Anand Menon On The Changing Landscape Of British Politics & U.K.’s Place In The World
Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London.
By Aiden Singh, April x, 2026
The U.K.’s Role In The World
Aiden Singh: Even before the Brexit referendum took place, you argued that the U.K. was retreating from global leadership. Do you believe that still to be the case?
Anand Mennon: It is a very different world today from the one we were discussing then. One of the interesting things before the referendum was that, after the vote on intervention in Syria that David Cameron lost, his government became largely rudderless when it came to foreign policy, aside from the so-called golden era reset with China.
A lot has changed since then. We’ve been through a phase of “Global Britain,” which was always something of an exaggeration. One effect of Brexit for successive Conservative leaders was to create an incentive to show that the U.K. could still go out into the world and play a role despite Brexit. That helps explain why the U.K. was so forceful in its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Now, of course, we are facing constraints because of our relative lack of power.
We are in a world where China, the European Union in regulatory terms, the United States, and also Russia are, in different ways, taking us back to a world of hard power.
The U.K. is confronting the reality that, for all its reputation as a strong military player, it does not have as much in the way of deployable forces as it would like. We are seeing that in the inability to deploy serious force to places like the Gulf or Cyprus at the moment. Quietly, this is being discussed in London as talk turns to a “coalition of the willing,” because it is far from clear what, if anything, the U.K. could contribute if it came to putting troops on the ground.
So it has not been a continuous line. There was one dynamic before 2016, and something quite different is happening now. What is happening now reflects the real challenges the U.K., and indeed other European countries, face in a more insecure world where they can rely less on the United States.
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Divisions Within The U.K.
Aiden Singh: Looking internally within Britain, you have argued that Brexit revealed how divided the U.K. is, but did not cause those divisions. In what ways is the U.K. divided, and what are the causes of this division?
Anand Menon: There are two things going on. First, there is an economic element. The less prosperous parts of the U.K. tended to vote disproportionately for Leave. That matters because it shows that parts of the country that felt, as the phrase goes, “left behind,” and had not really been able to voice their dissatisfaction, were able to do so in a referendum where all votes counted equally. That is a consequence of the peculiar nature of our electoral system.
The second factor is that the Brexit vote mobilized a societal division between social liberals and social conservatives that had already existed for some time. You can see this in the Labour Party. Between 2010 and 2015, Labour lost a large number of its working-class voters and instead gained more liberal, middle-class voters as part of its social base. However, this shift was somewhat obscured by the traditional left–right structure of politics.
Brexit gave full expression to that underlying divide between social liberals and social conservatives. These divisions had been latent, but Brexit gave them form, turning them into two distinct camps: a Leave camp and a Remain camp. This pattern is broadly consistent with what is happening across Europe, where the traditional left–right divide is increasingly supplemented by a cross-cutting division over values, whether related to immigration, environmental policy, or other issues.
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Anti-Establishment Political Sentiment
Aiden Singh: You have argued that long-term dissatisfaction with the European Union and a breakdown in the relationship between voters and political parties led to Brexit and fundamentally altered British politics. Can you elaborate for our readers?
Anand Menon: I think, as in many advanced Western democracies, what we have seen over the past couple of decades is growing skepticism about politics, increasing distrust, and a steady erosion of confidence in politicians. That broader anti-politics mood helped the Brexit cause.
A referendum is a complex instrument. It asks a simple question but captures a wide range of motivations, all compressed into a binary choice: leave or remain.
One of the key drivers of the Brexit vote was a deep sense of dissatisfaction, a kind of “plague on all your houses” sentiment. We saw something similar that same year in the United States with the vote that brought Donald Trump to power.
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The Changing Landscape of U.K. Politics
Aiden Singh: You’ve written about how cultural issues are increasingly influencing party politics, in contrast to economic issues centered on class. How has this affected the internal coalitions of the Labour and Conservative parties?
Anand Menon: It has put them under strain. This goes back to the social liberal versus social conservative divide I mentioned earlier. A values-based coalition is very different from a class-based coalition.
Labour has felt this very acutely. There is a clear difference between more affluent, suburban, middle-class Labour voters and working-class Labour voters. They can agree on economic issues, such as redistribution or a more generous welfare state. They can align along the traditional left–right dimension. But on social issues, they are often fundamentally divided.
In particular, traditional post-industrial, working-class Labour heartlands tend to be more socially conservative than liberal metropolitan areas. As a result, Labour has had to manage significant internal divisions, which helps explain why many of those heartland seats ultimately voted for Boris Johnson.
Brexit brought this values-based division to the forefront of electoral politics. It produced outcomes that would previously have seemed surprising, because they were not driven by the traditional left–right divide, but rather by a split between social liberals and social conservatives.
Within the Conservative Party, the same dynamic existed, though to a lesser extent. What Boris Johnson did quite effectively was to position the Conservative Party as the party of Leave. By 2019, around 75 percent of Leave voters were supporting the Conservatives. This consolidation meant that the values divide was less internally disruptive for the Conservative Party than it was for Labour.
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The Impact of Global Trends On U.K. Politics
Aiden Singh: One of the things I have been discussing with experts in politics and history is the extent to which these trends are global or country-specific. Across Western countries, we are seeing a breakdown in traditional party politics that is not unique to the U.K.: we see it in the United States, with political outsiders like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump having electoral success, and in places like Hungary.
To what extent do you think global factors are driving these developments? And to what extent are they country-specific? How do you place the U.K. in the context of broader global trends?
