The world feels more unsettled than at any point in living memory. War has returned to Europe. Great-power rivalry has hardened into economic coercion. Climate impacts are outpacing the institutions meant to manage them, and progress on ending extreme poverty has stalled. Meanwhile, the rules-based international order is under threat, not least from some of the very countries that built it.
Andy Burnham’s new government will inherit a foreign policy that has been busy but fundamentally defensive or, as we saw from aid data published this week, in decline. Under Keir Starmer, the UK has shown genuine global leadership on Ukraine and worked hard to hold alliances together through a turbulent period in US politics.
These efforts have been necessary and at times effective, but they amount to crisis management, not agenda-setting. They frame the UK’s role in the world as stopping things from getting worse. That is not enough.
In his first foreign policy intervention last week, Burnham argued that Britain must rebuild its hard power to face a darker world, but also that countries work with us because they know what we stand for. He is right on both counts. The question now is whether his government will translate that second insight into a confident, coherent vision of what Britain is actually for in the next phase of international cooperation.
The honest starting point is that Britain is a middle power. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, speaking at Davos in January, called on fellow middle powers to chart a path of mutual resilience and coalition-building. That identity fits the UK, a country that has long resisted being solely European, can no longer anchor its foreign policy in its “special relationship” with the US, and shares more concerns with nations across the old Global North-South divide than the diplomatic map suggests.
Middle power does not mean a minor player. The UK is one of the world's most interconnected economies; it helped set up almost every major multilateral institution, it hosts the Commonwealth Secretariat and, until recently, was an aid superpower. But its leverage is not currently being used strategically.
Now is the time to change that. The UK will be president and host of the G20 in 2027 and is expected to hold the G7 presidency in 2028. The G20 remains the only forum bringing together advanced economies and major emerging powers at the highest political level. It is messy, contested and imperfect, but it is indispensable, and its agenda is not predetermined. Host governments have real influence, and the UK will take the chair after a disruptive US presidency that has sidelined progressive initiatives and shut down stakeholder engagement. That context raises both the risk of fragmentation and the premium on credible leadership.
So what should an ambitious agenda look like? Not theoretical elegance, but traction.
The UK should use its G20 presidency to drive forward collaboration on a global minimum wealth tax on the super-rich, argued Labour MP and former chief secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, in a recent essay for the New Economics Foundation. This would help tackle spiralling wealth inequality and help raise precious resources in rich and poor countries alike. Writing for the same think tank, of which I am the chief executive, another Labour MP, Polly Billington, called for the UK to lead a global clean power alliance that would build energy security and drive down bills.
And there are several other policy areas that would hit the sweet spot of raising both hopes and resources, such as getting serious about illicit finance. The government should require transparency from its own Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, and confront the anonymously owned property in the UK, or introduce ‘polluter pays’ levies that hasten the end of oil and gas and fund public goods at home and abroad.
None of this is naive. The UK would be in good company. A growing set of “coalitions of the doing” – from the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force to the proposed International Panel on Inequality and governments cooperating to phase out fossil fuels – are making progress where lowest-common-denominator multilateralism cannot. The gathering of progressive governments at Barcelona’s Defence of Democracy summit this spring showed there is an appetite for a new narrative in global economic governance. Britain should help write it.
Above all, this is about hope. Just as Burnham has tried to lay out a hopeful path to revitalising local communities and shifting power to people and places across the UK, so too should his government show how we can work together with others around the world to address collective challenges. A foreign policy of threat management alone offers people nothing to believe in.
The new government has a choice: shore up the old order as it crumbles, or help shape what comes next through leadership and strategic followership alike. The second path is more demanding. It is also the only one worthy of the moment.
