AGeek: The UK has a long tradition of collaborating with Europeans, the biggest example of which on the ground is our involvement in ESO. However the key part of that organization is the S - Southern. Most of Europe's high quality observing sites are in the southern hemisphere. Pulling out of Gemini and the ING will leave us with no optical access to the northern skies. This is critical to following up survey programmes with our northern submm and IR telescopes, JCMT and UKIRT. The one good route for collaboration in the north in Europe is Spain, through their Canaries observatories, but we're effectively dumping the ING on them so they're not likely to be best pleased with us. There will doubtless be individual collaborations but these will be done on a piecemeal basis with Spanish leadership of the optical programmes. The other alternative is similar piecemeal collaborations with US institutes who have plenty of northern observatories and now even more Gemini time. Again, there will have to be a US lead on such projects. Any way you cut it the UK will get less bang for it's buck as well as spending fewer bucks. Specifically the huge lead that projects like UKIDSS and SCUBA2, using northern telescopes, give us in the IR and submm will be seriously dented as we lose the ability to capitalize on these projects with optical followup. It's no good finding a candidate redshift 6 quasar with UKIDSS if you then have to hand the data to someone else to get the confirming redshift.