It was one of those campaigns. In May, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that Oscar and Nobel Prize winners would be granted an accelerated visa procedure for Great Britain. As was to be expected, the government’s efforts to attract international elites in science and culture as figureheads went to a superflop. Interior Minister Priti Patel now had to admit that not a single person applied for one of these “Global Talent” visas.
It’s not just a little embarrassing. One only remembers selectively other highly embarrassing events of the past six months with which Great Britain, which the Tories had portrayed as the new world power, made a mockery of itself. Almost satirical, for example, the government’s letters to all the Krauts still living in the country asking them to make themselves available as truck drivers. A German class 3 driving license entitles you to drive a Lorries. These stood around empty, because the vast majority of Eastern European truck drivers had returned to the continent after Brexit and of course Johnson’s offer of a three-month visa did not lure them back as guest workers.
The most visible, powerfully pictorial consequences of the national transport crisis were empty supermarket shelves and petrol stations without petrol, which is why the prime minister had to deploy the army, just like in an emerging country. By the way until today.
Another veritable farce was the grandiose announcement of the “National Space Strategy” by the Prime Minister in September. According to Johnson, Brexit has already transformed Great Britain into “Global Britain”, and in 2022 it will reach the stars as “Galactic Britain”, and then rockets will be launched into space. Incredible smiles and biting mockery everywhere. Even the most naive observer could not fail to notice that at the height of the supply crisis, which also affected drug shortages in pharmacies and missing ambulances, Johnson wanted to distract attention with his cocky and mendacious promises. Such anecdotal examples of the blatant failure of the Tories flocking around the political clown Boris Johnson misjudge the full extent of the tragedy that is currently taking place in the (un) United Kingdom.
To come back to the “Global Talent” initiative: Nobel laureates or scientists of excellence working at British universities referred to it as “joke” and attributed the spectacular failure to the unattractive framework conditions for foreign researchers, for example in view of the separation of EU third-party funding.
The spreading Europhobia, the increased absence of European students or the poor working conditions affect researchers at all levels of the mercilessly neoliberalized university business anyway. In this respect, it makes sense that the university union UCU has called for class strikes from December 1st to 3rd. Short-term contracts, pension cuts, wage stagnation and constantly increasing workload are the central points of the industrial action. That is the bitter reality of the universities in Brexit Britain. And Nobel Prize winners have better options in other countries anyway.
