Luke de Pulford is founder and executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, the world’s largest political initiative on the subject. Previously he co-founded and ran the anti-slavery charity Arise.
Labour’s landslide in Thursday’s general election means that for the first time in 14 years, the U.K. will have a center-left prime minister on Downing Street.
Keir Starmer’s government will be tasked with developing a legislative program capable of steering Britain through one of the most fraught and uncertain periods in its recent history.
His party’s victory follows a campaign dominated by immigration, tax, housing and the cost of living. As a result, we know quite a bit about what Labour intends to do at home. On foreign policy: not so much.
That isn’t wholly surprising. In U.K. general elections it’s almost traditional to avoid discussing international affairs. Campaign strategists insist it’s a waste of effort, based on the belief that voters care more about issues closer to home. Nevertheless, the lack of discussion on China — one of the most consequential policy issues of our generation — ought to be cause for concern.
The relative silence has given rise to speculation about how the Starmer administration will handle relations with Beijing. Labour’s manifesto didn’t contain many clues — just a vague commitment to audit relations with China.
The reality is that Labour’s policy on China is easy to predict. Let me tell you a story to illustrate.
Back in 2020-21, I was coordinating a cross-party campaign to amend the Trade Bill (legislation that set out Britain’s post-Brexit independent trade policy) to include a clause that would prevent the U.K. from entering into free trade agreements with states that were perpetrating genocide. We had China and Uyghurs in mind. Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration was strongly opposed. We ended up taking the Johnson government closer to defeat than any other vote in his premiership. It was a bruising campaign.
Labour, with Starmer at the helm, was in full support of the proposal, offering no fewer than six three-line whip votes (a strict instruction to attend and vote according to the party’s position) on various iterations of the amendment in both the House of Commons and House of Lords. In the end, the campaign was narrowly defeated, with the government bringing forward concessions to pick off our parliamentary support. They won, but Labour’s policy on genocide in Xinjiang could not have been clearer.
In July 2021 then Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy said, “We have watched as the situation has deteriorated in Hong Kong and as genocide is committed in Xinjiang.” Stephen Kinnock, another senior Labour MP, left no room for doubt in early 2022, saying, “The evidence of genocide in Xinjiang is compelling and conclusive.”
These are not the personal opinions of back-bench Labour lawmakers. Both Nandy and Kinnock were senior members of the shadow cabinet, and as such their words reflect the party’s position. Be in no doubt: It was Labour policy that China was committing genocide against Uyghurs.
This point was underlined when, shortly after the so-called “Genocide Amendment” battles, parliament passed a motion in April 2021, unanimously recognizing Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs and other minorities in China as genocide. Labour wanted to show parliamentary unity in support of those minorities. Significant, because this was a major political party agitating for formal genocide recognition — to my knowledge the first time this has happened in the history of the U.K. parliament. In the end, a vote wasn’t necessary and the motion passed unanimously.
Why does this matter? Because, since then, we have seen the Labour Party slowly and quietly retreat from this position as the prospect of power has approached.
In March 2023, under questioning from journalists, new shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Labour would “act multilaterally with our partners” to hold China accountable for Uyghur human rights abuses through international courts. This is a long way from the policy of the Genocide Amendment, which would have created a way for the U.K. to declare genocide unilaterally. It’s even further from the previous rock-solid pronouncements of Nandy and Kinnock.
Since then, the commitment has vanished altogether, with no mention of the g-word in Labour’s manifesto, despite the fact no other issue related to China elicited such a strong and principled stance from Labour in decades.
What explains this change, and why might it help us predict Labour’s posture toward China over the coming years? The short answer is that Labour needs to deliver on the economy and is scared that upsetting Beijing would jeopardize that goal. There are other factors, like Labour having to adjust to the stark reality of having to manage a civil service that, in my experience, is obstinately obstructive to a more assertive China policy.
Add to that the return of Peter Mandelson, a strategist for former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who reportedly has Starmer’s ear on China affairs. Mandelson has had Chinese state-owned enterprises as public affairs clients and was the only Labour member of the House of Lords to defy his own party to vote against the Genocide Amendment.
Which leads me to the core point of this piece: The Genocide Amendment debates were about the tension between core values and trade interests. At the time, Labour was keen to resolve that tension in favour of fundamental rights. If Labour can abandon a principled commitment to something as fundamental as genocide for fear of jeopardizing short-term economic gain, we would be foolish to believe that any other criterion will orientate its foreign policymaking.
None of this bodes well for those worried about U.K. resilience in the event of a Taiwan Strait escalation or Beijing’s expanding influence and interference programs, to say nothing of supply chain dependency. Meanwhile, with an unassailable majority, Starmer doesn’t have to worry too much about parliamentary scrutiny. The Labour leader now has up to five years where he will never be under serious threat of losing a vote.
There is a golden rule for those seeking to understand British foreign policymaking: It never moves unless forced. Ministerial ambition, parliamentary trench warfare, media outrage or unavoidable circumstantial change can all shift policy, but outside of a serious escalation in the South China Sea, I don’t see it happening. Instead, we will see greater U.K.-China engagement, a softening of criticism and greater U.K. exposure to manifold Beijing-related risks.
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