Introducing The Red Button Club

A new, non-partisan group for progressives looking to start a debate about what British foreign policy should like over the next decade

For too long conversations about foreign policy in the UK have been inadequate.

Every election cycle, party leaders are not pressed on how they would learn from costly mistakes of the past, but instead peppered with questions about whether or not they’d launch a nuclear attack.

“Would you press the red button?”, screeches the media, with candidates judged on whether they would obliterate millions of people in an instant - or god forbid, whether they would not.

This question is one of the major litmus tests that shapes perceptions of a potential Prime Minister’s relationship with the rest of the world during an election cycle.

But here at The Red Button Club, we believe reductive questions like this represent a failure of imagination when it comes to our role in the world.

The unfolding failure to prepare for - and prevent - a pandemic like the one caused by coronavirus demonstrates this. Despite warnings about likely threats, successive UK governments have failed to keep us secure.

At the same time, the impact of coronavirus is a timely reminder that despite being an island, we’re inescapably bound to the rest of the world. It shows us that our foreign policy has to be more than a Brexit policy.

But what should it look like?

We’ve launched The Red Button Club to answer this question.

We’re a new, non-partisan group for progressives looking to start a debate about what British foreign policy should like over the next decade and how we might get there.

So if you’re nodding your head while reading this and interested in being part of a conversation about the UK’s place in the world, this is the only red button you should be pressing: