Blighty's EU science funding will remain unchanged until new PM triggers Article 50 Science research funding from the European Union to the UK is set to continue until Britain officially terminates its membership of the bloc by triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The referendum split the nation in half; the leave campaign narrowly won the plebiscite with 51.9 per cent of the vote, leaving 48.1 per …
Free movement of work force is one of the four basic requirements of the EU for a country to be viable to participate in the research funding programs.
Switzerland has already almost lost the right, and now are on the delayed eviction from the programs, because they have voted recently against the free movement. Google: Switzerland EU research funding immigration. For example: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/nov/11/whatever-you-do-dont-become-switzerland-swiss-academics-tell-uk
Since the crash UK science funding has been hard to get & EU funding has been a valuable extra option for people to apply to.
If brexit happens then I doubt the UK gov will magic up cash to replace EU loss.
Even "very worthy" areas of research that may benefit us all such as those with potential to understand more about cancer causation / spread struggle for cash as there's lots of researchers but a small cash pile.
SInce the crash, a lot of UK university science researchers have felt the pinch & have been doing less research as far more cash limited
AC as although I;m not in cancer research some of my friends are
If brexit happens then I doubt the UK gov will magic up cash to replace EU loss.
I agree, but UK gov can allow the academic institutions to set higher tuition fees.
So the cost of Brexit to science will be born as debt by the young who generally voted against it.
Thanks you OAPs.
"Thanks you OAPs."
Not only did some of us oldies vote to stay in the EU, nut the largest demographic to not bother to vote were the younger ones. Maybe you ought to be "thanking" the crowds who went to Glastonbury instead of the polling stations. (I'm probably assuming too much here, but I wonder how many at the two or three big festivals on that day made a postal vote?)
I can't find the article now, but based on some guesses, someone thought that the Remain campaign had lost about 16,000 votes to people who were at Glastonbury without a postal/proxy vote.
Mind you, when everyone says "if the youth don't like it, it's their fault for not turning out to vote", they are forgetting that the turnout for young people has been low for at least twenty years now, so there's a good chance that you (yes you!) were once a young person who didn't bother to vote.
Given the timing involved things could get even more interesting
I think pretty much all of them have realised what a disaster playing politics and pandering to UKIP nonsense has caused. And they've realised that there isn't actually a majority in the Commons to pass the law needed before anybody can invoke Article 50. So there's a reasonable hope it will never happen. But meanwhile they are all pretty much paralysed in terms of how to deal with it. All we need is 350 responsible MPs and we can draw back from the brink.
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The current funding will remain unchanged.
Future funding is already affected and will be affected further by the day because any UK institution be it academic or commercial will now find it difficult to become a member of a project. Eu funded projects usually have a minimum requirement for number of commercial and non-commercial participants (at least they used to, when I was involved in some). Funding is never given to a single institution. So a UK applicant needs to find partners to apply for funding (or Eu applicants need to look for a UK partner) . Any UK participant in any future funding now has to convince all the other participants that it will be around and be _ALLOWED_ to be around for the duration of the project.
While officially, they are obliged to listen and accept such statements at face value as UK is still on paper a Eu member, in reality they will smile and find an alternative participant. This is the reality and it does not matter how many feel good false statements does GoveNoccio(*) put out and it does not matter how may times Sajit Javid asks to be supplied with discrimination examples British candidates will now be discriminated against. Any complains - please submit to Wales, Cornwall and Clapham on the Sea so they fund British Science instead. I believe they have the budget to do so at rate of 100+ GoveMillions per week so this should not be a problem.
(*)I did not realize what a portmanteau of Gove and Pinoccio equates to in Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian and Bulgarian till this morning. It very apt actually.
Not sure about the listed languages, but at least in Russian, the "govno"
I limited the list to Eu languages. If we expand it outside the Eu a combination of Gove and Pinoccio results in an aptly named GoveNoccio, which in addition to half of Eu languages also has the same meaning in Serbian, Macedonian, Belorussian, Ukrainian and Russian. The only two I am unsure of are Moldovan and Romanian, but I will not be surprised if it means that in those languages too.