Anand Menon: Global forces are significant, but their effects are mediated through national institutions, which means outcomes differ from country to country. These institutions might include electoral systems or political cultures. So while similar pressures act across different countries, the results are not identical.
That said, there is a broad convergence, particularly in Europe, where traditional party systems are fragmenting. One major international force behind this is globalization. There has been growing frustration among voters that politics is powerless in the face of global economic forces. Politicians often reinforced this perception by suggesting there was little they could do to control globalization, which in turn fueled dissatisfaction.
At the same time, while globalization increased overall prosperity, it also had clear distributional effects: there were winners and losers. Those whose industries declined or moved abroad experienced it very differently from those who benefited from financial globalization or the free movement of capital. Politicians were slow to fully acknowledge and address these disparities.
Another important global factor is the end of the Cold War. In Europe especially, it arguably left parts of the center-right without the same sense of ideological purpose that had previously been anchored in opposition to the Soviet Union. That shift helped create space for the emergence of new political movements, including those on the populist right.
Across the developed world, prolonged periods of relatively low growth and increasing dissatisfaction with mainstream politics have led voters to experiment with alternatives on both the left and the right. What is particularly striking is that this is happening even in the United Kingdom, where the electoral system was designed to sustain a two-party structure.
Historically, the combined vote share of Labour and the Conservatives had already been declining, reaching a low point in 2015. The elections of 2017 and 2019, when the two major parties regained dominance, now appear somewhat exceptional, shaped by the centrality of Brexit and the leadership of figures like Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.
By contrast, the 2024 election appears to mark a return to the longer-term trend: growing dissatisfaction with the two main parties and an increasing willingness among voters to support alternative options.
Aiden Singh: I recently spoke to James Nation, who was a senior adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. I posed the question of whether the Conservative Party - or the main parties more generally, the Conservatives and Labour - are in long-term danger. Given the secular trends you describe, do you think they risk becoming irrelevant, or is this something they can recover from? How do you situate those parties today alongside Reform and the Greens?
Anand Menon: Making predictions about British politics is extremely difficult.
What I can say is that this is a moment of real danger for the mainstream parties. British politics has increasingly coalesced around two broad blocs. On one side, there is a progressive, Remain-leaning bloc made up of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the nationalist parties. On the other, there is a right-wing, Leave-leaning bloc consisting primarily of the Conservative Party and Reform UK.
The risk for Labour and the Conservatives is that they may no longer be seen as the leading party within their respective blocs. Under a first-past-the-post system, voters tend to support the party they believe has the best chance of winning. It is no longer self-evident that Labour and the Conservatives are those parties.
The Greens have recently won a by-election and Reform is performing strongly. If Labour and the Conservatives fall behind these competitors within their respective blocs, they face a real danger of losing their positions as the dominant parties of the left and the right.
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NATO’s Importance To U.K. Security
Aiden Singh: You mentioned the Cold War earlier. And NATO has obviously been in the news recently, with Trump suggesting he might want to withdraw. How important do you think NATO is to the U.K.? And how important is it for the U.K. to remain effective within it?
Anand Menon: NATO matters enormously because it is the ultimate guarantor of European security. European states have, to some extent, been free riders. They have relied on and effectively outsourced their security to the United States, with the result that we now find ourselves less capable of defending ourselves independently.
Even without Donald Trump questioning the foundations of NATO, particularly the Article 5 guarantee, European countries would need to do more for their own defense. It is unlikely that any future U.S. administration will be willing to shoulder the same burden it has historically carried.
Trump’s comments have made this issue more urgent by casting doubt on NATO’s long-term reliability. However, the difficulty is that these challenges cannot be addressed overnight. Increasing defense spending, investing it effectively, and building up military capabilities is a process that takes a decade or more.
Whether European countries can sustain that level of commitment over the long term remains uncertain. At present, the signs are not especially encouraging.
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The U.K.’s Biggest Challenges
Aiden Singh: We are gearing up to host a summit on the future of the United Kingdom. One of the questions I will be posing to our contributors at that event will be: what are the most pressing issues the U.K. must confront? How would you answer that question?
Anand Menon: If I were a politician, I would say that there are several major challenges. There are demographic pressures facing all advanced economies, which are more medium-term in nature, and there is, of course, the climate crisis.
However, my primary focus would be on generating economic growth. The British economy has barely grown since 2008, or at least has grown far more slowly than in the preceding period. That stagnation lies behind much of the popular disillusionment we are seeing. So the top priorities would be restoring growth, addressing the cost of living crisis, and repairing public services. If I were in government, that is where I would concentrate my efforts.
The difficulty, as Keir Starmer is discovering, is that external events continually intervene, whether geopolitical crises or other unexpected developments, making it harder to maintain focus on those domestic priorities.
Aiden Singh: What are you thoughts on the central role the debate over immigration as played in U.K. politics of late?
Anand Menon: Immigration has also been a highly salient issue. However, its salience appears to be declining somewhat. When the next set of figures is released, we may see a significant drop in net migration. It is possible that, looking ahead, the U.K. may actually face the opposite problem, not having enough immigration, which could carry economic consequences.
More broadly, I would argue that hostility toward immigration and the rise of more strident populist politics are at least partly rooted in economic insecurity. When the economy underperforms and people feel left behind, those sentiments intensify. That is why, in the end, I return to the same point: addressing the U.K.’s economic challenges is the most important step in dealing with many of its wider political and social problems.
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