just massively increased the profits they can make from inflating their electricity price.
And the 'global' gas shortage is also largely due to the EU's own decisions. Germany could solve it's gas crisis in very short order by simply allowing NordStream 2 to operate. Stop the self-sanctioning, and there'd be no 'energy crisis'. Especially given we seem to be sanctioning ourselves so our 'ally' can keep shelling Europe's largest nuclear power plant.
And then there's carp like this, as ever from the clueless Bbc-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62570900
The UK is expected to take delivery of a shipment of gas all the way from Australia next week, as the pressure on European energy supplies grows.
Which will be making a lot of money for someone. UK doesn't really need Aussie LNG, but Germany is very desperate and does.. But doesn't have it's own LNG terminals. Which is also a potential trade war lever. So if the EU wants to continue trying to punish the UK, we could simply impose an export ban on gas.
Sanctions work, right?
It is not a claim. It is a fact that the UK was a net contributor to the EU.
You are making the mistake that many do when they look at anything to do with the EU. You look at one aspect only, and not the whole. No doubt this will be part of some bargaining re fisheries, and so on.
@VoiceOfTruth
"No doubt this will be part of some bargaining re fisheries, and so on."
I assume a continuation of their efforts to anex NI. But could just be a continual branch to hit us with as long as we entertain hopes of continuing research with them.
The EU would shoot their own foot off as long as the blood ruined our shoes
@sabroni
"Where is the border supposed to go then smartarse?"
Look at my comment history I am very consistent on this, in Ireland. In fact you will notice that nobody yet has managed to explain how the EU's problem which is the border (they want) is our problem.
"Bojo promised the Irish no border on the island, he promised the Unionists no border in the sea."
So we remove the one from the sea, thats one solved. Then we dont apply a hard border in Ireland, and the other is solved. If the EU wants to make a border thats the EU doing it if they really want to. Aint our problem. At no point is this difficult.
@ClockworkOwl
"I'm guessing you haven't heard of the Good Friday agreement, which probably indicates the level of your true ignorance on matters of border politics..."
Oh the burn, I am in agony. Mostly for how stupid your comment is but anyway. The GFA does not state we cannot have a border. Also even if you wish to read it as not allowing a hard border, its the EU's problem not the UK's.
The UK (assuming its not changed its position) doesnt want a hard border therefore it is the other side who either wants or not a border, and the EU does. The EU wants a border. And so either ROI resolve their own issue... or not, we dont care, it aint the UK's problem.
If there is no border between the UK and the EU, and no freedom of movement and no common market between them, a few things happen:
1) Mass illegal migration across said border - no checks, see.
2) Smuggling becomes the major industry in NI - no checks, see.
None of the nations involved would accept that situation. The EU and Ireland would demand arbitration, and the UK would pay dearly.
That would be why.
Now, if the UK rejoined the common market, the problem would be solved. That's probably the only way to solve it, in fact.
If we could join the "common market", like we did in the 1970's, then I think many people would accept that.
But the EU is not just a common market any more, and has not been for almost the entire time since we joined. It's on a path that will lead to a federated Europe with most of the control coming from Berlin and Paris. I reacon if we had stayed in the EU, the UK would have become rather like Texas is to the USA.
But the issue with Horizon Europe should be decoupled from the EU. It was and is not an EU program, and the UK is still a full member, so feels we ought to get some of the work. It is the EU that is linking them together.
Is a Federated Europe a bad thing? Large trading bloc, broadly comparable moral and cultural histories, strong geopolitical motivations for alliances; and a very strong rationale for a unified military rather bit-parts under the auspices of NATO.
For those that read the history books (because no-one is left alive that experienced it) a key issue in the Liberals-versus-the Tories back around the turn of the century was the design and construct of the British Empire.
The liberals favoured a Federated British Empire - India, Canada, Aus, etc. being part of a larger and global state.
The Tories were more interested in putting the boot on our Dominions and Colonies to extract cash from them. Ergo, the latter buggered off and quite rightly so.
Trouble is, it's hard for UK itself to bugger off from the Tories.
Incorrect.
The EU could put the border between the Irish Republic and the rest of the EU, in the same way as the current border splits the UK. Except the border between the Irish Republic and the rest of the EU is already an international border (unlike the internal UK border through the Irish Sea).
And of course, when the EU thought that there might be a 'no-deal' scenario, the EU bureaucracy made plans to do exactly that.
@Richard 12
"1) Mass illegal migration across said border - no checks, see."
Damn. So your saying we had serious illegal immigration in Ireland while we were in the EU? Aka no different to what we had before.
"2) Smuggling becomes the major industry in NI - no checks, see."
Aka as it was before! Oh no the doom!!!
"None of the nations involved would accept that situation. The EU and Ireland would demand arbitration, and the UK would pay dearly."
So the EU would fuck up Ireland because of a personal grudge? Damn, almost like they are childish and its a good job we got out.
"Now, if the UK rejoined the common market, the problem would be solved. That's probably the only way to solve it, in fact."
Thats just bull. The EU could easily put a border between ROI and the EU. It was even considered assuming the UK held the line in negotiation. If the EU cant manage to handle something like this then how can they be taken seriously in the world?
Am endlessly impressed by the mightiness of the great junky brain. Is truly a marvel to behold, a subject to be studied by scientists everywhere.
About movement of people across UK borders the mighty junker pontificates this way:
Damn. So your saying we had serious illegal immigration in Ireland while we were in the EU? Aka no different to what we had before.
Yes, before was free movement between EU countries you see. Big purpose of brexit was to end that, was it not?
About trade without checks across UK borders he announces to the waiting world:
Aka as it was before! Oh no the doom!!!
Yes, before was a think called single market for EU countries. Another big purpose of brexit was for UK to leave this single market was it not?
And now the junky in his great wisdome pronounces on the fate of Éire:
The EU could easily put a border between ROI and the EU.
Yes of course. EU could just put border between country which is part of EU and EU. This is in fact not topologically possible unless that country were not to be part of EU any more. So I see you propose that, because the UK chose to leave the EU, the EU should in turn throw out Éire. Because, I suppose, in your pretend world, the island of Ireland is merely colony of UK anyway, not independent country at all. Never has been in fact. Same way Putin thinks of Ukraine, isn't it?
@the small snake
"Yes, before was free movement between EU countries you see. Big purpose of brexit was to end that, was it not?"
Was it? So you are somehow claiming the purpose of brexit was to ban people from ROI to travel into NI thereby breaking the GFA yet being the opposite of the UK's position? Go on reconcile that for me.
"Yes, before was a think called single market for EU countries. Another big purpose of brexit was for UK to leave this single market was it not?"
Yup we left the single market. Are you claiming the EU's full incompetence at a trade deal for Ireland? The EU unable to cope with the world beyond its borders and unable to keep to agreements of its member countries with others? Ok.
"EU could just put border between country which is part of EU and EU. This is in fact not topologically possible"
And so you are wrong. Exceptionally wrong without being close to true, impressive. That the UK has an internal border at the moment shows it possible for the EU to. That the EU planned for it if the UK held the line shows its possible. That the EU is made up of various different 'versions' of treaties shows it can.
"So I see you propose that, because the UK chose to leave the EU, the EU should in turn throw out Éire."
No but you may think that way. ROI has an agreement with the UK and they can put an end to it if they wish if the EU dictates a border, or they could leave the EU or some compromise on their internal borders as I just mentioned.
"Am endlessly impressed by the mightiness of the great junky brain. Is truly a marvel to behold, a subject to be studied by scientists everywhere."
Do some studying and your brain may also become impressive. I expect mine hovers around average but thank you for looking up to it.
So the EU would fuck up Ireland because of a personal grudge? Damn, almost like they are childish and its a good job we got out.
Please stop projecting your own bigoted blind views of the UK's responsibility. The EU have kept the peace in NI as a high priority while your beloved Johnson was repeatedly lying to everyone, and in different ways, about there being no border and no risk to the Good Friday Agreement. The EU is not fucking up Ireland, the UK is, through blind rabid brexiteers and corrupt, incompetent politicians. Hell, the Tory party repeatedly gave the NI secretary job to individuals whose only skill was to say "Yes, Boris" and no actual knowledge, skills or any competence in anything. The exit agreement that was written and signed by Johnson/Tory party/UK gov with the EU was touted by Johnson as being complete and great, and then a few months later this same exit agreement, which is an international agreement, was being criticised as if the EU imposed it... they didn't even write the damn thing, they contributed to the discussions and in the end signed to it despite the childish antics of the "negotiators" that the UK sent to work on it. But somehow to rabid brexiteers, the oven ready, great deal and agreement signed by the UK is the fault of the EU. It's not, and never has been and is cannot even be.
@Nick Ryan
"Please stop projecting your own bigoted blind views of the UK's responsibility"
Actually it was the previous posters comment suggesting so.
"The EU have kept the peace in NI as a high priority"
So it remains not the UK's problem because the UK doesnt want a hard border and so the EU would resolve their internal issues to accommodate it. See.
"The EU is not fucking up Ireland"
It is but the previous poster said they would. That the EU is over policing the border to the point of breaking the agreement means they are.
"The exit agreement that was written and signed by Johnson/Tory party/UK gov with the EU was touted by Johnson as being complete and great, and then a few months later this same exit agreement, which is an international agreement, was being criticised as if the EU imposed it"
Actually the EU didnt implement it as agreed and nearly applied art16 over Covid so has no credibility. However I dont defend our gov, feel free to slam it as much as you please. I have never yet heard how having a crap government on top of our crap government improves things.
"childish antics of the "negotiators" that the UK sent to work on it."
Both sides had their moments but the EU certainly wernt grown up in their negotiations.
"But somehow to rabid brexiteers, the oven ready, great deal and agreement signed by the UK is the fault of the EU. It's not, and never has been and is cannot even be."
Actually the serious attempted BINO was the problem.
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No border on the Island of Ireland, no border in the sea …. Put the border in Stranraer, Holyhead and Heysham.
Job done, commitments honoured.
It’s working really well at Dover right now for UK —> France trade and people.
Stop complaining.
@VoiceOfTruth "It is not a claim. It is a fact that the UK was a net contributor to the EU."
Not just a net contributor the second largest net contributor in 2015 even though the UK was getting a discount on it's contributions.
Germany 14.3 billion euros
UK 11.5 billion euros
Without the discount the UK would have had to pay another 6 billion euros which would have made it the largest net contributor at 17.5 billion euros.
That was just a result of poor negotiations and poor economics: the "rebate" quickly became a slogan only as the budget was adjusted. It was like some of the offers you see in shops which cover a real price rise.
Anyway, a better basis for comparison would be per capita where I think The Netherlands makes the largest contribution on this basis. But seeing as it's also one of the largest beneficiaries from the single market, outrage is limited.
EU budget negotiations are messy but they really are childs play when it comes to the pork barrel approach of the US, which the UK has also started to adopt under BoJo.
@Charlie Clark "Anyway, a better basis for comparison would be per capita where I think The Netherlands makes the largest contribution on this basis."
Well I don't know what it is per capita but using GNI for that year (2015) Netherlands is the main net contributor with a share of 0.54 percent. Sweden (0.48 percent) followed and then Germany and Great Britain with 0.46 percent each. So that way Netherlands is top. :)
Anyway they are just stats and we just choose the one that says what we want.
The only reason I posted those figures was everyone was going on about net contributions so I put up the figures from the year before the referendum. Make of them what you will. :)
Net contributions are an abusive misuse of facts.
Let’s say you have £10, you give it to me, and I hand you back £8 worth of gold. Fine, we can both agree you gave me £2 net. But if instead *I* choose the nature of what I give in return…..what if I give you a large fluffy pink elephant, that has a retail price of £15 (but I bought for £5 wholesale)? Do you accept that you are a net beneficiary of £5? Of course not.
Lets assume you do actually want a pink fluffy elephant. But….you don’t have one already, which means you didn’t like it enough to buy it at £15. It’s actual value to you is….numerically indeterminate, but definitely less than £15. The concept of “net” is simply meaningless in this context.
