Union leader gets behind Starmer’s Brexit deal in bid save the UK’s car industry

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Union leaders have backed Keir Starmer’s planned ‘reset’ of Brexit and predicted that it will help save the British car industry.

In an interview with The Independent, Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), said he “absolutely” believed the policy would keep manufacturing and other jobs in the UK and prevent them being moved to the continent.

Mr Nowak also urged the new Labour government to deliver the “change” he said the public had voted for.

And he called for an urgent new ‘workforce commission’ to plot a way to repair the UK’s public services, as a new poll reveals that nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) of voters think they are deteriorating.

Just 13 days into his premiership Sir Keir declared Britain was “back on the international stage” as he sought to build closer ties as part of his planned ‘reset’.

Hosting the summit of the European Political Community (EPC) in Oxfordshire, he scored his first major success as European leaders lined up to hail his plan for a new era in post-Brexit relations.

In the weeks that followed he used a trip to watch the opening of the Olympics to hold a series of one-to-one meetings with European leaders and has struck up a close relationship with leaders in Paris and Berlin.

Mr Nowak said that with Sir Keir’s large parliamentary majority “people on the other side of the Channel are more likely to take the government seriously and think that here is a government we can do business with and actually get an agreement.”

He said more could be done to “ease pressures on supply chains, which is really important in sectors like automotive and aerospace. But also more broadly, for musicians and other creative performers and for some of our young people, that ability to move across Europe more freely I think is really important. I don’t think anybody’s talking about a complete return to freedom of movement but certainly thinking about how do we make it as seamless as possible?”

UK car production is still well below its recent peak in 2016 of 1.7m, dogged by supply chain problems after disruption caused by Covid-era factory closures as well as Brexit red tape. Last year, Britain built 1m cars.

Asked if he believed the reset would help keep jobs in the UK, he said: “I do, I absolutely do.”

He added: “Certainly in some of those high-end manufacturing (industries) where things like supply chains are really important... Because nobody builds an aircraft wing purely on components sourced from the UK. You don’t build electric vehicles purely on components sourced in the UK. You’ve got to find ways to reduce the friction as much as possible.

“I would be in exactly the same place as [manufacturing body] Make UK, for example - let’s make sure that we are not putting up barriers to companies being successful here in the UK.”

He also called on the government to deliver for those who backed them at the election.

He said he recognised that Labour had “inherited, or been bequeathed, a pretty rotten legacy in terms of the state of the UK economy and the state of our public services”.

But he said he hoped and expected “that they’re going to use the Budget to set out now some light at the end of the tunnel. How do we repair and rebuild our public services? How do we get the economy growing? How do we get wages rising again?”

He said that the TUC would be a critical friend to the new government and he would be “encouraging the government: ‘You’ve got a manifesto (and) you’ve got a huge mandate to go out and deliver it’”.