The UK in a Changing Europe pocast year in review

The UK in a Changing Europe Podcast

News

4.3 • 105 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This year has seen the inauguration of Donald Trump, the first ever UK-EU summit, continued conflict in Ukraine and other parts of the world, severe domestic and foreign policy challenges, as well as a changing political landscape in the UK. As 2025 draws to a close, Anand Menon is joined by UKICE stalwarts Catherine Barnard and Rob Ford for a discussion on the year gone by. They reflect on Trump 2.0 the Labour party's remarkable slump in the polls and the rise of its challengers, how Brexit dividing lines still influence how people vote, how the government's much-vaunted UK-EU reset has really gone, and, of course, some predictions for 2026.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the UK in a Changing Europe podcast.
0:08.0	And for our last episode this year, we thought we'd do a little review of the year
0:11.6	and a preview of the year to come.
0:14.0	And who better to undertake this task with me than Professor Catherine Barnard of the University
0:19.1	of Cambridge and Professor Rob Ford of the University
0:22.5	of Manchester. To whom Rob, congratulations because I believe your general election book has just
0:28.0	come out in actual physical form. Is that right? It is in the process of coming out.
0:33.2	To be saying this for about six months. You can pre-order it now and it will definitely be with you quite soon. I can't be more specific than that because the publishers keep moving the goalpost. Out for Christmas? No, which I'm quite disappointed about, but out for the new year. So you can have it with the turkey sandwiches. Wonderful. Fantastic. So let's kick us on. I mean, God, I always struggle.
0:55.3	Maybe it's an age thing to think back for the year in which we get to December. But this year
0:59.7	just feels like it's been particularly sort of frantic and frenetic. And I suppose that's partly
1:05.5	our politics. It's partly the sort of tortured debates about policies. It's partly also
1:09.4	what's happened internationally, isn't it? I mean, President Trump has dominated this year, hasn't it, in all sorts of ways?
1:15.5	Well, yes, absolutely. And of course, his election was last year in November,
1:19.7	but the way the US system works, he only actually came into power. The beginning of this year was the
1:24.7	inauguration. And I mean, for those of us who remember the first
1:28.9	Trump administration, it's somewhat of a familiar feeling in that you wake up each morning,
1:33.8	not really sure in what way he's going to be dominating the news headlines today, but pretty sure
1:38.8	that he probably will. So that kind of sense of perpetual chaos and unpredictability is there.
1:43.5	But if anything, it's intensified now.
1:45.9	So we've had huge rouse, tariffs and trade, an area which many people have probably considered
1:51.7	to be settled.
1:52.9	It's unsettled the situation with NATO and the Ukraine.
	...

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