Unite boss warns campaigning to rejoin EU 'won't go down well' for Labour
Labour will be punished if they campaign for Britain to campaign to go back into the EU, the leader of Unite has told LBC.
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Sharon Graham insisted that her members want better trade with the block, but she worried it “won’t go down well” to try and reverse the result.
London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has repeated his calls for Labour to campaign to back into the trading block, saying Labour should put the pledge in its next manifesto.
And Sir Tony Blair has called for Mr Burnham to look again at the EU and campaigning to return.
As Mr Burnham arrived at the party’s annual conference in gathering in Liverpool on Saturday, he said he wanted to draw a line under the divisions that the Brexit vote had caused in the last decade.
Read more: Union boss calls for Angela Rayner to replace Sir Keir Starmer
Read more: Budget is ‘critical point’ for Unite’s continued Labour support – Sharon Graham
Mr Burnham said: “We’re going to make this a really important week where we set out a new direction for the country.
“We’ve had a decade since Brexit and it’s been a decade of too much drift, too much division, and we need to draw a line on that.”
He said his vision would leave “people able to have hope again that things will improve, that life will get better – and it will”.
Last week he left the door open to the idea being a Labour policy in future, but he’s previously said that now isn’t the right time to have the conversation.
Ms Graham told LBC today that they’ve been “very vocal” about the need for firms to do better business here.
She said: "You can see what's happening in the car industry/
"We're pushing for things like EU27 so that we're able to be part of those discussions so we can trade properly.
"I do think though that if we go down the line of opening up a Brexit discussion, I think that Labour will be punished for that. I don't think it's as simple as that. People have got a disdain about how politics happens, and if they feel that we've turned over something they voted for, I don't think that will go down well.”
She said instead, a close relationship with the block should be the aim - but to diverge and back British industry where possible instead.
The union boss said: "I think what we could do though, is use some of the things that we can do because we're not in Europe, like making sure we buy British, for example, which is something that would have been a problem before.
"Let's get as close a relationship as possible as we can with the EU, but make sure we are using everything we can to make sure that we can push the country forward.”
She also told LBC that she wanted to see the Chancellor, John Healey, prioritise energy bills and income tax thresholds in his first budget, which is just weeks away.
Her plans would include wealth taxes and a banking levy to pay for billions of pounds to unfreeze the thresholds..
She said: "one of the things that we're asking is this freezing on tax thresholds must be unfrozen.
"If they hadn't frozen the lower threshold, which is £12,571, which now pensioners will be dragged into, that would be at £16,000. That's a huge amount of money difference before you start paying 20% tax.
"So we've put a proposal on the 20% and the 40% to say, look, we need to show that we are here for workers. Workers and the working class can't pay any more. It's now time for them to have the burden taken off their shoulders”
Unite claims hundreds of MPs and members are ready to back their motion at the party conference, with insiders saying their motion is causing “the most worry” in the party.
Mr Burnham is doing well so far after just two months in the job, she stressed, but that what “we need to make sure now is it doesn’t get captured by the ‘computer says no brigade’”.
Labour must be even bolder to prove it’s on the side of the workers, she insisted.