The United Kingdom has backtracked on the EU Horizon program, a €100 billion subsidy to research and development.
The United Kingdom will rejoin the EU’s Horizon and Copernicus science programs, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak officially announced on Thursday. For the first time since the 2016 Brexit referendum, the UK and the EU resumed friendly relationships.
Horizon is a massive subsidy program for scientific research and innovation, allocating €100 billion between 2021 and 2027. On the other hand, Copernicus is the EU’s space program, whose goal is to provide precise information on the Earth’s surface and climate and therefore help mitigate the effects of climate change. Copernicus will receive €5,8 billion in investments between 2021 and 2027.
“Today’s political agreement on the UK’s participation in Horizon Europe and Copernicus will strengthen science across the whole of Europe,” European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen posted on X (formerly known as Twitter).
Rishi Sunak too expressed his approval, calling the Horizon and Copernicus plans “the right deal for the UK”. British science minister Peter Kyle also expressed his approval, saying that the UK had missed out on two years of innovation by being outside the Horizon program.
The UK will not, however, be joining the Euratom program, the EU’s nuclear fusion experimental department. Instead, the United Kingdom wishes to implement a nuclear fusion program domestically.
Difficult relationships
The United Kingdom was on the fence of the Horizon program for most of the Brexit negotiations. When it became clear London wanted to pursue a hard Brexit, although the government was uncertain until the last minute, Brussels rejected British participation in the program.
After Brexit, the UK tried to rejoin the Horizon Europe program, but relationships remained tense over the Northern Ireland border.
The island of Ireland is physically divided in two: a sovereign republic (part of the European Union and the Eurozone) in the south and a sub-division of the United Kingdom in the north.
The land border on Ireland has been the object of harsh disputes for the better part of thirty years, finally resolved in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. With Brexit, these disputes risked firing up once more.
To solve the Northern Ireland conundrum, the UK and the EU finally reached an agreement last February. The deal divides the trade flow between the two “Irelands” into separate lanes: the “green lane” is for products traveling within the United Kingdom, therefore receiving minimal checks, while the “red lane” is for products crossing the border into the Republic of Ireland, receiving the full set of EU controls and regulations.
Once the Northern Ireland issue was resolved, talks about rejoining the Horizon Europe program resumed.
