During today’s latest summit to save the Euro monetary union (and for once, it was a decisive summit!) , the United Kingdom has taken clear steps towards detaching itself even more from European collaboration and integration. That might serve to bolster the financial sector in London’s City, but if Mr. Cameron’s “bulldog fight” will really serve the country’s overall best interests in the longer term is anybody’s guess. Twenty-six against one is never going to be a very promising perspective.
One thing is for sure: the UK will remain outside the fiscal and political union that will eventually emerge on the Old Continent. There are already those who say that the UK joined the European Union only (with several opt-out clauses and exceptions from EU rules) to do what Great Britain has been doing for centuries – playing the continental powers against each other for its own benefit. There are also those who say that the UK is becoming more and more of a U.S. overseas territory anyway, and has merely taken one more step on this way. Whatever truth there might be in such attitudes, the UK political class is evidently viewing the dynamic German-French axis with deep suspicion – like some Fourth Reich emerging, as has been explicitly claimed here.
And what does this mean for Europe’s pharmaceutical industry? GlaxoSmithKline – the single top-ten player with roots in the UK – is of course a globalized company, more a distributed state than a corporation; Shire, though in a much smaller league, is at least as much American as it is British, and highly internationalized all the same. Current events will have minimal impact on such companies; they have sufficient maneuvering mass to adjust and adapt.
What will happen to those small research-driven startup companies in the UK that have to a good part relied on European Union funding is a different matter entirely. Today and perhaps also during 2012, they won’t feel much impact. But how these companies will fare when the apply for new funding in, lets say, the 8th Framework Programme… thats something I would not dare to predict at this point.
In H.M. Pharma Consultancy’s recently published Protein Engineering Report we have shown that antibody engineering is one of the few fields of advanced therapeutics R&D where Europe plays in the same league as the United States; the small and extremely innovative European biotech companies that specialize here are almost all either German, or from the United Kingdom. How will the balance shift during the years to come?
It won’t be a matter of “the continental powers taking revenge”; it will simply be a matter of the UK no longer being more than a very peripheral player in the community, by the country’s own free choice. In a crisis-driven Europe that will now make a more determined stand to become economically and fiscally united – if only to avoid becoming an irrelevancy as Asia rises – the UK has chosen the place on the doorstep. Last week’s government announcement of a £180 million U.K. biotech fund (see here) might not be a coincidence; it might be direly needed two or three years from now.