Projects can be funded by either national government spending or EU spending. *By definition*, EU-funded projects are the ones that governments would *quite* like to do, but *haven’t* done as their top priority because there are other things even more valuable to do with the same money.
Every single EU project is *specially selected* as transferring resources from services that the local population need, to ones that they don’t need but would like. They have a lower value than their nominal cost, but nobody can say by how much.
TLDR; If a country contributes 15bn, and “gets back” 10bn, the one thing we can say with certainty is that the Net Contribution is more than 5bn, but less than 15bn. Please stop with the “Net” BS.
The "pork barrel" approach we used to have here worked VERY well.
Sadly, it's gone, and has been for quite a long time. What replaced it is total dysfunction.
(Pork barrel politics, for those not familiar, is the concept that a legislator from one area agrees to vote for spending on a project in another legislator's district, in exchange for a vote for a project in the first legislator's district. What ends up happening is a very functional system that actually gets necessary infrastructure built. After enough idiots campaigned against it, it stopped happening. And now the bridges are falling down and the roads have potholes. And don't even think about getting a high speed rail line built.)
You're essentally arguing for horse-trading, which is how the EU budget (itself tiny in comparison with national ones) works.
But what you ended up with are bridges to nowhere, and airports without planes. Pork barrel politics made lobbying even easier by establishing the principle of completely unrelated earmarks in spending bills. Then there's the democratic imbalance of Congress (Wyoming and Rhode Island have the same number of senators as New York and California), and the two-party system favoured by first past the post voting and you get the rest.
In the long-term, we *will* spend the resources previously committed to EU R&D on other things. Might be U.K. R&D, or might be e.g. NHS hospitals to start to repair some of the damage from the pandemic.
In the Short Term, we still have outgoings to the EU under the Divorce bill to cover our pre-agreed program commitments, so the money isn’t available yet. Which, Brexiteer as I am, I’m comfortable with.
How much we should actually be spending on university research is a separate topic, one I don’t think people have thought through at all. The percentage of students going to university has expanded over time from 10% to 50%, which *automatically* means 5x professors, hence 5x research grants. Nobody *chose* that, it just happened as a byproduct. Sure, basic research does have a value, but what’s the optimum amount, how much should society be paying for? Just picking a random amount that happens to fill the career aspirations of how many teaching professors we have is stupidly bad resource allocation. It’s not arbitrary, because you’re taking the social provisions of the elderly, lower working classes and disabled to subsidise the career goals of upper middle class professors, and it’s not OK. Not Ok at all.
Where is the rest of the brexit dividend?The rest of the brexit dividend is in Unicorn Fart Fantasy Empire Land.
I have a nasty feeling that the only this way will be resolved is when the bigots, old racists and others that pushed and supported brexit and continue to support and give their blessings to criminal, corrupt and incompetent politicians will be dead in 20 years. Unfortunately their selfish legacy of self-harm will continue much longer than this period.
So what? You would expect the larger, richer economies to contribute more.
There's this thing called "society" you see, where the better off help the worse off. I think it was often called "Christianity" in the old days, although most religions encourage such behaviour.
We were a Net Contributor only in terms of explicit financial payments. But that's like saying if I pay you for a service (and it's a really good service, and I am paying below market rate for it) then I am a 'net contributor' to you.
That would be nonsense if the service presented very good value for money. And clearly, I think our membership of the EU was very good value for money. Collaboration in science is just a tiny part of what we used to get out of it.
And "The UK will become a Science Superpower" has always been an empty statement. It makes no sense, you can't become a science superpower if you burn your bridges with the rest of the scientific community..
Anyway, we all know you are a russian troll, VOT.
Even as a Brexiteer, I agree with your basic position in principle. Just not your conclusion. I think talking about “net contribution” misses the point.
If we pay 15bn into common programs, and get 25bn of *economic value* out of them, that would be a net positive. This is not a zero sum game. I wouldn’t even care if the EU program didn’t spend a single penny for “UK jobs”. It wouldn’t be “fair”, but so what, life isn’t.
Instead, we had the opposite. We put 15bn into the common pot, and sure 8pm came back out again in “jobs in the UK”. But these were jobs that were *useless*. We might as well have got plastic unicorn sculptures for all the benefit we got.
Repeat after me. Spending is not Economic Value. It is *always* an economic negative, which may or may not be compensated by positive Outcomes. Broken Window Fallacy.
The EU is just an engine for breaking peoples windows across the continent, replacing them “for free”, and looking for grateful votes from the glaziers it employs. It never asks the people whose windows it smashed.
It never asked the elderly waiting for a COVID vaccine, if they’d like help saving *2 euros per person* with a common procurement policy. They just swooped in and “helped”. The people who suffered the negative consequences of waiting an extra five months to be vaccinated? They’re *dead*. They don’t get a vote.
It is also a fact the UK got a disproportionate amount of EU R&D funding. It was still a net contributor, like Germany or France, to be sure, but oddly enough the Treasury hasn’t replaced the former EU contributions with domestic R&D funding, just as the NHS is being funded by the NI hike (i.e. new taxes, not reassigned contributions).
Then again it is a national sport for politicians in EU members to blame the EU for their own failings, it’s just the UK press (owned largely by a US citizen, Rupert Murdoch) and political class showed an unusual level of mendacity, like one Boris Johnson making things up out of thin air.
What you get from a collaborative research programme is much more than money. You get collaboration. As was pointed out repeatedly before the referendum and during the May regime and again during the Johnson regime, losing Europe-wide collaborative research would be disastrous.
Guess what, they didn't listen, and it's a disaster. It's not just about the money.
What you get from a collaborative research programme is much *less* than money.
You get huge administrative overhead, but much more importantly you get massive distortion of research goals. Research programs that have no real goal other than to fit into the buzzword bingo of the Project Coordinators, who in turn have no option than to use the buzzword bingo of the non-scientifically educated Political Officers.
You get, for example, the billion-euro Human Brain Project. A project so bad, that hundreds of neuroscientists *wrote letters of protest to national newspapers to get it cancelled, even those who were getting the grant money*.
You get Big Science. 10,000 individual 100k projects, with 10,000 individual successes (and many failures) get replaced by a single billion euro project. Even if it succeeds, it has only ten or twenty major experimental results. For a billion euros. And many of them do fail, utterly.
It’s very difficult to campaign against the Large Hadron Collider. How could anyone not want to advance fundamental understanding of the equations that underpin the universe. But at what scientific opportunity cost? How many *tens of thousands* of experiments in condensed matter physics aren’t happening. How many tests of microscopic gravity. How much fundamental organic chemistry isn’t happening (with a hundred times the societal impact), all because LHC is sexy?
You get research goals that attempt to *prove a politically convenient thesis*. Look how bad X is, we will need to subsidise EU funding to combat it. Doing an experiment to prove what you think to be true is the absolute opposite to science. Science does an experiment when it doesn’t know what the answer is, and a real scientist is most excited when the experimental result shows opposite to what they thought it would be. An EU Cross-disciplinary research is considered a failure when the result is opposite to the grant request.
I’ve personally worked on many Horizon2020 projects. They. Are. Horrendous. It’s a perversion of science. Cargo cult science - it looks like people are doing science, and many of them think they are, but they aren’t. It’s the opposite of the Enlightenment.
Having worked on scientific research projects myself I completely agree, particularly the part about politically convenient theses.
Sadly the majority of reasonably "well educated" people in Britain have no real understanding of how science actually works and will castigate you as ignorant, stupid and a science denier in hot self-righteous anger for daring to question any aspect of it.
Ten of the richest EU countries were net contributors to the EU budget.
Should I now assume you feel the EU should have payed you for the great honour of having you as a member.
It might surprise you but most countries tend to help porer parts of the county to catch up by taking money from the ritcher parts of the country.
But that of course is not British at all as Ritchy has pointed out.
@Lars.
Help the poorer parts? You mean, like the "help" the E.U. dished out to Greece?
So they "helped" Greece by lending around 270 billion.(IIRC)? How was that supposed to help a country that cannot pay back what it already owed?
Oh and please remind me of the conditions attached to the loan? And whilst I am asking, remind me of which countries banks were happy to lend them the original loans.
And as for not being British, you are right.
The British way is to give (mainly English) taxpayers money to the other countries in the uk.Not Loans. Maybe the British could teach the E.U. something do you think?
And just for the hell of it, it is paid not payed. Naturally, I won't notice errors in my post until after editing time is past. It was ever thus.
"Oh and please remind me of the conditions attached to the loan?"
The conditions came later, in the form of enforced austerity. This was necessary because a default would have devalued the Euro so badly that it would have doomed the entire Eurozone. Even the spectre of a default sent the value plummeting and it took years to recover. Basically, Greece failed to spread the pain to the point that the Troika had to step in and make it happen all at once.
"And whilst I am asking, remind me of which countries banks were happy to lend them the original loans"
Germany returned the direct profits from the interest payments on those loans to Greece. They did make (and keep) a few billion but this wasn't direct profits, rather it was by wisely investing the repayments.
This was necessary because a default would have devalued the Euro so badly that it would have doomed the entire Eurozone.
I don't think that was really ever true. The Greek economy is tiny and was already a basket case and should never have been allowed to join the single currrency. The bailout and the accompanying financial repression, which effectively gave money to states, was more about confidence that Italy wouldn't default. If we're lucky we'll get another go at this after the forthcoming Italian election. Oh joy!
Yes, while the Eurozone still suffers from the coupling between bank and state financing, a Greek default could have been absorbed. IIRC the Greek economy is something like the size of the state of Berlin, another basket case that needs to be propped up by transfers from the other German states but hardly endangering financial stability. If Greece had defaulted, its debt would have been restructured, the government forced to reduce spending and the cost spread across the Eurozone. This is pretty much what happened without the political risk of Greece becoming a "failed state" and raising the prospect of an Italian default.
Compare this with over a decade of zero, and even negative, interest rates and how much money has been transferred from savers to governments (and capital investors); multiples of 10^12 Euros for Italy alone, kept largely out of the news.
The idea was that governments would use the time and the largesse to reform practices… Lots of tumbleweed and nothing much happening. Then, of course, people started thinking that near-zero rates would be "the new normal" and that governments should start borrowing to invest in the infrastructure they'd been neglecting for years…
I'm not against public spending and I think we can see evidence of the problems of lack of investment throughout the EU, but we still haven't got anywhere working out how to finance it over the long term.
Sorry, I didn't mean the default itself but, rather the panic that a default would inspire. I believe it would have been a far worse devaluation than what was seen. Thank you though for taking the time to lay out why the specifics of the default itself would be of limited impact.
-> Ten of the richest EU countries were net contributors to the EU budget.
So we agreed that the UK was a net contributor.
-> It might surprise you but most countries tend to help porer parts of the county to catch up by taking money from the ritcher parts of the country.
This is about countries, not counties. As others have pointed out we saw how Germany "helped" Greece. We saw EU solidarity when it came to swiping covid vaccines. What short memories some people have.
I can report from first hand experience living in an EU country during the pandemic, we did get vaccine supplies from other EU countries and helped others in our turn. We also had other countries take our ICU patients when we ran out of places.
So, of course the EU isn't perfect and there are often squabbles but there are also often demonstrations of unity.
> we did get vaccine supplies from other EU countries
Not only from other EU countries. The EU (of which I am also a citizen and resident) hoarded the lot leaving poorer countries elsewhere with their knickers around their ankles. That, and the idiotic and unnecessary politisation of the whole thing, was disgusting, counterproductive, and very sad.
But you have to admit they were a pretty important few months considering the circumstances.
Paying a bit over the odds to get life saving treatment does not sound particularly wasteful - unlike our disgraceful PPE contracts, T&T that did neither well and many other pork for 'friends of the Tories' projects.
But you have to admit they were a pretty important few months considering the circumstances.
Not really, if you look at outcomes. IIRC it was at most six weeks and UK mortality did decline faster in early 2021 but from a higher level. It was lower than many EU countries for about six months but has been consistently higher since summer 2021.
