Bear in mind this was mostly British tax payers money in the first place, the EU doesn't have any money of it's own, it's just tax collected from member states. Whilst I can't verify these figures myself, let's assume they're correct and there's a net benefit to the UK of £300m in research funds each year. How long do you think EU research funding will continue once Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain have been declared bankrupt? Either the research funds will be dramatically reduced or the ECB will print trillions of Euros to recapitalise their member states... Printing Euros means each subsequent Euro's value will suffer from diminishing marginal returns. So whilst you might get the same nominal amount of Euros in funding, it won't be worth £300 million pounds when its converted to Sterling, it will be worth significantly less.
As for Stephen Hawking suggesting "We now recruit many of our best researchers from continental Europe," that's because our education system is in dramatic decline, standards have plummeted, it's woefully underfunded and heavily over subscribed. You'd think one of the brightest people on the planet could have worked that out. Maybe he's not as bright as we'd all hoped.
Here's a thought - Perhaps we could use our EU contributions to improve the education system and create our own world class scientists, it's worked in the past.
Fedaykin wrote:Ah you used the phrase "EU gravy train" that means the research conducted using that funding is inherently bad.
The EU paid back to UK research more than we paid in for research by the UK.
