Explained: Who is the UK’s New Prime Minister and What is His Position on Ukraine

The Labour party won the UK General Election with a landslide victory on July 5, catapulting Sir Keir Starmer into 10 Downing Street as Rishi Sunak swiftly conceded defeat.

Labour – which traditionally sits on the center-left of UK politics – has won its biggest election victory since 1997 when Tony Blair shot to the top job against the backdrop of D:Ream’s single “Thing’s Can Only Get Better.”

Thirteen years in power followed, before Labour lost to the Conservative party in 2010 and spent the next 14 years as the main opposition party. On July 4, the British people voted for change once again.

Several senior Conservative MPs have lost their constituency seats after being swept away by a sea of Labour “red.” Among them is former Prime Minister Liz Truss, who was prime minister for a matter of months in 2022 following the party’s ousting of Boris Johnson in the wake of the COVID-19 “Partygate” scandal.

Who is Keir Starmer and what does he represent?

As Britain’s new Prime Minister, Starmer is a human rights lawyer and has been on the political scene for just short of 10 years. He was knighted in 2014 for services to criminal justice and served as Shadow Immigration Minister (2015-2016) then Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (2016-2020),

Starmer became leader of the Labour Party in 2020, taking over from Jeremy Corbyn. In the years that followed, Starmer sought to move the party away from its more socialist left wing and closer to the center ground to appeal to a wider pool of voters.

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The country's first national ballot since Boris Johnson won a landslide for the Tories in 2019 follows Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's surprise call to hold it six months earlier than required.

Starmer grew up in southern England - his father a toolmaker by trade and his mother a nurse working for the National Health Service (NHS).

What are Labour’s foreign policy pledges?

• Labour has pledged to maintain Britain's military, financial, diplomatic and political support for Ukraine

• The party has declared its commitment to NATO as "unshakeable”

• The Labour party seeks a new UK-EU security pact to strengthen co-operation and rebuild relationships with key European allies

• Britain will stay outside of the EU, but seeks to deepen ties and remove barriers to trade

In February 2023, Starmer visited Kyiv, Irpin and Bucha and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky. Speaking afterwards, he said: “There has to be justice for this. There has to be justice in The Hague and there has to be proper reparation in the rebuilding of Ukraine.”

In May of this year, Labour MPs David Lammy and John Healey visited Kyiv and made a joint statement declaring Labour’s commitment to Ukraine as “ironclad.”