Anand Menon, Director of the U.K. in a Changing Europe, a think tank, discusses the outcomes of the U.K. elections, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s political future, and how the Labour Party’s foreign policy towards India and China might look if it forms the next U.K. government, in an interview with Sriram Lakshman.
What are we expecting in terms of turnout this year relative to the past few elections? And historically, is there a statistical relationship in the U.K. between turnout and the prospects for the incumbent?
I don’t know of any relationship between turnout and incumbency. On balance, we would expect turnout, I think, to be low this time. There are two things that tend to militate in favour of a low turnout. One is people thinking that it’s a foregone conclusion. And everyone is convinced that Labour is going to win. And the second is when people have a sense that there is not that much difference between the big two parties. That tends to drive turnout down as well. Now, it’s very hard to predict because the counterargument is there’s so much anger against the Conservative Party that people who don’t normally vote will go out to register their discontent. So we are never certain until the day but there are reasons for thinking that turnout will be low.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has the worst approval ratings, according to some polls, since 1979. He has promised to not jump ship and move back to California. How does Mr. Sunak’s political future look if he loses his own seat?
I think the cynical approach to that question will be to say he might be quietly relieved if he loses his seat because then he does not have to honour his pledge to stay in Parliament for the next five years. Most people I have spoken to seem to think it’s very, very unlikely that if he wins his seat, he will stay in Parliament, or if he does stay in Parliament that he will attend Parliament very often at all. But we will have to wait and see. But of course, if he does lose his seat, then he spared that difficult decision.
If he wins his seat, it’s unlikely he will attend Parliament?
I just think for a former Prime Minister who has lost in humiliating circumstances, who then has to sit around — while his party picks a new leader, and the candidates will queue up to say why he was wrong in what he did — it will not be the most comfortable work environment to be in.
How do you think the Conservative Party is going to look, post-Sunak?
The simple and rather disappointing answer is: we don’t know. And we don’t know largely because we’re not sure how many MPs are going to be left in Parliament…And remember, it’s the MPs who choose the two candidates [for party leader] who go to the ballot of members.
Is Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party here to stay? Are they going to be a consistent force competing for votes with the conservatives? How is their support spread across the U.K.? [Nigel Farage was one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign and is currently not an MP].
One of the trends we saw before the Brexit referendum was a steady decline in the vote share of the two big parties — Labour and Conservative. And UKIP, which was a forerunner of Reform, was one of the beneficiaries of that. So in 2015, UKIP got almost four million votes. We will see if Reform does better than that four million votes or not. But it does seem to me that this is going to be another election where the vote share of the two big parties is going to drop and where other parties are going to do well. So, I think Reform is here to stay. Unless, and this will depend on a lot of things we can’t predict it is conceivable, there’s been a lot of talk about the fact that if Nigel Farage wins a seat in Parliament, he might consider jumping ship to the Conservatives because he wants to be a Conservative rather than in Reform because the Conservatives are a bigger brand, better databases, better voter tracking and things like that. Now, a lot of politicians in the Conservative Party have come out and said that Nigel Farage cannot join the Conservatives. Again, we’ll have to wait and see what the Conservatives look like after the election. It is conceivable, just about, that Reform get a bigger share of the vote than the Conservative Party, though, because the Reform vote is pretty evenly spread across the country, they’re not going to get many MPs at all.
David Lammy, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, has recently said an FTA (‘free’ trade agreement) is the floor, not the ceiling, of a relationship with India. Labour is also looking to reset its relationship with India. Some of that has already started. The Indian High Commissioner also recently said that asking for visas is not India’s number one priority in the FTA context. Will Keir Starmer have more bandwidth to negotiate a free trade agreement with India because his hands are less tied in terms of migration and perhaps he has less to prove in terms of exercising post-Brexit freedoms?
It’s interesting on immigration because, on the one hand, Labour has continued to talk tough: they are going to reduce numbers, they are going to stop so many immigrants coming in by improving training for British workers and things like that…But on the other hand, Labour voters are not concerned about immigration. Immigration is not a top concern for Labour voters. And it looks like Labour is going to have the unexpected presence of coming into office and seeing a significant fall in immigration numbers because of the decisions taken by the current government. So it might be that that gives Labour a little bit more freedom than their predecessors to talk about a deal with the Indians, including visas, because it might not be the top requirement, but it’s certainly an important requirement for the Government of India. So it could be that Labour sees an opportunity to be a bit more flexible.
There’s a political rationale for some of this. I am not doubting for a moment that they are genuinely interested in strengthening this strategic partnership with India, but Labour has been in recent times, struggling to keep hold of Indian Hindu voters who have been tending to turn their backs on the party. And I am sure that party strategists who say whatever the foreign policy benefits are, and there are several, of a good relationship with India, and there are political dividends to be had as well.
The Conservative manifesto seems to have more detail on the relationship with China. Is that because they have the advantage of having been in office for 14 years? Are you seeing any major shifts in the U.K.’s China policy; the Labour manifesto sounded fairly high level on its China policy.
I think on the Tories, there are three things. One, yes, they have been in government and have had to try to address some of these questions, too. Two, there is a very strong strand of opinion inside the Conservative Party that wants to see us be tougher on China. And I think that was reflected in the manifesto. And three, if I can suggest something as cynical as this, it’s easier to promise things if you are pretty convinced you are going to lose.
Labour, you’re absolutely right it’s very, very, vague. Cooperate and compete where we can or where we have to…it’s intensely vague. And I do think it’s the case that Labour has not even begun to confront, in their manifesto, at least [we don’t know in that private thinking], some of the difficult trade-offs that are going to be in the relationship with China. Because, on the one hand, the priority of Kier Starmer is growth, and having flourishing trade with China might be part of that strategy. On the other hand, opinions in this country on China have hardened notably over the last five or six years. I think the U.K will come under significant pressure from the U.S., whoever is in the White House, to take a tougher line on China. So that I think is an issue where we’ll learn as we go what Labour intends to do.
Do you think we are going to be in a position where we can seriously be talking about the U.K. returning to the EU, in some sense, in a few years?
At the moment, I would say there is very little prospect of that. But there are a lot of moving parts. Let’s see how big the Labour majority is; and how bad the conservative defeat is. You can look in terms of Labour being in power for the foreseeable future, I think they might be willing to take more ambitious steps towards the European Union, perhaps at the end of the first term, or towards the second term. The problem for Labour is they need to score some successes quite quickly. And a lengthy negotiation with the EU leading to, ultimately, a closer economic relationship, is not going to give you those quick wins. So I think it is conceivable I mean… anything’s conceivable in British politics these days… but I don’t think it’s for the first term of a Labour government.
Keir Starmer has been criticised for his positions on Israel and Gaza [for example in October 2023 he had implied that Israel had a right to withhold water and power from Palestinians while also saying Israel had to act within the bounds of international law]. Once the elections are done, are we going to see any shifts from Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in terms of Israel and Gaza?
It’s very hard to know, on both Israel and Gaza and Europe. What will be interesting is that the government will face significant pressure from its own side, to move further and faster than they have seemed willing to do today. One of the things we don’t know is how well the leadership will cope with those pressures, whether they will succumb to them, whether they will stand up to them. Those are things we simply don’t know until we see the new government in action. I would say that whilst I think Kier Starmer misspoke in the LBC interview about whether Israel was respecting international law, so I think he probably went further than he intended. I would hazard a guess he was not that upset about it afterwards, because at that point, the key message from Labour’s leadership is, “We have changed”… And there are a few clearer ways of doing that than turning your back on some of these pillars of Labour policy.