Since then, of course, we've seen the limits of the efficacy of the vaccines, especially in the older population, which is why most countries are reverting to established endemic procedures.
It wasn’t six weeks, it was five months delay. By the time EU population reached even 50% complete of the over 65s, first dose. In UK over 50s had second dose almost completely apart from deniers, and first dose to over 40s was mostly done.
You’re now coming up with post hoc rationalisation as to why it’s not important to vaccinate older people (which I don’t agree with, there’s no clinical evidence for what you say). But the cold facts are that the EU vaccine delay cost about 250,000 lives.
I know you don’t want to hear this, but by January 1st 2021, Germany only had 34000 dead. By May 1st it was 85000. The vast majority of those 50000 dead were the elderly victims of the EU vaccine delay.
UK had its own separate problems - mainly a very, very bad decision in hindsight to shift people from hospitals to care homes, causing probably 50-100k extra deaths in the care homes. And also comparatively low adherence to restrictions. That’s what made UK deaths bad, but it doesn’t excuse EU decisions.
Also worth remembering that UK care home decision made sense at the time, due to the fog of war. Estimate at the time was that if we didn’t, the NHS would collapse entirely, and we would have lost 500k lives in UK alone not just Covid deaths but all those with cancer etc would likely not have survived.
Germany has 2x doctors per head of population, hence could afford to risk a much higher load on their hospitals before saturation.
@Oglethorpe
"The honourable thing would have been to share the pain with our European friends."
How? We ordered supplies they didnt. We organised distribution they didnt. They acted like children throwing blame at anyone and everyone while threatening our supplies. Where was the honour?
People shouldn't suffer and die just because another country has a better contract or organisation. The Commission had to get agreement from EU members, the UK government was able to act unilaterally. They were at a disadvantage and it was shameful that we exploited it.
@Oglethorpe
"People shouldn't suffer and die just because another country has a better contract or organisation."
And yet they do all the time. The poor countries suffering this considerably. Also while the EU screwed up the UK was vaccinating its foreign territories too.
Another knife in your argument is the Dublin minister mentioning the idea of crossing the border to NI to get vaccine and bringing it back to ROI only for the EU to clearly say no. Aka EU inflicting harm on the people.
"The Commission had to get agreement from EU members, the UK government was able to act unilaterally"
Yup. The benefits of brexit which EU president Ursula spelled out to the EU, the UK is a speedboat and the EU a supertanker.
"They were at a disadvantage and it was shameful that we exploited it."
Sod off. The US managed to do it. The UK managed to get stuff ordered as did Israel and the EU buggered the job hard. The French limited how much vaccine the EU could order based on how much they bought from the French producer (that failed to make it work) and the EU made international issues for their stupidity. We didnt exploit them, they screwed up massively then alienated those it needed help from.
The UK changed its national medical regulations to allow vaccines to be used before they were fully licensed. Even if we had tried to hand them out to EU nations, they would not have been allowed to accept them because thy were not licensed! Basically, the UK moved ahead based on the data but the EU waited for the finished report.
Also, let's face it the UK was never going to get a s good a deal as the EU due to size of market - not quite the Brexit bonus it is touted to be although Brexit did allow us to act independently
(Note, France and Germany were also trying to act independently because the EU negotiations were seen as taking too long)
@genghis_uk
No that is not true. Britain followed EU rules and did something any other EU country could have done, I think, was it, Hungary who did it too.
The 27 understood it would be madness for every country to compete individually for the same vaccine and cooperated for a joint big order.
This has all been cleared up long ago in Britain too.
What you Brits should start to understand is that the "fantastic rollout" is just a smoke screen to hide the fact that Boris blew it badly.
You did worse than France and Germany and many other EU countries too. The numbers tell it all.
You still find on YouTube, Boris showing with his hands how the Covid epidemic would just past through, taken on the chin.
He might have gotten that idea from the Swedes who made such a decision.
They did understand later it was a mistake but they were never able to mend the error. The numbers shows it very clearly today.
In the USA, also with not so stellar numbers, we have Trump who claimed he invented two or was it three vaccines, and some Americans no doubt believe it still.
And I suppose many Brits will keep on falling for the rollout smoke screen for years to come.
I believe the reference was to the EU demanding the UK hand over supplies of Vaccine because the EU had forgotten to confirm their order so their order was further down the list, well behind the UK's order.
There was quite a mess early on with supply/demand of medical equipment and vaccines: It settled down but for a few months there was a lot of bad behaviour from within the EU. That's not to say the UK would have been any different save we were at the end of the chain so there was no one else to steal from.
Oh, and as for the 'great price': AZ was supplying the vaccine AT COST. Zero profit. So no, the EU couldn't get a 'better' deal than the UK. As for Pfizer: They were making quite the profit either way.
I believe the reference was to the EU demanding the UK hand over supplies of Vaccine because the EU had forgotten to confirm their order so their order was further down the list, well behind the UK's order.
No, this was due to AZ factories in EU countries not delivering to EU countries in violation of their contract.
On the other hand the UK said it would donate to other countries, but only after the entire adult population was fully vaccinated first. So it wasn't going to supply other countries.
And all of this was moot anyway because results showed the AZ vaccine blood clot cases in younger age groups. The EMA detected it first and moved on to other vaccines but the UK had bet everything on the AZ horse and had nowhere to go. The vaccination rate in the UK slowed down in younger age groups partly due to this as the UK searched for other vaccines.
Well “AZ factories in EU countries not delivering….” Is a flat out lie for one very simple and verifiable reason.
AstraZeneca don’t *have* any factories located in EU countries. So the EU *insisted contractually* that AZ work with a *Belgian* factory, selected by the Commission, who had no vaccines expertise at all. AZ’s job was to act as contract prime, show them how to set up the kit, and train the staff. But factory wasn’t an AZ factory, and they weren’t AZ employees. It was a tech transfer.
AZ proposal was just to scale up the UK plant by exactly duplicating the existing infrastructure in place, which would have been much more efficient. But the Commission refused that, and the arguing on that point is mostly what delayed the contract signature.
So, please stop lying.
“results showed the AZ vaccine blood clot cases in younger age groups”.
Those blood clot cases did occur, but as you know very well there is still a large net benefit, even for the younger age groups. However, the politically motivated FUD was amplified by Macron, which fed into French vaccine denialism. At a 4 per million rate, a full rollout of AZ would have cost 400 lives in France. Instead, the preference to take nothing rather than AZ led to about 80,000 deaths in those few months. That was Macron, nobody else.
I’ve no idea why you think the UK was dogmatic and had nowhere else to go, once it became apparent that both vaccines were effective but one had a lower risk profile. I’ve had two AZ and two Pfizer shots in total by now, as has everyone else I know. So that’s a bunch of lies that’s only in your head alone.
@justthespin
"AstraZeneca has its corporate headquarters in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and its main research and development (R&D) centres are in Cambridge (UK), Gaithersburg (Maryland, US), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Warsaw (Poland)."
"However, the contract that AstraZeneca reached with the UK was very similar to that it reached with the EU, and it also contained the phrase "best reasonable efforts"; the UK contract was signed on 28 August 2020, a day after the contract with the EU.[146] The key difference seems to be that AstraZeneca entered into a preliminary agreement with the U.K. back in May 2020 which arranged for "the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K."[147] The failure to produce the vaccine in the anticipated quantities contributed to the low vaccination rates of vulnerable populations of the European Union at the beginning of the outbreak of more virulent variants of SARS-CoV-2 in early 2021."
"Lawsuits
In April 2021, the European Commission announced that it would sue Astra Zeneca for delaying the timely delivery of Vaxzevria at a time when "every vaccine counts, because every vaccine can save lives".[107][108] In September 2021, the lawsuit was finally settled with AstraZeneca agreeing to deliver 60 million doses of vaccines to EU member states by October, 75 million by the end of the year, and 65 million more by April 2022."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AstraZeneca
I think Pfizer become the number one vaccine in the EU.
As for the annoying facts.
Deaths:
Britain 187.000 highest in Europe
France 1500.00
Germany 146.000
Deaths per 100K
Britain 281 almost as bad as Italy at 289
France 230
Germany 176
Why does it surprise you that Boris is going on only about that one small advantage that eventually came to nothing.
And Britain, an island had all the possibilities to perform extremely well.
Take Ireland for instance, death per 100K at 158 to 281 in Britain.
For this question, it is irrelevant where AZ has corporate HQ. The question is where the vaccine was physically *produced* and shipped from. AZ has no *vaccine factories* in the EU. Unless you think Gothenburg accountants are going to roll up their sleeves, they aren’t much help.
The lawsuit: I don’t know what you think you are saying? In fact, the Commission definitively *lost* that court case.The outcome was: the court agreed AZ had been trying, in good faith, to maximise the production out of the Belgium subcontractor, which had been delayed by technical issues and the inexperience of new staff ramping up. The court simply put in writing the plan to manage the slip, with its schedule, which had been put in place months before by AZ, and both parties signed the new delivery plan. No penalties were imposed. If you think this was the Commission somehow forcing something new out of AZ….what was there to give? AZ weren’t in control of the production. All AZ could do was leverage their experience and provide the best technical advice and management plan they could to the Belgian company. Which they did.
Death rate: yes, U.K. did pretty badly. We know some reasons: decisions to send Covid patients from hospitals to care homes; poorer than EU average adherence of population to restrictions; ethnic mix in our large population centres (South Asian ethnicities seem to have a 1.5x risk factor); historic overbooking of NHS capacity so we were closer to saturation before it started; bad procurement of PPE. There may well be others.
So what? That doesn’t absolve EU Commission of its failings, which caused massive deaths. This was a single-point decision, to optimise contract negotiation for bulk buying cost and location of the factory to provide EU jobs, rather than speed and delivery volume. It didn’t have to be.
Nobody anywhere in the EU voted to spend 5 extra months unvaccinated to save a few euros per person. It was insane. No national government figure would have done so because the government would have fallen within days and voted out. Can you imagine Macron saying that? Merkel? Standing up on TV and saying “well, sorry, we could have bought you lifesaving vaccine for 20 euros, and released you from a year of lockdown, but nah it was more expensive than a pizza delivery so I personally took a stand. No Deal”.
That’s why it wasn’t just a random *poor decision* on the part of the Commission. It was intrinsic to being a non-elected leader decision.
@Justthefacts
Why you don't do any duedilligence is much beyond me but anyway.
From AZ own information:
"To help meet global demand for COVID-19 vaccine, AstraZeneca rapidly conducted due diligence with more than 60 potential partners to ultimately build a global supply network of more than 25 proven manufacturing organisations in 15 countries with the capability and capacity to supply the vaccine. With each partner, the technology transfer process began immediately to ensure that not a minute was wasted in our quest to rapidly establish commercial manufacturing ahead of regulatory approval/authorisation. During this process, our technical experts worked around the clock with our supply partners to transfer our validated protocols and standard methods for vaccine production. As our teams were unable to travel due to the pandemic, we used virtual technology to provide real-time technical support and coaching to production teams on each site."
From the Wikipedia:
"As of March 2021 the vaccine active substance (ChAdOx1-SARS-COV-2) is being produced at several sites worldwide,[82] with AstraZeneca claiming to have established 25 sites in 15 countries.[83] The UK sites are Oxford and Keele with bottling and finishing in Wrexham.[82] Other sites include the Serum Institute of India at Pune.[82] The Halix site at Leiden was approved by the EMA on 26 March 2021, joining three other sites approved by the EU.".
Apart from Halix there is also Novasep and in addition for filling and finish IDT Biologica Catalent and Insud Pharma in Spain and Italy.
How can that surprise you.
What? The text you quoted exactly proves my point:
“The Halix site at Leiden”. Yes. Halix is a subcontractor for AZ. AZ do not *own* any site at Leiden. AZ did a tech transfer to Leiden, they have never owned it and do not control it. It certainly doesn’t “surprise” me that companies use subcontractors or tech transfers - I even used the phrase tech transfer in what I wrote.
