Nurse joins the EU referendum battle
Jan 27, 2013
Bishop Hill in EU, Royal Society

Paul Nurse has weighed into the EU referendum fray with an article in the Guardian outlining why he thinks we should stay in.

There's a lot of spurious verbiage to get through, but at the end of the day he seems to be saying that because we get some science funding from the EU we should stay in (he makes a subsidiary point that being in aids collaboration). Having cut through the stream of words in this way, one can see that his argument is extraordinarily thin.

I assume Nurse is clever enough to understand that the concerns of the scientific community are only a minor side issue in the arguments over Europe. In reality, we have the considerable issues of taxation, self-determination, democracy and openness to the world to consider.

Money grubbing by scientists should not weigh too heavily on the views of politicians or of the voters in a referendum.

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