EU has realised it needs Britain more than it thought

Windsor Accord allows Brussels to extricate itself from a policy doing serious harm to European science

Vladimir Putin is the godfather of the Windsor Framework. Full-scale war in Europe for the first time since 1945 is what has made it possible to detoxify the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Few people are aware that the UK extended its world-class cyber-warfare deterrent to the whole of eastern and central Europe at the outset of the conflict, raising the stakes for the Kremlin if it tried to take down critical infrastructure with cyber attacks.

Nor are they aware that the UK extended a solidarity guarantee to Sweden and Finland at a critical juncture, offering de facto Article 5 protection even though they were not in Nato. But the significance of this was not lost on the governments of these countries, and they have a voice in EU affairs through multiple channels.

Commission pettifogging over the trade of seed potatoes and sausages from one part of the UK to another had become surreal. Events vindicated the British view that Putin could be checked and that Ukraine should be backed to the hilt. That put us in tight alignment with front-line states, the Nordics and Holland. The divide was not between the UK and the EU: it is and was within the EU.

Much wishful thinking in Paris and Brussels has been ruthlessly exposed. The war dashed hopes of a European defence and foreign policy “superpower” emerging now that the EU is no longer held back by Britain, acting in eternal character as De Gaulle’s Trojan horse for the Americans. Little has come of Emmanuel Macron’s “European sovereignty” or his defence condominium with the Germans. He has drawn the inevitable conclusion and buried the hatchet over Brexit, something easier for him to do with the calm and amenable Rishi Sunak.

Personally, I am stunned by Sunak’s deal. As Lord Mandelson said, it is “as good as it gets”. David Davis, on the other side of the Brexit bench, called it a “spectacular negotiating success”. Indeed it is.

Yes, the European Court remains in the shadows, but governing a reduced sliver of the acquis, with no “reachback” into British economic policy through state aid rules. The larger political point is that Brussels no longer wishes to use the Protocol to demonstrate hegemonic power. That episode is over.

The deal clears the way for Britain to rejoin Horizon Europe for science and research, and the nuclear Euratom programme. Or, put differently, it allows the EU to extricate itself from a destructive policy that was doing serious harm to European science and was leading to a generalised revolt by research institutions and universities against the Commission. Brussels discovered that in sanctioning the UK, it was sanctioning Europe.

Let us be clear what happened. Horizon is a genuinely pan-european scheme. British participation is written into the original Brexit text. Until yesterday, the EU was refusing to fulfil its legal commitment.

It has been holding science hostage, using it as a political pressure tool. Was it Moscow-educated Maroš Sefčovič, the Commission’s Brexit enforcer, who chose to weaponise science? Whoever it was, he or she did not understand the nature of cross-border co-operation in research, or the pivotal role of British and Swiss institutions in Europe’s scientific ecosystem.

“It’s a punishment for all of us, a punishment for Europe, a sadomasochistic decision,” said Prof Antoine Petit, head of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Grants have been blocked. Projects are in limbo. Suddenly, scientists on the Continent find themselves on the wrong side of a political barrier when dealing with the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge or the Torus fusion labs in Oxfordshire.

The European University Association said the EU research policy had become “arbitrary and obscure: the Commission can no longer claim to be the adult in the room”. The universal cry from European science has been to stop this folly immediately.

Britain is not a poor relation in this domain. It has the highest ranking universities in Europe by far. It has big beasts of funding research such as the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK. Without British participation, Europe risks being relegated to a second-tier backwater in global science.

Horizon is an excellent programme – the sort of Europe that the British always wanted – but it is excellent for a reason. European scientists were so disenchanted with the Commission’s research directorate – top-down, bureaucratic, glacially slow, and run by ideologues who micromanaged the use of funds – that they drifted away in the early 2000s and formed their own cross-border network. It became the European Research Council.

The Commission learnt a hard lesson. It changed its fundamental approach to science and brought the dissidents back into the EU family. The ERC and Horizon have together evolved into a European success story precisely because they are sui generis.

It is desirable that Britain should retake its place in this structure. This is not because it needs hand-outs from Brussels. The Government has pledged to match pre-brexit levels of research grants whatever happens. Horizon is valuable because it is the glue that holds everything together in European science collaboration.

The moral of the Horizon saga is that the EU needs the UK more than Brussels supposed in the first flush of post-brexit triumphalism, just as it needs the UK more than it ever imagined to prevent Putin reconstituting the Russian tsarist empire. Sunak had the personality and good judgment to seize the moment, and so did Ursula von der Leyen. Hats off to both of them.