It *is* more than slightly eccentric that AZ original proposal (in mid 2020) to manufacture at their prime production site in U.K., by expanding its production capability specifically for the EU, was rejected by Commission. Who decided to contractually specify a subcontractor chosen by the Commission. Then later to attempt to hold the prime responsible for the poor performance of the subcontractor they themselves had insisted on. Despite documented evidence that the prime had itself over-delivered on its commitments, other than what it had no control of within its sub.
And the court agreed with me, rubber-stamping the management plan that AZ was already implementing, and imposing no penalties at all.
Have you ever managed anything in your life? How does a prime *control* the production of its sub? It doesn’t manage the staff or tasks day to day. It can’t make underperforming individuals or processes perform.
It can *advise* the sub. It can *threaten* the sub with penalties, or even contract termination. But what it can’t do is actually make the sub perform when the sub is trying its best but not up to the job in the timeframe specified. Nobody can do that. In fact, it can’t even force the sub to follow “good practice”. A sub usually will have its own standard practices and procedures; the prime may well think they aren’t optimum but it can’t *make* them.
A prime’s *responsibility* is to select a sub that is capable, and monitor it. But if the sub has been chosen for it, against its documented advice, what do you suggest they do? Storm the place? Interview and hire extra staff, then lock the Halix staff out of their own plant? Go in at the dead of night and tinker with the machine settings to improve throughput?
Worth remembering here: you seem to be very focused on which company’s *management* takes the blame.
Back in the real world, you have production engineers working night and day, 7 days a week, to the best of their abilities, to stand up a production line from scratch. Most of whom were working well outside their comfort zones.
You have factory staff, most unskilled, and none of them with set of skills actually needed on this job. But they took long hours, low paid jobs, probably because they thought it be worthwhile to save the lives of millions of people.
And all you can think of to thank those people, *Belgians* I might add, is to abuse and rubbish their efforts because you hate the English, and you think it’s a stick to beat them with.
These people in that factory were trying their best, and under the circumstances did a not-terrible job from a standing start. Four months was very aggressive to stand up a unique production line from nothing, without domain experience. Nine months is Ok, given technical hitches.
Nobody at *any* company was responsible for the debacle. That was solely the Commission, for *requiring* the work to be done in this way.
And working in pharma @AZ: about that UK solidarity. You mean that nice deal UK gov did to make sure that the "supply channels" were directed in one, and not another way?
Sure...
FFS...
In the end specimens of the human species are not what it says on the tin. In general. No exception. And yes, thus self centered. Me good. My tribe good. You bad, and the product of your loins too.
Can we please stop trying to convince each other, conclude with One Foot in the Grave that it is all rubbish, that "passionate discussions" here are not going to change the world, just order another pint (or whatever metric holds your preference), and make our preparations for the year of the Linux Desktop?
The 'Net contributor' point is an economically illiterate one. EU membership is not some money carrousel, that wouldn't even make sense, it's about return on investment. You can see that in action in the official government figures about cost per capita. The cost of EU membership was £137 per capita per year, the cost of non-membership is £4200 per capita per year. Why do you think HMG is suddenly so short of cash? We suddenly had to create over 30 agencies and bodies to do the work that we previously outsourced to a communal level with 27 other countries with all the benefits of economies of scale. If EU membership was a money carrousel then it wouldn't have worked that way.
Let's bring it down to the micro level. I was a net contributor to my university. I have paid them far more than they have ever paid me. Yet, the return on investment has been amazing and I am glad that I spent the money years ago, despite them never paying me.
Debate whatever you want but I recommend staying away from the 'Net contributor' point because you will be schooled by anyone who understands this matter.
I agree. Net only makes sense for zero-sum, which this isn’t. But….
Your numbers are utterly wrong. Since you don’t believe in “net”, you can’t quote the government figure per capita, which is given from net. The gross cost was £17bn, which is £258 per capita. If you got one figure wrong by nearly double, why should we take your guess of the value benefit seriously?
While there are benefits, there are also business disadvantages, even at the “if this were free” level. It’s very difficult to estimate, but I’ve seen varying from £1500 per capita benefit to £2300 per capita *disadvantage* from respected economists. We can both quote endless papers with our own confirmation bias, but it’s pointless. The only real thing we can be certain of, is that the margin of *un*certainty is at least ten times the claimed size of the effect. Spending £258 for zero return value isn’t exactly selling it to me how wonderful your product is.
I think it was Nouriel Roubini came out with a paper analysing the EU macroeconomics, concluding roughly “you can’t assign any numerical value to EU membership cost/benefit. Demography is destiny. EU will depopulate either by literal starvation or migration within a lifetime, per capita is meaningless with a zero in the denominator”. So. There’s that.
> EU funding: we were a net contributor to the EU
I do not specifically recall if that was true, as in more money going out than coming in, but please note that even if that was the case (which would make sense), it's only part of the equation.
You also need the cooperation agreements, joint research and exchanges with all the other countries at the leading edge of different scientific or technological advances.
For instance, the UK might have been getting access to the latest biotech advances through cooperation with Swiss partners, or defence / space tech via France, etc. Now however, UK researchers are quite literally isolated.
More research happens in the continent as a whole than in the UK so it makes sense for the UK to have been a net contributor, in exchange for access to the fruits of that research.
“All those new markets” :)
As a UK company, EU is a very small market. Asia Pacific is a big market. Americas also. EU? Tiny market.
What you don’t understand: a) Most customers come from growth. In the EU there are few customers because growth is zero, and existing population is happy with what they’re already buying b) Most barriers are cultural.
You won’t sell anything to France. Ever. They make the best wine, their cars are the best in the world, and the best tech comes out of a French National Innovation Study. Just the way it is.
Germany do buy plenty of external goods. But, and this is important for people to understand, everything other than B2B tech they buy on price alone. The most cost-effective furniture (millionaires buy from IKEA), the cheapest jacket. It’s fine….but if you sell to Germany you’re always in a margin game. Volume but no profit. Been there, got the T-shirt.
Broadly speaking, the rest of the EU is lots of people with no money. So they don’t matter exportwise. And a few small countries with money but no people.
How much money do you think I can actually make selling to Sweden, population 10 million? I live in a country of 60 million. I can stick my head out the window in London and shout to more people as the whole of the Swedish market.
TLDR; “exporting to the EU” is an illusion caused by merging the phrases “400 million population” with “Germany” and “France”. But it doesn’t hold up when you actually want to do it as a business.
I sell more to South America than the EU, and that was true before Brexit too.
New Trade Figures Expose This Brexit Catastrophe
If you seriously think you can define Brexit as successful or failed (never mind as a catastrophe) when it's less than 2 years since it happened, I can only presume that you have no clue about basic world politics and economics.
Look at history. Any country that left a political union after decades as a member has usually taken at least a decade to re-establish itself. It's inevitable that it takes time to establish new external relationships after independence, that is always the case. The fact that the UK has not plunged into the deep crisis that remaimers gloatingly predicted is significant, and shows that even the inevitable initial difficulties of Brexit are being handled.
I know that short-termism is popular, and maybe you're one of the younger generation that wants everything RIGHT NOW, but to really see the actual effects of Brexit you'll have to wait until 2030 at least. In the meantime is it too much to suggest that you accept what has happened and work constructively, or would that spoil your sense of entitlement?
The fact you think the ONS figure support your case that Brexit was bad, even looking narrowly at economics only, tells volumes about your assumptions. They really don’t.
Just for starters, back in the *1970s*, there used to be endless hysterical pieces in the less educated newspapers that UKs balance of trade was negative and that was intrinsically bad? We grew out of it. This is the version of economics you in the EU believe in? Oh. My. God. Do you even understand what Balance of Trade represents?
Wait until you find out that Balance of Trade is fundamentally similar to the Target2 mechanism within the EU. And that Italys balance *just to other countries within the EU* is well over 620bn, and grew by 110bn last year. Not 60bn like the U.K. . Plus Italy has similar negative balance outside the EU too! Wow, your brain is just going to *explode*.
https://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/reports.do?node=1000004859
And the European Central Bank *itself* has run up a total Trading Balance Deficit of 340bn in just 8 years. And the ECB is just a financial balance sheet with no means of generating any products of profits to ever recover that.
“Balance of Payments” is a very naive measure. People assume that it reflects “country produces and exports more than we consume from abroad, so we are accumulating wealth”. It’s called the “Householder Fallacy”. That’s sometimes true, but often it can also reflect many other fundamentals.
Example 1: importing goods exactly equals exporting currency. That’s the way a money transaction works. And that’s exactly what USA does. It runs a huge “trade deficit” largely because the world has an almost inexhaustible demand for dollars, which is the worlds reserve currency. The USA has no problems at all with its huge “trade deficit”, because it can and does just print dollars, has done it for a century, will continue. The *necessary definition* of a sovereign nation includes printing its own
Example 2: in a financialised country like U.K., we list a lot of (most of) global companies on our stock market. Their share price is denominated in sterling. So when the share price rises, where do you think the money comes from? The “total quantity of money” is *not fixed*. It is leveraged on the value of underlying assets. So, when the value of an *Australian* mining company quoted on the FTSE goes up, more sterling magically appears in the U.K. The owner can of course sell the shares, but then still in sterling to someone else in the U.K. The net effect of that is zero in terms of Trade Balance. Therefore, *global* stock market rises produce a positive offset to our negative trade balance. In fact, U.K. trade balance *must* be negative in the equation to counterbalance global nominal stock market gains
And here’s where it gets both weird and current: global inflation means that *all* assets cost more, in units of currency. Stock markets rise in nominal terms even when they are falling sharply in real terms. At those times, by mathematical balance, any country economy that holds large amounts of global assets on its books in its stock market, *must* have a large negative Trade Balance. Hence….now. And for exactly the same reason, the 1970s.
For the U.K., Trade Balance tells you almost nothing about real trade balance of goods, or even services, but everything about the global stock market and global inflation.
Example 3: The canonical example given in economics textbooks. Imperial Rome in its glory years. The City of Rome imported and consumed the wealth of the entire known world. It produced and exported nothing. Not even soldiers: most Roman soldiers were not born in Rome. It’s Trade Balance was perhaps the most negative in history, relative to world GDP. Yet it dominated the world for five centuries, economically as well as militarily.
The issue about Horizon is about access to research programs and sharing results and benefits of research. Sure we can pay to do our own research, meanwhile 27 other countries will be forging ahead much quicker. This kind of thing is frustrating to scientists so many of the best will leave the UK, hampering our efforts even more.
Well, them politicians enjoy their money - regardless whether they have any success in turning the UK into the dream country they were promising.
The scientists, especially the younger scientists who are our hope for the future, I met lots of bright lads and lasses in my time, are out of funds, out of jobs (and will thus quit science). This hits all the wrong people, even if I think that the whole Brexit thing was a stupid idea (and that the UK are doing their best not to maintain the peace in NI, and that they are in fact in breach of contract - but let's not argue about that).
Probably the younger now ex-scientists will find good jobs in investment banking, insureances or whatever (the bright ones quite often do), what a loss for the scientific community (and the UK).
> Or the country.
It's not that easy anymore. I see it in my line of work, where people with (just) UK citizenship get sidelined every day because of uncertainty over possible immigration / tax issues.
Ironically, a client of ours is taking Chileans and Brazilians over Brits as they find it subjectively easier to sort out their EU paperwork (objectively it's exactly the same, but hey).
My recommendation: if you have any Irish, German, Italian, Croatian, whatever ancestry, see about swallowing your patriotism and getting yourself kitted with an extra passport. It doesn't solve the macro side of things but it helps on an individual level, and also builds bridges for the future.
Even if the UK does manage to get back into horizon and similar programmes (which are not only EU—a bunch of other countries also participate, including Switzerland and Canada) there will be, at least for a time, the lingering problem of people not wanting to deal with uncertainty unless they really have to.
Already before Brexit, in the couple of funding programmes that my company currently gets money from, the respective consortia deliberately left out the UK companies we had partnered with in the past, because uncertainty. :(
What would help now is an end to the vexatious shouting war with the EU by the Conservative party and a new, proper free trade agreement with the European Union that would significantly reduce tariffs, duties and bureaucracy that would then effectively make the Northern Ireland Protocol irrelevant.
