Keir Starmer enters 10 Downing Street as prime minister today (July 5.) Not well-known abroad, he leads a party that has a poor recent record on transatlantic defense and security. Within his first two weeks in office, he will be swept up in two major summits where he will be keen to show his party has changed.
Just five years ago Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, was soundly defeated by Boris Johnson’s Tories. Polling showed voters considered him “weak, indecisive, lacking in patriotism . . . excessively left-wing and unsuitable to lead the country.”
Starmer and his team have worked hard to change the party’s image. Asked the defining question as to whether, in extremis, he would push the nuclear button, Starmer said yes and made a high-profile visit to the submarine yard where the country’s new £41bn ($52bn) nuclear deterrent is being built. Corbyn said he would never respond to an attack with nuclear weapons.
Labour’s 2024 election manifesto reflected this shift and is in many ways similar to that of the Conservatives on defense and security (although Tory leader Rishi Sunak argued on July 1 that Labour still cannot be trusted.)
Labour promised that “the UK’s military, financial, diplomatic and political support for Ukraine will remain steadfast,” seeming to suggest that military aid will continue at the current rate of about £3bn ($3.8bn) a year, plus civil aid.
On defense, the new government has not (yet) committed to a date, but says it aims to raise spending to 2.5% of GDP. The Conservatives had pledged to do this by 2030, while Labour committed to an immediate security review to establish the country’s needs.
Whatever the outcome, it will not be able to avoid confronting the dismal state of the country’s armed forces; a House of Commons committee warned in February that the UK was not ready to fight an all-out war.
Starmer has ruled out any return to European Union (EU) membership or even an interim step like rejoining the customs union. Even so, he wants to improve relations that reached their nadir in 2020 when the UK finally left the bloc (which remains still its biggest trading partner.)
His party’s manifesto said: “We will be confident in our status outside of the EU, but a leading nation in Europe once again, with an improved and ambitious relationship with our European partners.”
He will have a chance to drive the message home when Britain hosts 40-plus European heads of state, government, and foreign ministers of the European Political Community (EPC) at Blenheim Palace on July 18. It will be early days for the Starmer administration, so Europeans will not be anticipating a lot of detail, but they can expect a warmer embrace than was offered by the Conservatives.
Even before that, Starmer is expected to attend the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington from July 9-11. He will meet President Joe Biden, with whom he shares a political outlook, but his aides will be keen to maintain relations with team Trump.
The visit will offer a reminder to the new British administration that you can’t always work with your favored partners and — especially in relations with the US — this is about as important as it gets.
The UK’s intelligence and military forces are intimately tied to Washington but the days when Tony Blair, another of Starmer’s Labour predecessors, enjoyed a strong bond with Republican President George W Bush, are long gone.
Labour’s manifesto called the US an “indispensable ally,” words that describe the centerpiece of UK foreign policy since 1945. But Starmer’s team will worry, like the rest of Europe, that times are changing.
So while the Labour manifesto stated that “our commitment to NATO as the cornerstone of European and global security is unshakeable,” the new government knows the alliance’s power comes from its American muscle and leadership. Without those, it’s in trouble.
Perhaps with an eye on this, the manifesto added: “Labour will seek an ambitious new UK-EU security pact to strengthen co-operation on the threats we face. We will rebuild relationships with key European allies, including France and Germany, through increased defense and security cooperation.”
On China, the party pledged to “cooperate where we can, compete where we need to, and challenge where we must” and will conduct what it calls a strategic audit of the bilateral relationship.
The promise to address growing terrorism by governments also got a mention, with Labour saying it would apply the UK’s anti-terrorism policies to covert actions by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Putin’s Kremlin.
The manifesto pointedly mentioned the 2018 chemical weapons attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which put them and a police officer in hospital and killed a British woman. The reference was not accidental. In response to the attack, Corbyn suggested that samples of the nerve agent novichok be sent to Russia for analysis. Labour is very keen to put that past behind it.
Francis Harris is Managing Editor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and oversees Europe’s Edge. He was a foreign correspondent and Deputy Foreign Editor with the Daily Telegraph, and served in Prague, London, New York, and Washington.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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