It’s all about collaboration
Brian Cox says how Brexit is doubleplus ungood for science.
He thinks ongoing scientific research at all levels is vital. Which brings us, almost neatly, and inevitably, to Brexit — the elephant in every room, pub and Uber journey in the capital. Last weekend thousands of people marched from Trafalgar Square to Parliament to protest against the planned departure from the EU. I ask what effect Brexit will have on the amount of money available for research. “I promised myself I wouldn’t really talk about it,” he demurs. There’s a pause, before he quietly but convincingly does so.
“What you can say as a fact is that we receive more than a billion currency units a year. Pounds, euros, whatever it is, it’s about a billion,” he begins. “So the first question is what happens to that. It’s obviously a big hit to the university research base. That’s extremely problematic.” A member of the Royal Society’s staff points out that “10 per cent of university research funding comes from the EU”. Cox nods.
“Even more urgent is the position of EU nationals in our system,” he says. “Not only in lectureships and professorships but post-docs and students. All these things need addressing. But it’s not just science. There’s an enormous list.”
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I suggest that British science might become isolated: unable to attract talent, its own talent unable to travel easily to foreign research posts. “Absolutely,” he nods. “When you look at my fields, particle physics and astronomy, it’s all about European and global collaboration. The European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory, CERN. The “e” in CERN stands for Europe — our whole science infrastructure is European. The facilities we have are part of a much wider structure: one single country generally cannot afford to build large facilities on its own. It’s all about collaboration.”
And collaboration is quite a good thing, after all. It’s something to strive for. It’s a big improvement on war and fighting.
Sigh, yes he’s absolutely right. When I worked in academia, a lot of the funding we got was from Europe. It was difficult money to get and I can’t count the hours I spent writing and polishing proposals. We did it anyway, for two reasons:
First, academic funding from the UK was increasingly thin on the ground. We had to go after every source we could just to keep running.
Second, the collaborations were extremely valuable. We could get more done. We could find more stuff out. As part of the bidding process, we reached out to other groups working in similar fields and they reached out to us. The people running the bidding process also suggested groups we didn’t know about. Some of these bids worked out and some didn’t, but they more often than not led to some collaborative work of one form or another.
All of this could stop happening and you can be 100% certain that the government won’t replace all that lost European funding with UK money. Research – not just scientific research) will starve. Not that particle physics will have much to worry about; particle physicists are never short of funding (in comparison to everyone else).
I too voted to Remain and am disappointed with the result. Scientific research is a self-evidently good thing. But let’s respect the facts. The three institutions Dr Cox mentions are indeed European institutions. But they are not EU institutions. They are intergovernmental institutions outside the EU. Their membership, funding and governance are separate from the EU. They would carry on even if the EU ceased to exist entirely, just as they existed before it came into being.
The Europe of Juncker and Schulz is not coterminous with the Europe of Beethoven and Beckett, Copernicus and the Curies; and conflating the two only adds to our unhappiness and confusion.
But a lot of scientific and other research funding does come from the EU. A lot of the projects running at CERN will be funded that way.
What’s the benefit in funding CERN via the EU, rather than from national budgets? The EU certainly has a positive role to play in promoting research, but if it simply transfers resources to CERN it’s hard to see how it adds value rather than bureaucracy. (Recall the principle of subsidiarity: “Under the principle of subsidiarity… the Union shall act only if… the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States…”)
Richard, I’m not talking about funding for CERN. I’m talking about funding for projects that might include CERN (or any other facility or research group) as a partner. Currently, EU research funding includes money to find partners across Europe and to pay for the mechanics of collaboration, as well as salaries/equipment for people working on the project. For a project to use a facility such as CERN, the costs of building the partnership and of using the equipment/staff must be factored in as part of the project’s funding.
This could all be organised in a different way, but with the UK out of the EU this would add to the bureaucracy because there’d be new and bespoke requirements for eligibility, monitoring, accountability etc.
There’d be no incentive for consortia to pick teams from the UK because of the added difficulty and the money for UK teams would have to be provided by the UK government and there is absolutely no way this will happen.
Richard, why would you assume that funding a project through the EU would be less bureaucratic than funding through 20+ different nations science budgets?
Complex scientific investigation and collaboration is pretty much the poster child for subsidiarity.
Rob – because there are two sets of bureaucratic process to be gone through, rather than just one.
latsot – the UK will now presumably be in the same position as Switzerland and Norway, not to mention various countries from outside Europe as well as outside the EU. I don’t doubt that leaving the EU will, in some cases, increase the administrative burden, and is likely to reduce funds available for research. I regret that and it was a subsidiary factors in my decision to vote to Remain. (The primary factor was simply that our departure is likely to have bad consequences for Europe at a time when it is particularly vulnerable.) But the point I was trying to make, perhaps rather clumsily, was that Europe is much more than the EU. I hope we can withdraw from full membership of the EU while retaining an active and positive role in Europe.
Not automatically, some deals will have to be worked out first. But yes, that’s true. And it’s harder for those places to do collaborative research than members of the EU. I’m not saying that the problems are insurmountable, but they will make things a lot more difficult at an already very difficult time.
Of course Europe is more than the EU, but it’s the EU we’re talking about here; its the set of rules and well-worn funding streams and strategies that help people work together more easily. The UK is going to be outside all of that and there’s no way that can amount to a good thing for research. Clearly we’ll find ways to work with European partners, but leaving the EU is a giant setback.