It would also generate goodwill and would pretty much guarantee UK membership of all these cooperative scientific and technical schemes. That would be a win-win for everyone.
It doesn't even need a new free trade agreement. The EU has proposed several ways of speeding up the protocol but the UK just dismisses them.
The package of improvements which the EU came up with on a fact finding mission in 2021 with NI business organisations was praised by those same organisations afterwards, but the UK has now moved the goalposts on to something else.
The UK's concerns (CJEU oversight over the SM and CU) are shared by literally nobody inside NI and their argument is legal nonsense however they know it's a red line the EU won't cross so it can be used as continual source of confrontation as part of their "red meat" strategy. Congratulations on being an unthinking pawn in their game.
"UK can join the EFTA whenever it likes....".
No those days are long gone, very long gone.
You could apply but you won't, nor am I convinced you would be accepted, run by your government of today, or any.
"The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is a regional trade organization and free trade area consisting of four European states: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.[4] The organization operates in parallel with the European Union (EU), and all four member states participate in the European Single Market and are part of the Schengen Area.[5] They are not, however, party to the European Union Customs Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Free_Trade_Association
It won't happen because being part of the EFTA means you need to abide to EFTA "freedoms" - including the freedom of moving across boundaries.
The point is exactly that - if someone in UK still believes in a "free trade agreement" which means that goods and capitals can move freely as in happens in EFTA or EU, but people can't, it's still dreaming a lot after drinking too much Breixters' Kool-Aid. The rules for free trade with EU are there. Don't like them? No free trade, sorry.
And that also will impact any agreement on R&D - if UK wants to fully control who could do and get the benefits of that R&D.
"Norway, does not want a shark like the UK arriving in its waters. It would almost certainly veto any such request"
That is just not true. I know this because I can read Oslo's Aftenposten (The Evening Post) in the original Norwegian. Former prime minister Erna Solberg* was actually quite open to the idea and to starting discussions about the UK joining EFTA. It would have had the benefit of the UK joining EFTA's ready made trade deals with other countries.
*She is an example of an intelligent, competent, pragmatic and moderate conservative politician and the UK could do with many more elected representatives like her.
"... free trade agreement with the European Union that would significantly reduce tariffs, duties and bureaucracy ..."
As far as I'm aware there are currently no tariffs or duties between the UK and the EU. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Unfortunately there is now more bureaucracy, just like when trading with, say, the US or Canada (and then tariffs/duties may be relevant).
And tourists entering the EU from the UK, and vice-versa, now have to pay VAT when bringing back overseas shopping beyond their personal allowance (GBP 390 or EUR 430) - same as if they were bringing shopping back from New York. (That's really reduced the amount we spend in the UK.)
But that's simply what folk voted for.
And tourists entering the EU from the UK, and vice-versa, now have to pay VAT when bringing back overseas shopping beyond their personal allowance
Strictly speaking they should claim back the UK VAT they already paid, and then pay EU VAT in their country of arrival (or vice-versa when going in the opposite direction). There's no requirement that they pay twice.
The UK has scrapped VAT refunding for international tourists, so it's now possibly the only country in Europe not to offer this.
"Strictly speaking they should claim back the UK VAT they already paid, ..."
Nope. That was the VAT Retail Export Scheme - withdrawn as of 1-1-2021 (except for NI).
Sources:
https://www.executivetraveller.com/news/uk-to-axe-duty-free-sales-vat-refund (heading: Also for the chop: VAT refunds)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/duty-free-extended-to-the-eu-from-january-2021 (heading: VAT Retail Export Scheme)
"There's no requirement that they pay twice."
Unfortunately now there is - if you go shopping in the UK. The only way to avoid paying twice is if the UK-based supplier ships the item to the customer's address, then they only have to pay their national VAT. So that means more hassle, shipping costs and time, and discouraging customers from spending in UK shops. Not great for the tourist industry, methinks (https://www.fashionroundtable.co.uk/news/2020/11/24/the-vat-retail-export-scheme).
However, tourists resident outside the EU can still get EU VAT refunds when they return home. So for a Canadian tourist it's now much more attractive to buy that expensive handbag in Amsterdam than in London.
As far as I'm aware there are currently no tariffs or duties between the UK and the EU. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
This is true if the rules of origin are satisfied.
Those UK businesses which receive stuff from China, slap a label on it, then send on to an EU country will not satisfy the rules of origin.
The UK did agree to this though.
.... does the UK government not understand?
Way to later for buyer's remorse. Time to look forwards not to the past. The UK should create their own multilateral science funding programme.
Maybe with new trading partners. India would make a good lead partner.
75 years after partition and independence the UK can crawl back on bended knee and grovel for a trade and science funding deal.
What part of "Leave." ....
.... does the UK government not understand?
Oh, they understand it very well. They're just annoyed by the EU's apparent unwillingness to understand the term "agreement", as in "respect the terms of the leave agreement that UK and EU signed", which included scientific co-operation.
As we've seen all through the Brexit process, the EU is employing every possible approach (most of which use poor old NI as their football) to make it difficult for the UK, even when that also screws projects in EU countries. And Macron still can't understand why the French turned against him.
The UK has NOT reneged on fishing quotas, some French fishermen simply refuse to produce the proof that their government agreed to when it signed the withdrawal agreement. Most likely because, following the time-honoured principle of l'exception française they chose to ignore the requirement to keep such proof as not applying to them. Other countries have no problems, it's just a few irréductibles Gaulois...
-> the island nation
Which island would that be? The Isle of White or the Isle of Man?
-> foreign secretary Liz Truss
Not just a bottom drawer politician, she's not even in the cupboard. The idea of Liz Truss being able to negotiate anything is laughable. She is another of the PPE Oxford graduates who can't do anything. PPE or sometimes PPE+Law is a useless degree for useless people. Most of those with PPE degrees go into politics or the civil service - there is no use for them elsewhere. They are the revolving door people.
"-> the island nation
Which island would that be? The Isle of White or the Isle of Man?"
Adjectives are always singular. "island nation" - a nation made up of island(s).
a forest nation
a mountain nation
a canal city
a skyscraper city
some nine-YEAR-old children
some twenty-POUND potatoes
some ten-POLE tudors
Tend to be both extremely racist and extremely stupid. They are the ones who were hoodwinked by a lie on the side of a big red bus. A friend of mine told me that his mum said she voted brexit "to kick all those bloody pakis out"
The tory brexiters on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing: Removing any oversight and accountability so they could sell the country down the river for their own gain..
Although many of them are also xenophobic. Priti Patel would seem to be a very odd example. But then I think maybe she just hates everyone, actually.
"The idea of Liz Truss being able to negotiate anything is laughable."
WHile I agree with your assessment of her, unfortunately it's not laughable. She's one of two candidates to be the PM. The other is married to someone with a major interest in the Indian outsourcing IT industry. I don't consider either a good outlook.
Also known as Whataboutery, Bullshit, and the Dismal Science.
If we had some more politicians with degrees that have a foundation in reality or formal logic, such as the physical sciences, medicine, or mathematics, we might not be in such a mess.
But then you'd have to ask what sort of doctor goes into politics to earn less than they (deservedly) would as a GP or consultant, and you do kind of come to the conclusion that they might not be a very good doctor...
The same logic applies to other fields, such as law, Suella.
As a trade expert pointed out recently, the dispute resolution procedures are places you really don't want to go because their use implies the agreement has already fundamentally broken down. You might win or lose the specific point being argued but the likely result is that there is no longer any common shared interest in the agreement's continued operation.
If the UK really doesn't want to be party to the Withdrawal Agreement, there are provisions to terminate it. Up to now, the government has run from that prospect, whatever may be said in public. It's possible that the next PM might actually find it a useful temporary distraction from the growing financial chaos.
However, it's not going to get renegotiated - no EU leader is interested and the UK has no clout to force their hand.
No one is punishing the UK and that is a complete fiction. It was Boris Johnson who chose to take the confrontational route and to inflict a hard Brexit and trade barriers on British businesses.
What is now required is a more rational and pragmatic approach to the European Union just like the Swiss and Norwegian governments do.
> our deal with the EU on leaving provided us with the same.
That is not the case, as is explained in the article itself.
> The EU are backsliding to punish us for leaving.
Sadly, and I say this with EU hat on, there is an element of that on the part of the European Commission, which in terms of incompetence, narrow mindedness and xenophobia are on a par with the current (and last few previous) UK governments.
If we could only round them all up, along with the telephone handset cleaners, and ask Mr Musk if we can borrow his latest rocket for a quick test launch, I reckon we'd all be a lot better off.
We did leave the EU, of course - but in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement it was agreed that the UK would be (along with a dozen and a half other non-member states) a participant of the Horizon programme. Not being a member state doesn't have to prevent us remaining friends and collaborators.
Unfortunately, having decided that delaying ratification is a good bargaining chip against unrelated matters; the Commission are delaying ratification for political reasons. This is much to the chagrin of many EU academics and researchers - https://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/eu-must-immediately-accept-uk-into-horizon-europe-say-blocs-research-leaders/
The EU originally agreed to UK participation in Horizon but, now that the UK has broken the agreement on Northern Ireland, the Commission wisely chose a target that will be seriously harmed by interference, both in the EU and in the UK (increasing tensions so they can't fly under the radar). This will put pressure on the British government to surrender Northern Ireland because, otherwise, the Commission can point to the harm Britain has done to, for example, medical research or renewable energy. It's a very sensible way of causing pain without being too broad.
> Commission wisely
This is where you went wrong. Those two words just don't belong together.
Let's be clear (I'm in the EU), it takes two to tango and the Commission are no less pathetic or malicious than the idiots over in Westminster. Amongst other things, they put a French far right jingoist (and a bit of a Eurosceptic himself) as head negotiator to pretty much guarantee that no deal was going to come out of it. The excuse for many a disagreement was half a dozen fishermen in a village in Brittany, never mind the 500 million of us all.
Sadly I fear that this is the Zeitgeist. :(
@Old Tom,
What has (along with a dozen and a half other non-member states) to do with anything related to Britain and Brexit.
Could it be that you are looking for support from other non-member states who have no problems with their relation to the EU.
Will Truss now travel to Bosnia-Hertsegovina to ask for help.
@AC
"Lars, yours is starting to sound very much like Schadenfreude. It's not helpful."
Tell me first of all how I could help?.
As for schadenfreude (no capital letters) i would assume it produced a at least slightly smiling face but I am not smiling at all. Normal people don't smile looking at a car crash either.
Not being a member state doesn't have to prevent us remaining friends and collaborators.
No it doesn't, but the UK's constant confrontation over the NI protocol does prevent the UK and the EU remaining friends and collaborators. The EU acts in member states' interests so should we be surprised that they're not rolling out the red carpet if the UK is at the same time dismissing suggested improvements to the protocol from the EU and threatening to not implement the agreement that it negotiated?
>Not being a member state doesn't have to prevent us remaining friends and collaborators.
Indeed. Likely the only thing required would be for the UK government to act like either of those things. Maybe refrain from passing legislation which aims at unilaterally changing the terms of the withdrawal agreement already reached and just work quietly behind the scenes to achieve a mutually satisfactory compromise. Perhaps stop the continual stream of belligerent, anti-EU rhetoric from government ministers. Of course, they cannot halt the flood of rabid anti-EU bile which emanates from the UK's right-wing press, but they might, for example, refrain from feeding it.
Any of the above likely to transpire? Didn't think so. In the end, the UK will have the relationship with the EU which it chooses to build. On present evidence, it may not be an easy one.
No, we agreed to have an opinion poll on it that was explicitly non-binding, then the Tories changed the rules half way through, and some bloke said "we'll implement whatever is decided," and incidentally also said "I'll see this through to the end" and quit the day after the referendum when it didn't go the way he was expecting, due largely to his utter incompetence, which biased the campaigning heavily in the opposite direction.
The referendum was fundamentally flawed in several ways, and the only reason it wasn't struck down completely was because the elections watchdog couldn't do so exactly because it was non-binding and there was nothing to strike down.
