By Claire Ainsley
A resurgent UK Labour Party is looking like it may be heading back into government in Britain after voters go to the polls on July 4th. What would a change of governing party in Britain for the first time in fourteen years mean for foreign relations? And is Labour—and the center-left more generally—prepared to secure their nation’s interests in a new age of global instability?
If Labour leaders do form a government this year, they will do so in a dramatically changed world compared to when they last left office, in the end days of Gordon Brown’s premiership in 2010. The global financial crisis preceded a period of low economic growth, the rise of right-wing populism and authoritarian rulers, and a breakdown in the rules-based order that liberal democracy was founded on. Britain itself withdrew from the European Union, a construct that had seemed such a stable feature of increasing integration.
Today, we live in a more dangerous world than many Labour politicians will have known in their adult lifetimes.
