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We’re really building capacity now... 

Welcome to Sir Nick Harvey, our new CEO! 

I’m absolutely delighted that this month our brand new CEO, Sir Nick Harvey, got his feet under the desk at EMUK HQ!  

Nick brings with him a treasure trove of experience. He was, under Sir Vince Cable, the CEO of the Liberal Democrats. So he’s had his hand on the tiller of a political organisation with over threefold the membership and staff size of European Movement. That bodes very well for EMUK’s ability to scale up at pace, knowing exactly what infrastructure we need to build as we grow. Nick can claim over 25 years of experience in politics, from MP for North Devon to minister of State for the Armed Forces, experience which is vital for the political territory in which we’re engaged. He’s also a lovely person and I hope you all get the chance to meet and chat with him at future EM events. 

Building our internal community engagement 

We’re building much more engagement with our grassroots. 

It’s an absolute priority for me that our members and local groups are heard, listened to, engaged with, and fully involved in everything we do. That’s why we now have these Chair’s Updates, a regular email briefing our National Council on what’s coming up each month, the grassroots conference in Sheffield in July, our recent Brexit Watch dedicated to grassroots activity...  

…and JUST IN - a new monthly Grassroot Update Webinar series. That means that the membership gets to work with EM staff on key issues. Scott Daniells will kick off our programme this Tues, introducing his new series of training videos – and in the months after him, Andrew Plant and Michael Anderson will go next with webinars on local media and local supporter lists, respectively. ALSO, on Tuesday, Scott will be showing everyone the new Grassroots Hub on the website, packed with resources for local groups. 

And with our new EM staff roles supporting the local groups and members on the tech front, I hope you can see how robustly this is developing. I know in the past with the pro-EU movement local groups have often felt very frustrated at the lack of two-way engagement. This should now all be starting to look and feel very different! If it doesn’t, email me!  

Ultimately, if we are to win this battle, we need our own community to be happy, unified, cohesive, experienced, well-resourced, fully involved and enthused. That’s what we’re building. 

Horizon Europe 

Rishi Sunak’s inability, indecision, or outright disinclination to seal a Horizon Europe deal hot off the back of the Windsor Framework agreement… has now become a depressing and tortured saga. 

The Windsor Framework was first announced in February this year. Our Science Minister had been telling us for the last 2.5 years that reassociation to the EU’s 95 billion Euro “Horizon Europe” science programme was the absolute first choice for UK science, and it was the EU holding it up over disagreements about the Northern Ireland protocol. So we waited. And waited. “On the bench,” in the words of our Science Minister.  

Then Rishi signs the Windsor Framework. Ursula von der Leyen hails that it is “great news for scientists”. Rishi does not reciprocate the warm sentiment and no-one can understand why he doesn’t triumphantly kick the ball into the open goal. 

Then it emerges that Rishi Sunak is very interested in the Plan B that the Science Minister cooked up but didn’t use for 2.5 years as we held out for Plan A: Horizon Europe association. Is this bizarre turnaround a haggling tool for better rates? – or is Rishi serious? He could well be serious, given that it was Chancellor Sunak that decided to chuck the Erasmus+ programme citing costs and built the woeful Turing programme to replace it. He had form for bad decisions.  

Then he published the Plan B, now branded “Pioneer”, to the ridicule of the UK science community and the Treasury clawed back £1.6bn unused Horizon Europe funds – to the consternation of UK scientists. 

Then in July there were two rounds of false hope, followed by the announcement that Sunak was kicking the can over the summer and into September. All of this is infuriating to the UK science community to say the least. The Plan B is clearly a dead duck and though Rishi may think he’s a hard haggler, every week of delay costs money and piles on a nervous hilling effect for UK science. It’s inexplicably daft behaviour.  

At European Movement, we've been making as much noise as we can about this. Working with top scientists such as Lord Rees (the Astronomer Royal and ex-President of the Royal Society), Prof Dame Anne Glover, Prof Martin McKee and others, we’ve landed quotes in The Times and BBC. We worked with Sadiq Khan’s office to pressure the PM on this issue – and I’ve been giving out my opinion across science media, The New European and the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2. We will keep hammering this one home and we will collect all the receipts. Thanks to all of you who signed the petition on it. Get ready for another push in September! 

If you want to understand why it is vital for the UK to join Horizon Europe, please do read the piece I wrote for the European Movement website on it. 

Who’s afraid of the big red tape? 

Answer – the government. They just can’t take anymore Brexit red tape. And finally, on this area at least, the government are conceding defeat on their previous Brexit ambitions. 

First up, the CE mark. The government has just given up on its latest Brexit reinvention of the European wheel, as the UKCA mark which was meant to replace the European CE mark has finally bitten the dust. This article by Polly Toynbee is certainly worth a read. Essentially, UK business has had a collective sigh of relief as they escaped the need to be enslaved by a new bureaucratic and pointless system under the banner of Brexit “freedom”. But, as we celebrate, also do look at the vast government guidance on UKCA that was prepared at our expense and let your mind boggle at the sheer opportunity cost and financial and time waste in pursuing this dead end for so long. 

Secondly, the news that yet again, for the fifth time now, post-Brexit import checks on goods coming from the EU to the UK have been delayed. It’s almost like this government of Brexiteers don’t want the full cake of red tape they ordered. 

The reason, of course, that the government does not want to start putting checks on products coming from the EU to the UK is that they’ve seen the chaos that these Brexit checks caused when they were put on our exports, in a timely way, by the EU. The government knows that the moment such a barrier goes up on imports, countless European manufacturers, producers and transporters will just decide they can’t be bothered with the British red tape and instead prioritise other customers in their vast Single Market where there is no import-export, just pick up and drop off. That reduces range, choice and competition for UK customers and those companies that do continue to send good through will have to pass on extra costs, increasing inflation within the UK. 

So for now we continue with the brutal asymmetry of all UK products going to the EU undergoing checks, but none of the EU products coming into the UK (or going anywhere in the Single Market) undergoing checks. Hardly the Brexiteer dream of lessened red tape and a massive competitive edge for UK businesses over European counterparts!  

UK farmers are certainly not happy about this state of affairs. They are being outcompeted by EU rivals because of this competitive asymmetry. 

Thank you Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. As our own Laurel and Hardy act, that’s another fine mess you gotten us into. 

Anyway, that’s it for this month. See you next time for the next instalment of the tragicomic Brexit circus. 

Dr. Mike Galsworthy, Aug 2023