It suited a whole bunch of very dodgy politicians to act like it was a mandate though, although it was very far from being so. Oddly enough, all the things they promised wouldn't happen have now happened or are now happening, such as all those promises that we'd definitely not leave the Common Market or Customs Union. Meanwhile, those who were worried that their ill-gotten gains in tax havens might be got at by incoming EU regulations are sunning themselves safely.
There's still some useful idiots round here who think that they won something with that referendum. Perhaps they did, but if that's the case then they're either one of those very rich oligarchs who are currently responsible for growing inflation, or being paid very well by one of them. It was a superb piece of divide-and-conquer by the ultra-rich hard right who are currently getting their wet dream of an unregulated low wage high inequality asset-stripper's paradise at everybody else's expense. "Taking back control" indeed, but for whom, and from whom?
Ah, so you voted to Leave then? You thought “this is non-binding, so I’ll vote against my opinion or not vote”? What is it about the word “Referendum” that gave you the impression it was an opinion poll?
And then, why did Remainers *oppose* a second clarifying Referendum, while pretending to demand one? We could have had one, and there was wide cross-party support for it. There would have been three, or even four options on the ballot: Remain, Hardest Brexit WTO only, Firm Brexit (what we have), Soft Brexit with Customs Union (yes, I’m aware that includes freedom of movement).
What stopped us from having that, was Gina Millers court case. A Remainer. She insisted that it was unconstitutional (why?) to have more than two options on the ballot. Basically to force people to choose between two very unattractive options. Had we been offered Soft Brexit with Customs Union, the *vast* majority of the population would likely have gone for that, me included and I’m a pretty hard Brexiteer. Polls suggest it would have been upwards of 70%, not 52%. But a simple re-run of the original vote, just because you lost? No, that’s anti-Democratic. And if you won, would you have been ok with best of three?
It’s only the Remainer fairytale they tell themselves that Brexiteers are against immigration, freedom of movement or “Brussels rules on bendy bananas”. Probably because you read the Daily Mail. But it isn’t the reality and never has been. No more than Remainers all read Socialist Worker.
Because that’s another thing: logically you know perfectly well that Brexit isn’t a right wing thing. Because the Tory party is split 50/50, and they are only half the country, and half of a half isn’t 52%. There are just as many Brexiteers on the left as the right. And yet you insist it’s all about Boris.
Let those ministers do their claims. It's all about bragging and speaking out loud.
EU has enough problems and doesn't need to spill money in a country who decided to leave the Union and who unilaterally change the terms of the agreement between the two. UK cannot be trusted as long as its leadership will say the same. If the UK citizens want to keep it, no problem, it's democracy. But there's no need to the EU to bend and comply to the wills of such jerks.
Not -entirely- self-inflicted I think. I think a lot of the people who voted brexit were not culpable, in the same way that an imbecile under manipulation by a scheming psychopath is not fully culpable - he has a diminished responsibility.
Propaganda is a powerful tool, and it is becoming ever more powerful thanks to the mass manipulation machine that is social media. It's now extremely easy to manipulate people en-masse, as Cambridge Analytica discovered.
But they even managed to change the rules after the event: It was supposed to be a non-binding vote with the same regime as a general election i.e. there has to be a clear majority to call it a done deal..
If it had been 48/52 the other way, then the brexiteers would have been calling for another vote, and they would have got it. Nigel farage was even asking for another vote when he thought it might not go his way.
But then when the vote was over and the country couldn't have been more undecided if it tried, with a tiny 2% margin in favour of leave, suddenly it's all "we won you lost, get over it remainiac, the people have spoken" etc etc. And Personally I believe that it has been propaganda and foreign trolls that have been driving that.
After all, the person who REALLY benefited from Brexit, was Putin.
3 Groups of people voted for Brexit.
The delusional. Those "True believers" who actually expected some kind of economic renaissance, despite all logic saying the opposite. Some fantasy vision of a Britain where the sun never sets (and the wages never rise).
The greedy. They saw an angle that couuld make them money. Shopkeepers expecting to make more money selling a pint can of lager than a 1/2liter for example, not realising their sharper customers could work out the increase in volume wasn't worth the increase in price.
Interesting thing about the greedy was that as I've dug deeper into them it seems they all made most money by betting against the UK ecconomy (Crispin Odey springs to mind for this) on a vast scale.
The gullible. The "Willing fools" as Lenin called them, they youngers mobilised by Cambridge Analytica through social media, the olders by the Daily Heil, The Scum and their ilk. Mostly lacking the maths skills of an 11YO or the sense of smell to detect the bu***hit they were being fed.
Within 2 years statistical estimates indicate the majority had died of old age.
When the votes for and against Brexit the young will feel betrayed by the old for basically nothing
And the young will not be happy about how their future was p**sed down the pan.
I think your Greedy category deserves an extra subdivision:
There were those "honest" shopkeepers etc that you describe, who thought that they might be in for an extra buck somehow. This category includes British plumbers, builders & other trades that were being out competed by Polish workers, and even the bankers who bought crypto and got ready to short the UK economy might fall in to this category, but they are more likely to fall in to my next one.
My extra category is far more dangerous, these are the political class: The Tory brexiteers, who were greedy for power. Knowing that power is money and money is power, they are quite happy to inflict untold misery on millions if it gives them the levers of power. They are quite happy to push the UK into a full blown economic collapse, towards general strikes, and towards a new world war, because they think they are rich and powerful enough to ride it out.
These are the guys who used to bang on about "sovereignty".. They are distinct from your first group in that they are not expecting an economic renaissance - they wanted to remove the anti-corruption rules (that the UK introduced to the EU!) that prevented them siphoning off all the public assets and handing them to their mates. They want to take over complete control of the UK "take back control.." but the gullible fools think they will be running the UK for the interests of its general population - they won't of course, they will be ruinning it to benefit themselves - and they already are.
When the UK crashes and burns, they will have built their offshore private islands, mansions and manor houses. They could even move to Russia or China, where they might be hailed as heroes who brought down the EU and the UK from inside.
“The young vote Remain” is another of those myths.
It’s a bit like “the young vote left wing”…..because students join the Socialist Worker. It’s true…but the young become the middle-aged and the middle-aged become old. And their opinions age with them.There’s no evidence at all that the population will intrinsically move towards Remain over time.
When I was a student, I had no opinion whatsoever about Europe, either way. After a long career, I’ve had more than a decade of which has been directly working on European Commission projects. I’ve managed dozens of those, and probably been responsible for the spending of over 30 million of EU taxpayers money one way or another. I have a very, very deep experience and understanding of the process through from the lobbying, to personal relationships with many senior EU staff, and “how things are done” from an engineering perspective. I’ve also spent other parts of my career seeing how things are done outside that framework, in large and small companies, and now own my own SME employing thirty people.
The outcome of all my years of deep engagement and experience working with the EU Commission, is that they sap all potential value out of everything they touch, and that I am now a strong Brexiteer. So no, I do *not* think time will shift opinions towards Remain.
I’m a Brexiteer, and I *did* call for another vote. Loudly. That’s the way referendums normally work, in Switzerland for example. First is a matter of principle, second is “ok, how shall we do this in practice, here are some options”.
Brexiteers wanted a second vote with four options: Remain, Hardest Brexit (WTO only), Firm Brexit (what we’ve got), Soft Brexit (Customs Union, freedom of movement)?
That actually had cross-party support among the population, but…polls suggested the winner would be Soft Brexit. By a *huge* margin, 70%+. And Gina Miller didn’t want that, she wanted to present the country with only two unattractive options that she selected to get what a few Remainers wanted. So she went to court to stop it, and won.
Hard Brexit we’ve got, is because Remainers tried to be clever and miscalculated.
Er what? You are trying to say that "Remainers" wanted Hard Brexit? What kind of Remainer wants that?
Although tories are weird. Theresa May called herself a Remainer but was (at the time) the most xenophobic politician I had heard of.. She was behind the "Go Home" vans, the expansion of the Border Farce, and the massive expansion of the surveillance state that was completely at odds with EU law, and she hated the Human Rights act. I couldn't understand why she would declare herself a remainer, and had assumed the only reason she did so is because she actually supported leave but knew that everyone hated her, so the cummings-controlled SPADs told her to declare for remain instead.
Choice between two pre-selected unattractive options seems to be par for the course from the conservative party these days.
Democracy, they've heard of it...
Icon, because the totalitarian surveillance/police state is what the tories seem hell-bent on bringing to Britain..
@cyberdemon
"Icon, because the totalitarian surveillance/police state is what the tories seem hell-bent on bringing to Britain.."
Not to defend the Tories particularly on this but to point out it was under Labour (Blair) that the police state kicked up a notch to being newsworthy. Before that there was more of a stiff upper lip when it came to terrorists.
And there we have yet another false dichotomy between two unattractive options - the tories vs starmer's labour.
I never said I was a Labour supporter, and you are right that this stuff got worse under Blair, Jack Straw and particularly Jacqui Smith (although arguably it started with Michael Howard).
But while Labour were interested in pure state surveillance, it was the tories who handed it to their mates in the corporations (along with everything else.. the railways, the power lines, along with choice cuts of the NHS, education & policing..) So now we are not just spied on "for our own good", we are spied on "for someone else's profit". See recent sale of NHS medical records to US insurance companies, zero public consultation whatsoever.
You wanted to leave, you got the votes and Brexit happened. Stop trying to get your snouts back in the trough you claimed you didn't want or need. Just hurry up and bankrupt the country so you can sell it to Rishi's father in law and we can all fuck off somewhere else.
"You wanted to leave, you got the votes and Brexit happened. Stop trying to get your snouts back in the trough you claimed you didn't want or need."
As ever, it's not quite so simple. The vote was tight. Those who are the losers in this are likely to have voted "No". In fact some of them would have been too young to vote at the time.
It is grossly offensive to tell people whose careers were ruined by no action of their own that they're wanting to get their snouts back in the trough.
Or another angle is - from your armchair, you are convinced that you know better than them, what is good for them.That’s exactly why we have democracy. So that people who think they know the right thing to do, are *not* allowed to just tell everybody else what’s good for them.
I moved to another European country before the EU was created, there was paperwork but it was not difficult.
Do you think, that just maybe, the hoops one might have to jump through to do the same now may have changed in the intervening 30+ years?
For instance, it is a fact that ten years ago, I could have moved to Portugal and got a job there, settled down, etc. with little or no paperwork, visas, or additional expenses to deal with. I cannot do this today. In fact, those British citizens who have Portuguese residency are now actually finding that, even though they *should* still have freedom of movement within the EU, do not, due to a lack of impetus on the part of the Portuguese to provide them with the requisite paperwork.
I was looking at the process for applying for a visa to work in Spain. Application cost is over 500 euro with estimated 8 month processing time. You can't apply while in the country. This also doesn't grant you the right to work in any other EU country. The visa is valid for a year.
So I would say this is more expensive and time consuming than being able to work in ANY EU country with zero cost or wait.
The friction is certainly higher. But you haven’t actually explained why that’s a bad thing for both countries involved, just it’s inconvenient for you personally. Let me give you a different place to stand:
As a hiring manager in the U.K.,there were some really negative aspects that applicants could theoretically move with such low friction. We’d get lots of applicants, and some of them were good, and hireable, and for interview you just go on “what’s on the CV, and do I think you can do the job”. But at the *second* interview, I have to dig into “and is this realistic, will the person actually turn up”. And I’d ask people things like “what are your constraints before you start”, and you’d find out that moving their kids from Czech would mean it would be nine months before they turn up (but our project is now). Or I’d ask them a salary expectation, and discover they have zero idea what the cost of living is in U.K., which means they haven’t investigated the practicalities at all. Those people, when I asked them to do some research, never ever came back to me. They were attracted by the high salary they’d heard on the grapevine…..but when they discovered the house that would afford was a rabbit hutch, they went for something “lower” paid in their own country with a better standard of living.
