THE GUARDIAN – OPINION: Polls suggest a majority of Britons regret our exit. Rejoining the scientific programme could be the start of something bigger
Is this the dawn? Have we reached the glimmer of a new beginning? Rishi Sunak’s about-turn on joining the European Union’s Horizon programme is a first note of sanity in the two and a half tortured years since Britain formally left the EU. Let it not be the last.
The story itself is miserable. Horizon is an £81bn continent-wide programme to give Europe’s scientific research community a critical mass to compare with that of the US or China. It acknowledges the obvious truth that advanced scientific research needs collaboration rather than competition. Britain’s universities had been leaders of the pack, and they were among Horizon’s principal beneficiaries. If anything made sense of a united Europe, it was Horizon.
Brexit was an act of sabotage. In a measure of infantile daftness, its adherents declared that here, as in all things, Britain could go it alone. Sunak’s own enslavement to the creed required him to agree, and he duly engineered a £14bn Pioneer programme with grants that were intended to replace Horizon. Many senior scientists in Britain protested the inadequacy. Sunak appeared unaware that research is as much about collaboration and scholastic exchange as it is about money. » | Simon Jenkins | Thursday, September 7, 2023
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