AUKUS champions in Australia need not fear the nuclear-powered submarine pact would be hamstrung if Labour wins the UK election as the party has promised “absolute” support for the project.
In fact, any UK leader would be stupid to oppose it given how much money Australia is paying Rolls Royce to keep building reactors for use in future Adelaide-built submarines.
“In the UK context, AUKUS is not as contentious as it is in Australia. It doesn’t cost us as much money as it’s going to cost the Australians — Australia is actually paying money into our nuclear enterprise,” Monash-Warwick alliance PhD candidate Thomas Howe told Crikey.
“This is a really good thing from a British perspective, and also you see AUKUS and the military industry in general being sold as a kind of industrial policy.”
Australia confirmed in March it would send $4.6 billion to the UK over the next decade to secure the Rolls-Royce nuclear reactor production line. The company said the funding would help create more than 1,000 new jobs in the city of Derby. There was funding from the UK Ministry of Defence as well, although it wasn’t immediately clear how much money the UK would provide over the next decade.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in 2023 the government would provide the equivalent of more than $9 billion over two years to be “spent in a number of areas including modernising the UK’s nuclear enterprise and funding the next phase of the AUKUS submarine program”, followed by “sustained funding over the next decade”.
Labour leader Keir Starmer has painted himself as a hawk in general, going so far as to promise last week he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons if needed to defend the UK.
Part of Starmer’s image-building is to set himself up as the antithesis of his predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn, an old-school leftist, said in 2021 AUKUS was “starting a new nuclear arms race and cold war”. Those comments came after Labour conference delegates voted overwhelmingly for a motion condemning then-prime minister Boris Johnson’s decision to enter the pact, claiming it was a “dangerous move which will undermine world peace”.
Under Starmer, the Labour Party has vowed to pursue a foreign policy strategy of “progressive realism”. As Howe and his Monash colleague, associate professor Ben Wellings, wrote in a think piece last month, Labour’s foreign policy spokesman David Lammy’s description of AUKUS cooperation as “a floor, not a ceiling” should be a convincing sign UK-Australian relations are in a “golden era”.
“If Lammy made those comments it’s because they’ve been approved by the leader’s office, so you can read Starmer’s position in those,” Howe said. “The way that I understand a lot of what Starmer’s party does, particularly in a foreign policy sense, is to differentiate it from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.”
Under Sunak, the UK has pursued what the government there called an “Indo-Pacific tilt”, using trade and diplomacy to deepen relationships and push for openness in the UK’s “wider neighbourhood on the periphery of our continent”.
A future Starmer government would be likely to increase its focus on Europe, however. Labour’s defence spokesman John Healey said in 2023 the UK needed to fill a “Europe-shaped hole” in its foreign policy, warning “there needs to be a realism about military commitments into the Indo-Pacific”.
In the same interview, Healey said Labour’s support for AUKUS was “absolute”, adding: “There’s a great deal we can contribute without misleading ourselves or others that British military forces are likely to be deployed at scale in the Indo-Pacific area.”