Not sure what GoveMillions translate to. We probably will have to switch back to shillings and 12 pence to a shilling to compute that properly. But I am quite sure that Clapham on Sea and Cornwall can provide the necessary 100s of GoveMillions per week for UK Science. They f*** voted for it.
Romanian language happens to be a descendant of Latin. Moldavian isn't officially recognized as a separate language.
But - by unverified claims about 20% of words are imported from Slavic neighbours, and Moldova has a sizeable percentage of people fluent in Russian. They'll probably understand what you're talking about.
Anyhow, dictionare.com does not show any Romanian words stemming from "gov" or "gav" roots. The word you're referring to is "rahat".
We pay more than we take out of the EU
No, we do not. We pay out of money which is largely generated due to UK being in the single market.
If UK is outside the Eu, any direct (corporate taxes, levies, etc) and indirect (employee income tax, NI contributions and VAT on spending) from the City is as good as gone. That exceeds the Eu contribution surplus by an order of magnitude. It is also a guaranteed loss - financial services for Eu will be in a Eu country, any ideas that this will not be the case are delusional. Anyone having that delusion is welcome to explain the rationale to the German regulator that already blocked the LSE to Deutche Borse merger based on BrExit fallout. Just tell me when, I will sell tickets.
I will not go through the second order losses, just the losses from the City being trimmed to size will be sufficient to negate any gains from not having to pay into the Eu budget. It is also unclear which of them apply as we do not know tariffs yet. The difference between them and the financial services ones though is certain - the financial services ones are guaranteed upon BrExit.
"We pay more than we take out of the EU, therefore the British government can decide to match what was lost by EU funding"
Don't be silly.
The loss to our economy of leaving means that we'll be poorer. We won't have an extra £350M to throw around, we'll be looking for things to cut just to get back to where we were.
And when will they do that? End of the year? Many scientists are on two year contracts.
And, will they fund collaborative work with scientists from other countries? Or will we now have to submit two proposals to different bodies in the hope that both get funded, so that we can work with each other?
If you want to sever your county's relationship with your neighbours, you have to be bloody sure it's the right thing to do.
One week in, how sure are we that this divorce is worth it?
The people have spoken. Are we sure they're sure?
This is not over. We do not have to do this.
"A referendum. Is a snapshot. Nothing more."
Although I've upvoted you I'd save your breathe (or finger tips), it largely falls on deaf (or ignorant) ears. I was saying this for months before the referendum, only to be meet with "out out out", "O U T O U T O U T" or variations thereof. Its that level of intelligence and articulation thats got us here I'm afraid.
To me this reads; science funding at whim of group of adults who are behaving like they're running for students' union elections or head boy at some posh public school.
We've no idea when that will be signed. It could be next week, September, 2017, 2020 or not at all.
So basically ; put everything on hold while Blighty's political system continues to run around acting like a bunch of morons.
If funding is unclear, things won't happen and researchers around Europe will be thinking, hmmm I'll wait until I know what's happening before I bring any UK based universities on board or get entangled in any UK research that involves EU funding. There's nothing worse than starting something, then discovering your colleagues are suddenly defunded by a political situation beyond their control.
I'm not being anti British, you're our next door neighbors and I've tons of connections to the place and have lived there. It's always been a real hive of creativity and great science. However, your current batch of politicians are turning the UK into an international laughing stock.
It's not even that you're leaving the EU. That's your choice to make. I don't agree with it but, it's a decision that's up to any member state.
What's leaving me flabbergasted is the utter omnishambles way you're going about it without any plan. It's actually really shocking that what I though was a sensible country is doing this.
Lions led by led by donkeys! Actually, not donkeys, pompous asses!
