Signs of how petty and self-defeating the EU can get today with the final confirmation that the UK is to be punished over its recalitrance over NI by being excluded from EU science programmes:
EU scraps 115 grants for UK scientists and academics amid Brexit row
One hundred and fifty grants were approved for British applicants after the then Brexit minister, David Frost, successfully negotiated associate membership of the £80bn Horizon Europe programme but most will now be cancelled....
Ratification of the membership has been in abeyance because the UK has not implemented the Brexit trading arrangements agreed under the Northern Ireland protocol.
With the deadline passed, it has emerged that just 18 of the 150 academics will take up the grants but must move to an EU institution to get the funds.
Who is supposed to benefit from that exactly? Some EU folk might, in a literal sense, but,overall, does it actually benefit anyone to politicise science and academic stuff as blatantly as this? Another thing -is this an 'excessive' retaliation for any economic penalty the EC might be able to demonstrate as a result of the Protocol being removed? They won't be able to reduce any fish exports as well, will they, if they are only allowed to be 'proportionate' in response?
Some academics do not seem to mind:
Thiemo Fetzer, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick who was approved for €1.5m (£1.28m) of funding for research into media and geopolitics, confirmed he was one of the 18 who had reluctantly decided to move to the EU.
He said: “I am relieved as this whole Brexit process has eroded my trust in the UK’s institutions and this Horizon Europe association was just another incarnation of this.
“I take some comfort knowing that with the ERC being hosted at a great place in Europe I am also developing an exit strategy from the UK like many other academics from the EU I know. I really fear that the UK is going down a very dark path and there is a Germany in the 1930s feeling to all. [sic]”
Economists -- still stuck in the 1930s.
But for others:
Last month, Nicholas Walton, a University of Cambridge astrophysicist studying the Milky Way and hoping to play a major part in the European Space Agency’s (Esa) next big observation project, revealed he had been forced to hand over his coordinating role on the €2.8m pan-European Marie Curie Network research project to a colleague in the Netherlands.
Which must be a tad galling.
UK Research and Innovation said the government had guaranteed funding for “all successful applicants to the first or second wave of Horizon Europe Grant awards”. It said its guarantee scheme was open and provides funding to researchers and innovators unable to receive their Horizon Europe funding “while the UK is in the process of associating to the programme”.
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