Context matters; you can generally tell whether someone's talking politics or geography.

But in politics the distinction between EU and Europe matters, there's the political EU region, but countries like Switzerland and Norway are politically still in Europe despite not being in EU just due to all the neighboring countries, in theory same should apply to UK

It likes to believe it is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Whenever I go to the UK, people there seem to consistently refer to EU or the rest/continental europe in general as "europe", esp in political/economic context. My impression is that the UK is just too important to be grouped together with other countries.

Ask two different people and get three different answers.