I’d say I spent well over half my effort in interviewing people who had no serious intent to take the job, as they didn’t have any concept of the true impact of re-location. That’s time I could ill afford.And, my friend, I’m afraid you are one of the time-wasters, you just don’t know it.
If you think *500 euros* is any noticeable fraction of the impact of relocating country, you have no idea of the practicalities. Back in the real world, the overall impact across all areas of your life is in the tens of thousands of euros, possibly hundreds of thousands. Housing. Schools. Moving your pension. The cost of not knowing the things that everyone in the area knows but doesn’t think to tell you. You’re moving to Spain: do you know all the permissions you need on your house? All of them? You can’t assume the house you buy has the correct permissions. Because I assure you if you think you do, you don’t, because even Spanish people sometimes find they’re sometimes liable for an unexpected 1000 Euro fine on the water service or something.
I have moved overseas to Australia, so am fully aware of the costs involved in moving.
The point I was making is that there were previously no restrictions. A school leaver could previously go work in Spain for a few months. Work in a bar or for a tour company. This was often a life experience for many.
Now they can't, without the visa hassle and as these jobs are not classed as high demand jobs, they probably can't even go anyway.
Nope, I actually moved to Australia, so did go through an expensive and time consuming visa process. I know how costly and frustrating visa beurocracy can be.
However, this may not be possible for someone who previously could just travel to most of Europe with no restrictions. School leavers who could just travel for an experience or retirees wanting to move somewhere warm are now cut off unless they have the right skills or enough money.
I am seriously pissed at the fact this affects my children who have lost their right to freely travel in the EU, especially since Farages kids don't have this problem as they have German passports.
"I am seriously pissed at the fact this affects my children who have lost their right to freely travel in the EU"
Hear, hear! That's one of the things I'm really upset with too, haven't got any kids of my own, but my friends do and it's making their lives more difficult.
Given the medical brain-drain, mainly to other English-speaking countries, from the UK, we may have a lot more to worry about than Horizon!
A neurosurgeon on TV: "Why stay here, in a health service that is fragmenting fast, when I can increase my income by four by going to the USA". Although I think he also said something about his taxes being much higher because of his pension!
My partner is a doctor in the NHS and it’s truly shocking what has happened over the last few years. The nurse shortage has been damaging for a few years now but the last year or so the shortage of doctors has really started to bite.
We’re talking a central London teaching hospital and a centre of excellence in her specific field with obviously a good salary. It used to be an attractive proposition. And yet now they have multiple doctor positions that they just can’t fill. The candidates that use to come from elsewhere in Europe no longer wish to move to the UK. They’ve had some limited success with persuading African doctors to move to the UK but not enough to fill the gaps.
The result is fewer clinics than usual, longer waiting lists and overall poorer service. Obviously the government doesn’t care, they quite like a collapsing NHS so they can sell it off to foreigners and get some kickbacks.
Obviously the government doesn’t care, they quite like a collapsing NHS so they can sell it off to foreigners and get some kickbacks.
Are you really that ignorant? For all but 2 of the last 50 years the NHS has seen investment above the rate of inflation, by all governments.
The problem is worldwide, progress in medicine now means that even serious problems can be treated, but at huge cost. Understandably people expect their health service to offer such treatments, but how can any such system finance treatments that can cost 6-digit sums every year just for one person?
A bigger problem is getting the money to the right places, not wasting it on unnecessary managers and paperwork to meet meaningless targets, and that's not an easy problem to fix.
How do you define should be? It has to be a balance with other public spending and taxation. Since UK life expectancy has grown from ~70 to ~81 over the past 60 years, healthcare is obviously working.
There's no consistent correlation between funding and party politics. For the period 1950 - 1980 investment in real terms (allowing for inflation) consistently went up during Tory governments, and down during Labour ones. For the 1980 - 1997 Tory period it dipped then rose again. During the Blair years it grew to an historical high, since then it has returned to close to the historical average of 3.7% above inflation.
There's no defunding, by stealth or otherwise, it's still steadily increasing.
It's a good question, but you can do comparisons on financing with other countries on both funding and outcomes. The UK has, for decades, been spending significantly less than other European countries on healthcare. IIRC Germans pay double for health insurance. Interestingly, German doctors were happy to moonlight in the UK up until a couple of years ago because they could earn more cash in hand. Since Brexit they've still got Norway and Switzerland to choose from.
The UK has, for decades, been spending significantly less than other European countries on healthcare
Not correct. According to the OECD the UK spends 10.3% of GDP on healthcare, which is above the EU average of 8.3%. Sweden (10.9), France (11.2) and Germany (11.7) do spend more, Belgium & Austria about the same as the UK, the others spend less. Outside the EU, Norway and Switzerland spend more. These figures have remained largely unchanged for the past 10 years.
The UK is easily in the top 20% among European nations.
Of course, one important thing to consider is where this spending comes from. The UK has a health service that is entirely funded from public money, which has both good and bad points. In France, on the other hand, the government (taxpayer) only pays about 70% of most medical bills, and most people are expected (required, if they're employed) to have insurance to make up the shortfall.
Actually, what they're short of *is* managers - and secretaries and other admin staff. Admin doesn't go away just because there isn't a dedicated person, it just means the doctors and nurses are having to waste their time filling them in and handling them instead of treating patients.
A boatload of admin people can get hired pretty quickly, a lot faster than new doctors can - get them in now, and you've got doctors doing doctoring and admins doing admining, and you're getting some actual efficiency due to people working on what they're specialised in.
And also, as the rest of the world gets richer, they want their own health service.
As repeatedly stated many times by many different government bods, the NHS has imported foreign staff for decades, so "why should we change?" Yeah, we've always built on foundations of sand, why do anything different.
It worked in the past as we could strip-mine other countries of healthcare staff as those other countries couldn't afford to use them. But no, brown people in hot countries quite like the idea of having a health service, and they are getting rich enough to actually afford it. So, yes it is getting more difficult to predicate our health service on ever-increasing imports of staff when we are now competing with ever larger numbers of other countries who also want to do the same, along with the source countries who have the audacity to think that they'd quite like to keep their home-grown health staff themselves thank you very much.
The problem is worldwide, progress in medicine now means that even serious problems can be treated, but at huge cost
That's often repeated but simply not the case. There are some headline treatments that are very expensive but really it's one illness replacing another: for example, we no longer worry about smallpox, polio or TB.
The real driver of costs is an ageing population that with chronic condition coupled with fewer young people paying in.
> The nurse shortage has been damaging for a few years now but the last year or so the shortage of doctors has really started to bite
Brexit clearly would not have helped, but there must be something else going on, because here on the continent the situation is almost exactly the same.
I used to be in the emergency services myself ages ago and the current level of service is truly shocking (except, for some reason, in Austria).
Why would an Eastern European doctor bother with the UK, when they can just go to Germany or France without any of the visa hassle for a higher salary than they can get at home.
If they could be bothered to jump through the hoops and cost of an "Australian style" points system, why not just go to Australia?
freedom of mobility
Not as much of an advantage as you might think. Medicine is still one area where language skills are essential, and qualifications often do not transfer. A British friend moved to work in France a few years back. His initially limited French wasn't too much of a hindrance in the IT industry where he worked, but his wife was a paediatric nurse. Not only would she have needed French qualifications, but to successfully deal with children you need to be comfortably fluent in their language. An ill child in hospital can't make allowances for misunderstandings in the way that a working adult in a professional situation could.
It used to be able to draw on the EU's liberal, if tight, supply of healthcare professionals. But not any more.
Most of the non-British healthcare workers in the UK actually came from outside the EU. The EU has huge problems recruiting medical staff as well. Getting an optician's appointment in France can take over a year, for example. The French government is even considering taking powers to compel new medical graduates to practice in certain regions (the "medical deserts"). Brexit has made little difference there.
> Getting an optician's appointment in France can take over a year, for example
I can attest to that. And most likely it won't be an optician but a specially trained technician.
> The French government is even considering taking powers to compel new medical graduates to practice in certain regions
I can attest to that too. Not a bad idea btw; I look forward to the TV series: "Doctor in Lozère"
the "medical deserts"
My doctor explained this to me in one of his chattier moments.
It's a choice of good pay and good infrastructure in the cities, along with the ability to do lots of interesting things...
...or lousy pay in a place with pathetic infrastructure (like trains for schoolkids and maybe two buses a day; police and fire service from four towns away; broadband in the single digit megabits; hospitals thirty miles away; loads of towns throwing away place names they've had since Roman times so they can group together to be a larger blip on a map just so they can keep their fucking schools running [*]) and a lifetime spent dealing with the same agricultural ailments over and over and over.
* - If you've lived here for any length of time, you won't know where the hell anything is any more because the ancient names have been replaced by larger grouped places, Ombrée-d'Anjou, Loireauxence, and numerous other bullshit names because of gross failings of regional governance...
Most of the non-British healthcare workers in the UK actually came from outside the EU.
Post 2003? I don't have numbers to hand but I think that's debatable. In any case, it doesn't matter whether it was the most, it was certainly significant.
Knowing people in healthcare in both countries I'd still say that the French system is now better than the UK one, though that doesn't in any way mean it's great. The NHS has been dying a death by a thousand cuts for years and the pandemic and Brexit have just made this worse.
Similar things are happening all over Europe but they are worse in the UK.
Post 2003? I don't have numbers to hand but I think that's debatable. In any case, it doesn't matter whether it was the most, it was certainly significant.
According to a parliamentary report from 2021 for NHS England, top nationalities are:
1.2m UK/British
32k Indian
25k Filipino
14k Irish
The biggest EU contingent is Polish, at 10.5k, so about 1% of the total. No other EU nationalities get over the 8k line. Total EU numbers are 5.4%.
For higher qualifications like doctors, 9% of doctors report an EU nationality, of which one-fifth are Irish.
The report concludes:
Nurses and health visitors are the only staff group to record a fall in the number of recorded EU nationals since 2016. 5.6% of nurses reported an EU nationality in March 2021, compared with 7.4% in June 2016. EU doctors fell to 8.7% of the total in March 2021 from 9.7% in June 2016, having risen as high as 9.9% in March 2017. The total number of staff in these categories has, however, risen since 2016.
The only EU nationality to record a substantial decrease in the recorded number of staff since June 2016 is Spanish, falling from 7,240 to 5,405 (-25%).
Knowing people in healthcare in both countries I'd still say that the French system is now better than the UK one
Having experienced both, I'd say it's swings & roundabouts. Some things are better in France, others better in the UK.
The NHS has been dying a death by a thousand cuts for years and the pandemic and Brexit have just made this worse.
The pandemic certainly has, but if you look at the numbers instead of the remainder FUD you'll see that Brexit has made little difference.
Similar things are happening all over Europe but they are worse in the UK.
No, they are not worse in the UK, that's a grass-is-greener mindset. Go live elsewhere in the EU for a decade or so, as I have done, and you'll learn otherwise.
I am sick to the back teeth of this incessant Leave voter whining about "the EU did this" or "the EU said that". The reality is that the UK voted to leave the EU and no longer has a say in how it is run. Suck it up buttercup!
Contrary to popular Leave voter belief, the EU does not and never did "need" the UK. In fact we were a difficult, obstructive thorn in their side for 40-odd years and many EU citizens are glad we have gone and really don't miss our money if it means they don't have to put up with the likes of Forage. Many UK businesses that previously supplied businesses and end users in the EU have already been replaced with other suppliers from within the EU simply because they are cheaper and less hassle due to less paperwork. It is nothing to do with the EU causing these changes, it's simple economics. These changes were utterly inevitable when the UK left the EU and are a direct consequence of the Leave vote, and they WILL get worse because we are still in the process of leaving and will be until 2025. Many Leavers nicknamed them "Project Fear" and are now whining even more as they all come about one by one. Being shut out of the science club is just one more turd on the Brexit sh!tpile.
If the Tory morons want the EU to negotiate, then they need to learn how to negotiate. Their current efforts are utter crap and doomed to failure. Unilateral declarations are on the level of a toddler throwing their toys out of the pram. In fact, if the Tory idiots had learned how to negotiate BEFORE we decided to have a Brexit vote then maybe it wouldn't even have happened as we could have partnered up with likeminded countries in the EU and forged an alliance against the Federalisation of the EU.
