EU Referendum

6 watchers
Dec 2015
12:54pm, 17 Dec 2015
16,853 posts
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DeeGee
As if a Conservative-run UK OUT of Europe will pass legislation IN FAVOUR of protecting workers!
Dec 2015
1:05pm, 17 Dec 2015
367 posts
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Shadowless Formless Legs
I realise that with the current state of the labour party it might seem like they will never get back into power, but I'm pretty confident we won't have a Conservative government forever. I don't think a decision to stay in or leave Europe should be based on the current UK government. We should take an appropriate long term view IMHO.

However it shouldn't be ignored that there is more than one way to influence Europe. One is to have a 'seat at the table', currently filled by people who want neither the table or the seat to even exist. Another is to provide an alternative to Europe. In the hypothetical situtation that we were talking about where Britain had a different approach to MRI safety than Europe, I would imagine that the threat of companies and R&D moving to a more favourably climate in Britain would also have persuaded Europe to change this particular policy.
Dec 2015
1:10pm, 17 Dec 2015
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Spleen
SFL: Why want I want anyone to attend my pay review on my behalf?
Dec 2015
1:21pm, 17 Dec 2015
368 posts
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Shadowless Formless Legs
Obviously it was just a hypothetical example. What real life example would you use is analogous to sending politicians to Europe?

Clearly that situation would never arise in real life, but the point is clear.
Dec 2015
1:43pm, 17 Dec 2015
6,348 posts
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Badger
Part of the argument made to the EU at the time was "All of this will just move to the USA and we'll lose it completely". I can imagine the industrial side of things might have moved, but the academic and radiological research? No chance. The funding is either national (not going to pay for something in another country) or EU-based (wouldn't come our way if we were outside, and always carries a requirement of within-EU international collaboration anyway).

Here's another analogy: your job is at risk, you are summoned to a consultation meeting, you are allowed to bring a colleague as support. Are you going to bring somebody who thinks employment law is a conspiracy to make it difficult for small businesses to compete?

I'm sure you can find holes in that one too, but hey, it's an analogy. Saying "it's like Piccadilly Circus in here" does not require ticket barriers and escalators.
Dec 2015
2:22pm, 17 Dec 2015
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Shadowless Formless Legs
Having no experience of scientific research in the EU or elsewhere I'm happy to defer to your greater knowledge, however it seems that the "All of this will just move to the USA and we'll lose it completely" argument supports what I was saying. The funding issue seems like there are 2 sides to it. We wouldn't benefit from EU funding, but we wouldn't contribute to it either. As we are a net contributor to the EU we could fund our own research although I appreciate you would lose the benefits of collaboration.

I'm not sure that an EU exit would completely exclude the possibility of shared research and would cite the example of the International Space Station as to what can be achieved despite the fact the the US and Russia aren't exactly the best of friends. It might also be argued that we would have more freedom for scientific collaboration with other (non EU) countries.
Dec 2015
3:50pm, 17 Dec 2015
6,350 posts
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Badger
Yes, you made a good point, and I was saying that exactly that kind of argument was used to pressure the EU into changing tack. Though just because it moved somewhere else wouldn't necessarily mean it would move to the UK. And I don't really like the idea of just letting the EU make a bad decision so we can sit back and profit from it.

The benefits of collaboration - economies of scale for starters - are not trivial. (Concrete example: a consortium in one of these frameworks will typically assign, say, data storage and curation to one partner. If you're not doing this in a consortium, that work will be duplicated across all the centres, and even if the centres share the data, it probably won't be in a common structure, creating extra work to exploit it).

Exit wouldn't mean a ban on shared research, no, and we're free to work with non-EU countries as it is - people do collaborative studies with the US, China, Japan all the time. But it's significantly harder. There isn't a lot of funding dedicated to that kind of work in comparison with the amount that's there for EU framework programs (and if we're not putting in, we won't get money out of those frameworks, so we won't be able to join anything going on; just paying money in to join them would basically mean paying money into the EU without our current influence on how it is used). There are also problems because of different legislative frameworks about, for example, patient confidentiality, patent systems (quite different relationship between publication and patenting in the US than the EU), which are much less problematic within the EU because we share those frameworks.
Dec 2015
4:23pm, 17 Dec 2015
5,480 posts
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Too Much Water
A lot of these arguments to do with science and research etc were made about Scotland staying in the UK, the cyber-Nats didn't view that as a significant issue. So why should people sceptical about the benefits of the EU?

I repeat, if we wanted to be a part of a Europe ruled by a crazed German tyrant, we would have rolled over in 1940.
Dec 2015
5:03pm, 17 Dec 2015
6,352 posts
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Badger
See, this is why I don't usually engage in political discussions on FE. Somebody you'd previously thought was reasonable marches into a reasonable conversation and calls you a Nazi sympathiser out of the blue.
Bye now.
Dec 2015
5:25pm, 17 Dec 2015
5,481 posts
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Too Much Water
Come on it's an obvious flippant comment about Merkel and Germany dominating the EU and flexing their muscles with Greece / immigrants etc

At no time did I say you goose step round your lab singing the Horst Wessel song

Keep your hair on!

About This Thread

Maintained by simbil
Are you in or out - why and is there anything much that would change your mind?

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