Simon Usherwood

We are a few weeks past Andy Burnham’s speech about wanting to re-open the question of the UK’s long-term relationship with the EU. Since then, there has been a fair amount of (sometimes hyperventilated) comment and discussion about what this relationship might look like, usually in flavours of Why My Prior Preference Was Right Then […]

A short post this week, partly because I’ve got other things on, more because my cunning plan to summarise where parties are on ‘Europe’ came a bit unstuck. Either they’ve kept quiet on the matter or they’ve offered much talk. Probably only the LibDems of the national parties have both adopted a new policy objective […]

Well, it feels like I picked a good time to start trying to blog more. Andy Burnham’s speech to the Labour party conference has fired the gun on something that felt pretty unlikely just a few weeks ago: a debate about the UK’s relationship with the EU. Given that one month ago I myself was […]

It’s party conference time, so everyone’s pushing their ideas into the public domain, hoping they will get picked up by the faithful (and the media) just at the point that policy might get changed. The IPPR have a useful report on the costs of not having mutual recognition of conformity assessment with the EU, highlighting […]

I’ve been spending the week at the UACES conference in Prague, talking about lots of things to do with European Studies. However, one the things that didn’t come up very much was UK-EU relations. It’s almost as if most people don’t have it on their minds. The moment it did come up was during the […]