What a UK Labour election win would mean for Ukraine (2024)

LONDON —Shortly after Britain's last general election in 2019, a young Labour MP let a London conference hall in on a secret.

Wes Streeting, now a senior Labour frontbencher and a rising star in British politics, admitted that most British voters viewed his party's vanquished leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as a threat to national security.

He even agreed with them.

Streeting —a centrist who always opposed the hard-left Corbyn —told the Fabian conference that voters were right to doubt Corbyn's ability to keep Britain safe, given his ambiguity regarding unsavory foreign regimes and his outright animosity toward NATO and nuclear weapons.

Corbyn's successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has spent the past four years trying to rid British voters of the notion his party is unpatriotic and weak on defense.

This has meant a near-united front with the Conservative government on foreign policy — and an unwavering commitment to NATO and the war in Ukraine.

"The last thing anyone in Ukraine wants is to see political parties back in the U.K. squabbling about something that is life or death for them," Starmer said on Sunday.

Standing now on the cusp of power as Britain prepares for a July 4 election, Starmer appears to have succeeded in his primary mission.

A wide range of opinion polling shows the British public now trust Labour over the Tories on defense and national security, just like on nearly every other issue.

And it's not just the British public whom Labour have sought to convince. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey travelled to Kyiv this month to assure their counterparts there that a U.K. Labour government would be fully committed to Ukraine's war efforts.

"[Lammy] and I had one simple message on our visit — that the U.K. continues to be united for Ukraine," Healey said afterward.

"If there is a change of government after the election, there will be no change in Britain's resolve to stand with Ukraine, confront Russian aggression and pursue [Russian President Vladimir] Putin for his war crimes."

For some inside Starmer's top team, the learning curve has been steep.

A senior Labour official admitted that some members of the shadow Cabinet had required emergency foreign policy training after Hamas' Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel brought Middle East conflict back to the fore.

They said a long-held belief by some that defense and foreign policy —rarely election-winning issues for opposition parties — could simply be learned on the hoof once in government had been summarily dispelled.

Attack and defense

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is certainly hoping voters' memories are better than the polling suggests.

He doesn't view security and defense as a bipartisan issue, and has already made them a central theme of his Tory Party's July 4 election campaign. He will continue to remind voters that Starmer, then shadow Brexit secretary, tried to make CorbynU.K. prime minister in 2019.

It's an attack line Labour is prepared to tackle head-on, especially after Starmer barred Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP ever again.

"They are desperate to fight Corbyn, but he’s not even a Labour MP," said a second Labour official, granted anonymity — like others in this article — to speak candidly.

"If they want to fight, they’ll have to answer for their record." Labour notes Britain's armed forces have been cut repeatedly since the Tories came to power in 2010.

But Sunak has gone further, claiming last week that a Starmer premiership would actually embolden Putin. He also implied in February that Starmer was a terrorist sympathizer, given that the Labour leader represented terror suspects when he was a human rights lawyer during the 1990s and 2000s.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and a broader Western concern about what Sunak calls an "axis of authoritarianism," will be cited repeatedly throughout the campaign to emphasize the current moment of global instability — and to suggest that voters stick with what they know.

"It’s important we ask the question of who is better placed to take the action needed, to deliver security for you and your family and our country," Sunak told the BBC on Thursday.

Above all, the Tories will latch onto Starmer's unwillingness to match Sunak's recent defense spending announcement, hoping to unsettle the electorate about Labour's ability to keep Britain safe.

Labour have vowed eventually to spend 2.5 percent of U.K. GDP on defense — but not by 2030, as Sunak promised to do last month. Instead Labour say they would match Sunak's spending plans only "when the fiscal conditions allow," while also claiming they need to do a complete military audit before making any more promises.

"My assumption now is that they won’t match [the 2030 commitment], and it gives us a chance to hammer this security message home," a Downing Street aide said.

The best form of defense

One shadow Cabinet minister said such Tory attacks will ultimately fall flat, given that voters rarely mention defense or foreign policy as key election issues on the doorstep.

"I can understand why they’re trying this attack line — because they can’t fight the election on anything domestic," they added. "If it was Jeremy Corbyn it would work because of his position on the nuclear deterrent and NATO. But Keir Starmer is completely different and we have matched them on Ukraine, on Trident [Britain's nuclear weapons system], on everything."

Another shadow minister said Sunak was "clutching at straws" and that people will always vote based on their own economic self-interest —not defense.

Indeed, a recent YouGov poll showed that only 17 percent of Brits think defense and national security is one of the biggest issues facing the country, well behind the economy, crime, health and immigration.

`However, the figures also show that defense is a far more important issue for voters now than a year ago.

"Defense and national security is something that never comes up in polling or focus groups except in moments of crisis," a Tory minister said.

"But subliminally what goes through people’s minds when they see the lectern of the prime minister [announcing an election] is who they would rather have making decisions on these kinds of issues."

Sunak and Starmer have exactly six weeks to convince British voters that it ought to be them.