Unremarked in the UK MSM, not only because of its familiarity but also because the danger is not fully (or at all) realised, are recently announced EU plans for increasing the spend on "research". Thus it is left to The Irish Times to tell us that the EU plans to spend €7 billion on research in 2012, the largest single research budget in the world bar the US National Institutes for Health and NASA.

This is part of the Seventh Framework Programme running from 2007 to 2014, but it is only part of it. Most of the projects paid-for out of the fund are match-funded, with upwards of 60 percent found from other sources.

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That will be no problem here in the UK!

I must rush through my proposal for research funds on the project 'Potential Benefits of Closer EU Integration for Preventing Global Warming."

Anyone want to share $100 million? I can do the computer models, just need someone to fudge the data and write the report in 2016.

... and keeping it bought.

I thought we were doing a good enough job ourselves without paying for outside help

Academia is heavily infected within the Religion of Consensus. 'Knowledge' goes with funds and not the facts.
When criticism of existing theories will cause funding to dry up, we remain locked in our understanding and incapable of advance.

Consensus should mean people reaching a similar conclusion independently from a given set of data.
It should NOT mean "You think like this or you will be ignored".

Marxism, with its neo-feudalist contempt for us serfs, needs to be rooted out and exposed as a far bigger killer than either the Nazis or the Catholics.

Qauerere Pecuniam, then! ... in the halls of the euterus.

What a lovely world; it must surpass even the decadence of falling Rome.

Not quite, they had 147 official public holidays each year by the time they imploded. (And only 360 days to fit them in, I think)

Org supports projects that support org... news at 11, as they say.

Were you hoping they'd invest in EUReferendum?

Would I take the money?

Don't answer that.

You are a stakeholder after all, van Helsing.

Re. science academia -

I don't think that this level of funding will produce a 5th column. It will still be a minor funding stream for most groups (*). Nice when you get it, but not what keeps you alive on a day-to-day basis. Similar to routine international collaboration, but with better lunches. Many at the top will play the politics, but most academics are cat-level herdable. A much bigger impact in channeling research direction will be the extent to which the national funding bodies are made to sing to the tranzie hymn-sheet. Subject areas can be set so that something somewhere in the output can be selected to justify a pre-chosen policy.

My big objection to the £7bn is waste - EU projects are highly prescribed and bureaucrat heavy.

* Unless they start to create elite groups, whose major funding is EU derived. A 2-tier system, they thrive while others struggle as national funding gets harder. European institues exist already, normally in high equipment cost areas. Rolling that system out more widely would produce the effect that Richard has flagged. Also, there is a consolidation trend driven by the sucess rate for a random EU research application being so low, that it's not worth the effort unless you have an inside track. National funding bodies have fairly recently started defining "centres of excellence". They would be obvious candidates.

And who is the Commissioner for research but an old time Irish party hack, Maire Geoghan Quinn. http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-201 ... dex_en.htm

This is a woman who like many Irish parliamentarians started off as a teacher. She has no scientific credentials whatsoever, nor any business ones other than as a part time business consultant, whatever that means. (Sounds like a lobbyist to me) She famously fell over at a party function, and then sued the Irish state and was handsomely rewarded by the Irish taxpayer for her pains. But then she is used to that, as she will be probably be in receipt of a teacher's pension, a TD's pension, a ministers pension, and an EU court of Auditors pension.

I wonder how much of this budget will end up with Greenpeace and like-minded souls.

as you oft remark, Richard...follow the money. To which: I might add: Every man has his price....and you must be the last person to sell himself short