Ideas on Europe

Simon Usherwood

avatar

The Author

Simon Usherwood is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the Open University and former Chair of UACES.

Blogs on: EUatOU

Articles

We’re gonna need a bigger tracker…

Simon Usherwood |

One of the joys of listening to Radio 4 is that while having my regular daily walk yesterday I heard a lovely discussion about the 50th anniversary of Jaws, the film that created the summer blockbuster and gave us some top meme-worthy comment. It feels apposite to mention this because one of my main takeaways […]

Circling the wagons

Simon Usherwood |

Not so much a post as a list of links for you this time, as I’ve been working up from a thread on BlueSky to a graphic to a podcast. The central theme here is how the UK-EU relationship is affected by the chaotic Trump administration in the US, particularly in the wake of his […]

All quiet on the Protocol front

Simon Usherwood |

This week’s vote on the Consent motion was unremarkable enough that there was hardly any media coverage in the run-up, even in Northern Ireland itself. Positions had been long-known and the result (a simple majority) was a given, despite the (sometimes long-winded) efforts of some MLAs to convince others. For a mechanism that had raised […]

Visions, strategies and plans: Deconstructing Labour’s EU policy

Simon Usherwood |

Maybe it’s some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, but since the Tories left office I have not felt the same urge to write about British European policy. Equally possibly, it might be because I feel a bit broken by another government with a lack of clear purpose in this domain. Labour, like their predecessors, seem to […]

The sleeping dog of ‘Europe’: UK relations with the EU as a non-issue

Simon Usherwood |

This piece was originally posted as part of the UK Election Analysis project. Do visit for lots of other pieces on all aspects of the 2024 General Election. Given that the past decade of British politics has arguably been shaped by the question of Europe more than any other single issue, one might have expected […]

UACES, IACES and Ideas on Europe do not take responsibility for opinions expressed in articles on blogs hosted on Ideas on Europe. All opinions are those of the contributing authors. The content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The map in the Ideas on Europe logo is an abstract map. It does not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UACES, IACES and Ideas on Europe concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

© UACES 2026