EU greenlights billions for microelectronics under Chips Act The European Commission has approved a project that aims to deliver nearly €22 billion ($23.6 billion) in funding to support microelectronics and communication technologies across the European semiconductor supply chain as part of the EU Chips Act. Labelled as an Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI), this …
I have no idea what this has got to do with Brexit specifically, tbh. Please enlighten us.
Surely the EU would have been doing this anyway, had the UK chopped its own arm off or not..
China was consolidating its position long before Brexit, and only now are the EU and the US noticing and trying to play catch-up before WWIII really kicks off. The UK is even further behind, thanks to our "lord of the flies" "I don't care if I turn the whole island into dogshit, so long as I am king of the dogshit" "sovereign" government.
>I have no idea what this has got to do with Brexit specifically, tbh. Please enlighten us.
The whole scheme is, as you say, nothing to do with Brexit but a scheme designed by the EU to make its members and partners less reliant on entities outside the EU; the set of which includes the UK (becasue of Brexit).
From the article
"The latter raises the question of why the UK is not involved if Norway is"
Because of Brexit the UK is explicitly not part of anything to do with the EU other than by accident of geography. Had we even retained a Norway style relationship with the economic bloc we would have benefited from the scheme. Sadly, our lords and masters, and 51% of the voting population, who bothered to vote, decided that no relationship with our nearest trading partners made more sense than any sort of relationship (be that Norway style, or something more nuanced) becasue we couldn't possibly be told what to do by a bunch of jumped up eurocrats.
Hence the EU funding reaching Norway, who have a relationship with the EU, and not the UK, who don't really, is easily explained as an effect of Brexit.
What do I remember hearing throughout the 2016 campaign? "They need us more than we need them...." seems that might not have been true. I am shocked I tell you, shocked!
U.K.gov is perfectly entitled to put together subsidy projects for semi/micro, if it thinks it’s a good idea. It doesn’t think it’s a good idea relative to other priorities, and I believe it’s correct about that. Now that same money will be spent on other U.K. gov priorities - care homes and NHS.If you think U.K. gov priorities are wrong, or taxes should be higher to pay for a larger public spending cake, that’s fine, use the ballot box to tell them so.
By definition, EU subsidies are subtracted from U.K. government taxes financing stuff that are seen by U.K. Gov as *needs* and pumped towards other peoples “nice-to-have”. The cuts to un-financed *needs* fall disproportionately on the less well-off, while the nice-to-have goes to the upper-middle-class. I’ve always said that if we’d had the more honest conversation in 2015/2016 it could have had very different results. The honest conversation would have been to make the referendum conditional on a U.K. cost/benefit wealth transfer tax, recognising the differential impact of EU membership. Very roughly, on condition of Remain, higher-rate income tax needs to go from 40% to 55%. The top rate needs to go to 90%: all the subsidised client companies are owned by that population sector, they need to live on their EU income rather than any be left over from the output of their U.K. workforce. And all the tax funds freed up need to go to what benefits below-median only. E.gl Only social and NHS, zero higher education spending (the EU can pay for that via Horizon).
You’d be amazed how many of those “stupid uneducated” folk would suddenly have voted Remain. And how the FT and “economics experts” would have re-analysed their equations to show that Brexit was obviously correct.
There is a global dependency on TSMC in Taiwan for advanced semiconductors. The amount of investment required to create an equivalent to their chip fabrication facilities is more that governments or industry can pay.
This represents an EU response to this choke point. The US is trying to do the same, largely through Intel. China has been investing for years to create such a capability but with limited success. It requires investments of hundreds of billions with no guarantee of success.
This is part of the economic poker game between the major economic blocs for who controls advanced chip making.
The EU has a key asset in ASML who make the critical tools that TSMC uses. The investment would probably go to supporting the network of companies it uses. It is a business with very long, very big investment cycles that requires government support.
The UK is not much of a player in this semiconductor game. Though, like much of the world, it would be seriously effected if there were any interruption to the supply chain should it be compromised by any drama between China and Taiwan.
Liz Truss was over in Taiwan recently, making the case for an ‘economic NATO’ to see off threats from China.
I expect there were some wry smiles from those politicians with a firmer grasp of economic reality.
I just read ‘Chip War’ by Chris Miller and feel much better informed about the semiconductor business and how the dependency on Taiwan came about.
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