Labour will reset partnership with India, says Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy

Labour Party's David Lammy outlines plans to reset UK-India relationship, emphasizing trade, climate, security cooperation and historical ties.

Days before the U.K.’s general election, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, reiterated that his party would reset its relationship with India. Mr Lammy is all but certain to be the country’s next Foreign Secretary, given that Labour is most likely — as per polls — to form the next U.K. government after the country’s July 4 elections.

Speaking on June 24 afternoon at the India Global Forum, a weeklong gathering of government officials, politicians, entrepreneurs and industrialists, Mr Lammy outlined some of the areas of cooperation — notably trade, climate and security.

“We need a reset,” he said, saying a reset with of the U.K.’s relationship with the Global South was needed, starting with India.

Referring to former Conservative U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recital of a colonial-era Rudyard Kipling poem during a visit to a temple in Myanmar, Mr Lammy said, to applause,

“If I recite a poem, it will be by Tagore.” Mr Lammy’s great great grandmother was from Calcutta and was taken (by the British) to the Caribbean as an indentured labourer, he said.

The Labour Party has also been seeking to reset its own relationship with India after some evidence that British Indians, who have traditionally supported the Labour Party were moving to the Conservative Party. The shift, as per some data available from 2021, was led more by Hindus and Christians, rather than Muslims or Sikhs.

The ‘free trade’ deal (FTA), being negotiated by India and the U.K., was a floor not a ceiling to the relationship Mr Lammy said.