All entries for April 2016

Please vote in the upcoming EU referendum – and I suggest you vote for the #UKtoStay

Dear students and tutees,

Please vote in the upcoming EU referendum – and I suggest you vote for the #UKtoStay

Today I am writing to encourage you to register (if you have not yet done so) and to vote in the upcoming referendum on the UK’s future membership in the UK. I am taking what you might initially think is an unusual step for your physics tutor and supervisor, but I genuinely believe this vote and decision to be important to you personally as a physicist and to all of us as scientists in the UK.

You, as recent alumni or current student at Warwick, are among those with most to gain if we remain and most to lose if the UK were to leave the EU. Your university degree will enable you to make the most of the opportunities offered in the EU. With a BSc, MPhys, MSc or PhD, now recognized everywhere in the EU, you can access jobs all across the EU – and you can do so with the certainty that your social benefits, your employee rights and your pension will be safeguarded across borders.

In fact, the EU has been working hard in the last decades to make sure that people are at the heart of EU regulations. In my lifetime, I have seen border crossings become welcome centres, costs for financial transactions, telephone and mobile phone calls across EU countries come down, air passenger rights strengthened, safety regulations unified, workers and human rights strengthened and many more. And all this has happened in a fair and largely transparent procedure – certainly at least as fair and transparent as any other democratic government process in individual member states.

As scientists, we encourage our students to work in teams, because team work, openness, trust and fairness are at the heart of science. The EU, with its previous research framework programs and it current Horizon2020 programmes, has been steadily building the case for team work in science and industry across national boundaries in the EU. We in the UK are among the leading beneficiaries of this, not just in the overall amount of funds coming into the country, but also because of the opportunities created by this to us as physicists to engage with partners across the EU and to mutually learn from each other.

I do not wish to comment on individual cost/benefit analyses/opinions offered in the newspapers and news programmes on TV. My own gut feeling is that while there will certainly be some people economically benefitting from the UK leaving, the vast majority of UK citizens will lose out. I reckon on a roughly 20% winners, 80% losers scenario, especially in the long run. Clearly, some of the UK’s most important industrial institutions have warned repeatedly about the dangers to the UK economy if we were to leave.

However, I also think that such a purely economic argument is missing the point: our world is increasingly growing together. When I grew up in the 70/80’s, a phone call to the US was an expensive undertaking, a trip to Asia a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Holidays, if they went abroad at all, were to neighbouring countries. Nowadays, many of you have already travelled to different continents and student fundraisers routinely tend to get to southern Europe. Calls across the globe are down to pennies a minutes while skype/whatsapp/etc reduce costs even for videoconferencing to nearly nil – our world is indeed more interconnected and the speed of the process is getting faster. However, such an interconnected world must make sure that all people are treated fairly and have similar rights. Just as the UN is an important part of this process, so is the EU – making sure that fairness and people’s rights are respected across Europe and the world.

So, as a final word, please think hard about your vote, then go and vote – this is a decision you want to make sure you had your opinion heard and registered!

PS: Of course I’d be happy to discuss in more detail with each and every one of you, just let me know. And yes, I am German and have been happily working and living as a German/EU immigrant in this country for 14 years.

—
Rudolf A. Roemer
Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK www.warwick.ac.uk/go/rudoroemer, +44 7984 353749

Rudo Roemer : 15 Apr 2016 10:37 |  Tags: #Uktostay |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem