It will be tempting to look back years from now and conclude that the UK would, in the end, always end up associating to Horizon Europe, the world’s largest research framework.
It is an appealing argument because so many of the UK’s research, innovation, and security, aspirations rely on a close partnership with a thriving Europe. Economically the UK is too small, geographically too remote, and in the end too pragmatic, to have blown apart its own research ecosystem on ever more tortured debates about rebate mechanisms.
That the UK nearly did not join the world’s largest research programme would of course have been a very bad thing for science. But anyone who has followed politics with even a small amount of interest will know that there have been lots of decisions made on the UK’s relationship with Europe that defy economic gravity.
On one side of the scale the research community almost uniformly made the case that the UK needed to be part of Horizon. Economically, the government has rarely tried to argue an alternative could be cheaper and it’s likely lots of funding would have been wasted on lots of new bureaucracy that the government is trying to get rid of anyway. But, despite all of this, Horizon association at one point seemed to be slipping away.