I don't see what the fuss is about. No sane government is going to starve the science community of funds. If the party you voted for last time doesn't promise to cover any grant loss from exiting the EU then vote the other lot in at the next election.
As for that awful 'freedom of movement of people' demand; are scientists too single minded that filling in a visa application is beyond them ? Anyway I can't see any scientist worth having on the project would fail to get a 'green card'.
I reckon some folk have started believing the scare story propaganda.
As for that awful 'freedom of movement of people' demand; are scientists too single minded that filling in a visa application is beyond them ? Anyway I can't see any scientist worth having on the project would fail to get a 'green card'.
Perhaps. At the moment, a scientist from a non-EU country would typically have to apply for a Tier 2 visa. The cost varies according to the details of the application, but is somewhere in the range of £700 to £1700 per family member. This is a rather substantial burden; if your prospective employer is not willing to pick up the cost (and few employers in science are rich enough, or are legally allowed to do so), you might want to consider your options. Especially if your other offer(s) do not involve the hassle or the expense.
Also, please do not delude yourself into thinking that if this process is applied to EU nationals, an equally expensive procedure would not be imposed on UK passport holders wishing to work in the EU.
No sane government is going to starve the science community of funds
Sanity is rarely a feature of election manifestos. While it is theoreticaly true that a post-Brexit UK government could choose to spend similar amounts to that spent currently on regional development or science or agriculture or whatever, the likelihood is it won't.
For example, in 2013, £5426 was spent per head on infrastructure projects in London while £223 per head was spent in the North East - that wasn't an EU mandate, that was simply a local policy decision on how to share out resources. A future UK government may well feel obliged to maintain the "headline" figure of regional development spending that was previously mandated by the EU, but that doesn't mean currently-discretionary spending won't be cut to compensate. A sane government would not be consolidating its development expenditure in a single overpopulated and economically-inflationary region such as London - but the actual government does because it's the laissez-faire option and temporarily benefits the people who aspire to be MPs or who have financial influence on their votes.
Similarly, it might be true that a UK government could theoretically maintain science spending. But science is necessarily collaborative - projects are simply too big these days for a single institution, or indeed a single country. Scientists move on from one institution to another to follow the opportunities - or follow the money. How do you square that with a referendum mandate that was essentially about "local money for local people"? Or tell people that the "bedroom tax" helps to preserve spending on graphene research?
And besides, this isn't about the sanity of the government, it's about the sanity of the electorate. What has effectively happened is that the majority of the British people have concluded that they are disadvantaged relative to an increasingly-distance elite and their priority is to reduce economic disparity, even if that means everyone is made poorer in the process. That may not be rational in a scientific sense, but it does seem to be the mood of the country. I think any government would be hard pressed in those circumstances to sell further reductions, say, in local council spending while maintaining research spending: it would simply be seen as maintaining privilege for an educated elite. That may be bad for the long-term future of the country, but the squabble over distribution is going to take precedence over the size of the cake for a very long time.
Dammit Britain, stop leeching
As a large net contributor to the EU budget, that's one thing you can't accuse the UK of. Indeed the next big argument within the EU is going to be over whether Germany will effectively end up funding the entire EU itself and to what extent it will continue to do so: the EU cannot sustain its current programmes without a replacement for British funding. Much as I regret Britain's exit from the EU (it will diminish everyone), its fundamental problem is that the commitment of the majority of countries to the project depends on them getting something for nothing and without some genuine signs of unity and reform the whole project is in jeopardy. Unfortunately, the distraction of Britain's leaving will make the necessary changes more difficult and more delayed.
Large contributor? After the *special snowflake* discounts and not even being in Eurozone or Schengen (i.e. a hanger-on)
In that case Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands are heroic contributors, and Germany and France looking pretty good too!
0.23% of GNI in 2014 was not exactly super-generous contribution from UK even considering the size of the economy
in fact in some years the net contribution from UK to EU was looking pretty close to ZERO (compare with Germany)
http://english.eu.dk/en/faq/faq/net_contribution
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