I disagree. I think it would have been much more prudent to try to reform the EU from within, rather than just sabotage the whole project, breaking European unity so that only Putin and the Chinese Communist Party are the winners.
Better to be inside the tent, pissing out, than outside the tent, pissing in.
I think it would have been much more prudent to try to reform the EU from within
We spent 25 years trying to do that, but even with the help of allies it was a doomed task against the federalist mindset of members like France and Germany
rather than just sabotage the whole project, breaking European unity
But we're not a part of it now, any such sabotage and loss of unity is down to the other members now. The UK can't be responsible for the behaviour of Hungary. After all, we left, we surely can't expect to have any influence, isn't that what we're constantly being told? Cake & all that?
Better to be inside the tent, pissing out, than outside the tent, pissing in.
Better to leave the tent & piss in the latrine, surely?
Well, it had always been the plan to get a political union[*], the first agreemets drafted up by Germany and France had some ideas along those lines. There was opposition against the UK joining the EC over exactly that: the UK has always been against a political union (or so it was perceived), as far as I recall reading about the EU and its history. There are also currently unfortunately many parties (and thus leaders of countries) trying to explode the whole union, drifting more and more away from a common position (the one you referenced, also the country lead by the duck brothers, which makes me sad).
Anyway, I would have preferred the UK to use the (non binding...) referendum as a lever to reform the EU. I also felt that the UK was much closer to the German position in many cases. Ah well, no hjelp to cry over spilt melk.
[*] fat chance of that happening with the high number of member states
Some Brits seem to have this fantastic illusion of being the great Reformers.
Please just look at your political system and an ailing industry and rotting infrastructure and food banks, Reformers.
Anybody here with any great specific British only example of this great reformation of the EU, anything else but efforts to get some more exceptions for Britain.
What great reforms did Cameron speak for when he met with the Commission before the referendum.
But one should of course remember how greatly Britain has tried to reform everything related to tax havens and dark money.
The reality is that the UK voted to leave the EU and no longer has a say in how it is run.
No, the reality is that the UK left the EU under the terms of an agreement negotiated between the two, and it has a perfect right to expect the EU to respect that agreement. It should not have to put up with the EU dragging its feet in one area as a way to apply pressure in another.
"have already been replaced with other suppliers from within the EU simply because they are cheaper and less hassle due to less paperwork"
The company I work for used to get a lot of stuff imported from the UK. Huge bags proudly saying "BRITISH SUGAR" and a flag logo, for example.
Interestingly, what put an end to this wasn't Brexit itself, it was the psychodrama in the run up to the withdrawal agreement when the tossers in Westminster were talking about crashing out as if that would somehow be a workable idea.
It dawned on our stock management people that this....would create a massive problem, especially for a JIT system.
And anything supplied from the UK was quickly replaced by products from suppliers within the EU.
More recently, after the withdrawal, we've massively cut back on supplying our products into the UK. The customs process itself isn't a big deal (we supply outside the EU, so it's "just another country"), it's more the inconsistent application of rules, the illogical delays in transportation (very important for perishable products) and, sadly, I've even heard reports of some shocking amounts of xenophobic comments from people in the UK who seem to think acting unprofessionally is cool. Like, you do not, in a phone conversation, refer to your supplier as "fucking frog scum", particularly when said supplier is talking to you in English...
So, there are numerous reasons, but it all amounts to the same thing - Britain shooting itself in the foot, and now screaming because mummy hasn't come along to apply a bandage.
I hear a lot of people these days blathering on about agreements as if they're binding contracts. They forget that a contract is a peer to peer agreement that implies mutual obligation whereas an agreement is really just a statement of intent -- we'd like to explore opportunities to make contracts for our mutual benefit but we're not obligated to do so. (....just because the weaker party feels that it needs to gain some benefit from a contract doesn't obligate another party to enter into a contract just to make them happy.....that's playground thinking)
The UK is currently in the same state of denial over its new Prime Minister that it was over Brexit. As with Brexit ignoring the reality won't make it go away -- you're going to end up with someone as PM, that someone is likely to be Liz Truss and you're all going to cop it as a result (because she's given every sign of being both doctrinaire and clueless.......a lethal combination). So expect the noise level to rise but nothing will get done -- the UK doesn't have a (functioning) government any more, its achieved full "Banana Republic" status.
You're wrong about Liz Truss. Though I agree she's going to carry the can for Boris's many lies and fuckups - and whatever ones she makes all by herself.
Truss is not doctrinaire - the very opposite in fact. She's a vain, shameless opportunist who will happily reverse any principles (assuming she has any) and say/do anything that she hopes will advance or protect her political career. She voted Remain. But when Clown Boris took over, she kissed his arse, kept her job and became a rabid Brexiteer.
As Groucho Marx said, these are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. At least Groucho told great jokes. Unlike Liz Truss who is a total joke.
It's horrifying to think someone this awful could well be the next prime minister:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srHNcNoEJ9g
It's horrifying to think someone this awful could well be the next prime minister
It's horrifying to know that someone this awful will be the next prime minister. The other candidate is just as horrific, just in slightly different ways. It's like being asked to choose between eating a bowl of shit and a bowl of red-hot gravel. Except, of course, that the choice isn't yours, it's someone else's racist granny's.
BREXIT in its more simplistic form is the much-vaunted notion of DECOUPLING... Globalism Bad... Decoupling wonderful. Adam Smith Bad ... Karl Marx wonderful.
Decoupling is grand as long as you are the engine and not the bloody kaboose.
Thank God Liz Truss is riding atop of this roaring volcano.... British Workers need more graft...
@AC "Which part of "EU grant" is so difficult to understand?"
Neither the UK or EU have any difficulty understanding 'EU grant'. That's why the 'Trade and Cooperation Agreement between UK and EU' states that any EU programme or activity the UK participates in, the UK will have to pay their share of the funding.
So no shock, no horror that EU funding is not going to a country that left the EU.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
So legislating to rip up an agreement you signed causes the other party to be 'less than urgent' in delivering things you want.
Who would have thought it?
I absolutlely love the EU resaponse:
"The Commission takes note of the UK's request for consultation and will follow up on this in line with the applicable rules, as set out in the TCA"
So we are going to follow the rules.....and there is no timetable in the rules....and there is nothing you can do about it.....brilliant......
No ... sure it is true that the UK as such was a net contributor. I don't think anyone capable of reading statistics will refute that.
Unfortunately for large swaths of the land, that flow back of EU funds was often tied to the idea to level up disenfranchised, rural places.
Once the Brexit was done that stopped and the funds could/would be used for other things, like funding the NHS :)
There is also the fact of economies of scale. For instance, with critical regulatory and safety agencies like EURATOM, paying in a fraction of the cost was always going to cost less than paying for an entire replacement regulatory agency (which will end up having to follow the same rules anyway). This is still true even if we were paying disproportionately more than some other countries (i.e. more than 1/28th of the cost).
The bit that the brexiters miss is that this money wasn't just "given to" the EU, it was used to pay for things, some of which we may no longer need, but most of which we do, and which we now have to pay for in their entirety ourselves.
The subtlety of such argument, however, is lost on people who rant about "getting are cuntry back".
For instance, with critical regulatory and safety agencies like EURATOM,
There is a competive advantage in writing the rules.
The UK specialists were very good at that and well respected for their work too. For example, most of REACH and the rules on recycleable plastics were written by the UK and I know people who work with these things that are not enthusiastic about Germany and France taking over.
People have moved to Europe. Funding applications are bouncing. New PhD places have been cancelled. Science crosses borders but not being in the same funding pot makes everything extraordinarily hard.
The money disappeared, the government are only going to "fill in" once a decision on Horizon is made but the money has already gone. The hole has been there for months. People have already gone.
Anon cos I'm affected in part.
The "Project Fear" pidgeons are coming home to roost and the Government that campaigned for and got re-elected on the own goal that is Brexit are now trying to dictate the rules and access the benefits of a club that they are no longer a member of...
Horizon and previous EU Framework programmes were a big influx of funding to UK Science but never mind we got blue passports.
The past history of the United Kingdom was as a science super power; we led the world in many areas of science. The very first thing to do is to think positive. There are very specific proposals in front of the government for a means to fund the creation of at least one major new research institute, here in the UK. Which if followed up with enthusiasm, will, not "may" . . . will . . . create an opportunity for the UK to return to full scientific leadership in direct conjunction with the United States; where an identical research institution will compliment the first to lead the world. It will be Europe that will regret their post Brexit actions, as the positive results of the two new research institutes will lead the world to a recognition that the UK remains a Science Super Power. Who ever becomes Prime Minister has been presented with a choice, to accept the deal offered and retain scientific leadership. The very same applies to the US. Scientific Leadership requires new thinking to be accepted and fully supported. The choice is theirs, on both sides of the pond; theirs to win via positive leadership being fully applied to new thinking.
That's about as likely as Britain "ruling the waves."
There's this little country overseas you may have heard of, where they have a large population of increasingly well educated scientists ready to do the research we don't have the resources, workforce, or funding to do. You may have heard of it, "China". See also: "India".
You might also have noticed that the US is also no longer exactly world-leading in scientific thinking, preferring to make its laws based on religious fundamentalism. They are no longer on the ascendant, and have not been for some time, and certainly do not view us as an equal partner in anything, preferring to become increasingly insular. They don't do partnerships, they do acquisition.
You clearly do not understand the concept of freedom of thought, and thus believe that a nation of more than a billion slaves, to a leadership dedicated to ensuring no one is EVER allowed to form their own view of the road ahead; can possibly rule the future planet; which China so clearly demonstrated by murdering their very best young people who had simply sat down to peacefully ask for the freedom to choose their own leadership. India is well known to be riven by deep corruption; their slaves are called "untouchables".
As a classic Brit, I have the brass cheek to believe in the capacity of the British nation to return to success. And another thing, it is the ownership of technology that creates opportunity, not the ownership of slaves. One good mind can, and as has been repeatedly demonstrated; create great prosperity.
If as I have in the past, spent any time in the US, to meet and converse with their very best people, you will know full well that, yes, while they might be described as being on the back foot right now; their people show great resilience, combined with a very competitive mindset. Their road ahead is already clearly set out and will allow them an easy return to success in all things. Nations that insist upon acquiring slaves will fail; nations that accept new thinking always succeed, as the only thing to fear is fear itself.
Time remains of the essence.
Never underestimate the power of stupid (or controlled) people in large numbers .... .... Anonymous Coward
The power of stupid (or controlled) people in large numbers is oxymoronic and vastly overrated and never underestimated by any and all with feeds and seeds of a need to know which simply question more for the correct positive answer to any new variation of a once originally primed and persistent problem .... a primitive primordial predisposition that still lingers on giving rise and succour to the vain arrogance which accompanies premium and disparaging ignorance even in these enlightening days of ACTive 0days for Enterprising Facilities and Utilities Engaging and Exercising and Enjoying the Employment and Advanced IntelAIgent dDeployment of NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT Energies.
However, quite whether the UK can easily currently dismiss being so evidently disempowered by their embrace and support of the former, rather than reaping the awesome unlimited benefits in guarded [so as not to terrify the natives] acknowledgements of the latter, to become a Science Super Power, is so obviously clearly enough well answered, but unfortunately not at all well for them, by the present crashing and crushing realities which abound and are presented by their expanding and expounding tales to media trailing and trialing crass and fake news all around them and the globe, as to require no question.
But the truth of what is freely available out there, and at no great universal cost, will out, for it cannot be denied whenever so clearly self-evident and easily believable.
And that's the point.
UK, the USA, China, France, Russia, Egypt and so on are all nationalist state where the only view you are allowed is to worship the Nation.
In the West, atheism is so deeply rooted that people just can't think otherwise. There is absolutely no freedom in this, you can't put atheism into question. It is the sole way of thinking. Everything comes from that. The only religion that dictates all is atheism.
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