The Waugh Room

Thursday 1st March 2012 | 21:35

Yvette Cooper in The House

Yvette Cooper has given a wide-ranging interview to The House magazine.

She reveals new Labour figures on police and service cuts, particularly Freedom of Information requests that show traffic cops have been cut by 17% in the past year and 200 fewer detectives. Cooper also gives a sneak preview of the Vera Baird revew of the impact on women of Coalition cuts, including figures showing domestic violence refuges have been cut by 31% in the past year.

But the interview touches on lots of areas, from David Cameron's 'blind spot' with women to the 'lasagne plot', from why Ed Balls does the cooking to how all parties will one day have women leaders and other topics.

The Shadow Home Sec also praises her mum as her own 'fourth emergency service' and reveals how her English accent got intor trouble while working for Bill Clinton.

I note she also gives strong support to comprehensive schools that stay as comps rather than turn into academies, and stresses parents don't want to have to travel miles for their kids' education.

Oh, and we also get her explanation of her infamous 'hhhhhghhhhghghgh' Tweet.

You can read the feature HERE. But the full quotes, topic by topic, are below:

 

 

COOPER  ON NEW CUTS TO COPS

"It’s been clear for a while that the sheer scale of the cuts that they were doing were going to have a deeply damaging effect on policing. It’s being cut by 20 per cent with the steepest cuts in the first couple of years.  David Cameron and Theresa May said it wouldn’t hit the front line  and David Cameron even said as recently as a couple of weeks ago that there will be an increase of the number of police officers on the front line.  The reality that we’re seeing is that 16,000 police officers altogether are expected to go over the spending review.

"Already last year, we saw over 4,500 police officers go alone – of those, 90 percent of them were from front line jobs. And the front line as defined by the Inspectorate Magistrate and the Government endorsed the definition of the front line.

"We started to ask questions about which areas are being most heavily affected and because you can see some areas neighbourhood policing affected, other areas detectives being cut , traffic cops. One of the most recent figures we now have, looking force by force through Freedom of Information requests, is on what’s been happening to traffic officers.  Very clearly front line jobs, out on the streets, on the motorways, front line. And every force that has responded so far has cut the number of traffic officers. And the total reduction in the number of traffic officers in the forces that have responded, which I think is over half the forces, that have responded is 17 percent.  So, we’ve only gone through the first year of the spending review and already they have cut 17 percent of their traffic officers.

"Wakefield traffic officers, for example in my area, wouldn’t just do the motorways, they would also other duties, whether it’s serious accidents through to speeding offences.  We had one police officer close to my constituency that was killed helping a woman motorist that had broken down by the side of the motorway.  I went to the funeral a few months ago.  It was just deeply sad.  It was a lorry on the hard shoulder.  It was deeply tragic. The whole force turned out to pay tribute. What was also interesting was that some of the things that the police officers were saying then was that people underestimated the range of things that the police do.  He was there risking his life to help a woman motorist who had been stranded at the side of the road. That’s not just about cutting crime. That doesn’t capture all the things they do to protect public safety as well"

[Stats: Nearly 400 traffic officers lost from forces including West Mildands, Thames Valley, Devon and Cornwall, Derbyshire and West Mercia.]

 

COOPER ON DETECTIVE CUTS AND NEIGHBOURHOOD COPS

"You have got some forces where officers are now spending less time on the streets because they are having to do all the paper work, because a lot of the support staff have also been cut.  So you have knock-on effects as well.  But particularly specialist units being squeezed.  So we’re worried about what’s happening to detectives to CID units as well. [We have found] 200 detectives have been cut from CID across the country in the last year."

 

COOPER  ON IMPACT OF CUTS ON WOMEN – REFUGES CUT, STREET LIGHTING CUT

"The Government doesn’t actually do any comprehensive assessment on the nature of the services that support women.  No impact assessment on women.  But also, no no sort of starting point of what services might be available.  For example, if it then turns out that services that affect women are being disproportionately hit, the Government won’t know"

She says that Labour's Women's Commission interim report - by former minister Vera Baird and to be published next week in the run up to International Women's Day - will show a string of cuts hitting women.

"Things like refuges are facing cuts of 31 percent. It's disproportionate.  It is facing higher cuts than other services are facing"

"In organisations that are taking over contracts of special services, a bit parallel to the work programme where you have some of the big companies giving some services to employees, so we’ve had one case where we’ve had a big service provider giving out services to a small refuge, and hired staff for the refuge in a national, and local papers including the address of the refuge.  That just because they haven’t got the historical specialist expertise.

"A lot of local authorities are also cutting their street lighting. So I went to one in the Midlands in a group of women, it’s a small town and they’re making cuts and other than the part of the town centre and you don’t walk far from the town centre and then suddenly there’s going to be darkness.  In an area where there is a railway bridge, already relatively dark at night, and if you’re doing shift work, or working late at night, if you’ve got teenagers he will be out are just gonna be out late then actually the anxiety that they are creating by cutting off the street lights and that sort of thing not being picked up."

 

 

COOPER ON CAMERON’S WOMEN ‘BLIND SPOT’ - AND THE LOLLYPOP LADY CASE

“I think David Cameron is completely out of touch with the pressures that a lot of women face. Some of it I think is a blind spot, some of it is also they just fundamentally don’t understand how important aspects of the public sector can be for women for working for responding and their whole philosophy is that publics ector creates dependence. If the public sector provides childcare support that’s somehow creates dependency, you know child care tax credits create dependency.

 "Actually, what women know is that what gives you independence. That can then give you the opportunity to then work part time to go out to get a job, to manage how you are going to manage with your elderly mother who needs looking after. All of those sorts of things.

"Or even just something as simple as the lollypop lady that means that you can let your ten year old go to school on his own because you  feel confident that he’s safe. You take the lollypop lady away and you’ve suddenly now got to think what are you going to drop your ten year old off on the way to school, how does that fit with your youngest who might be in childcare somewhere else who has got to be dropped off and you’ve still got to get to work by nine o’clock, those sorts of knock-on things I think he’s just got absolutely no idea about at all

 "He doesn’t stop to think he doesn’t pause to realise the consequences. We saw it when they decided to cut the DNA database and actually that has significant impact in areas like rape cases.   What they want to do is if someone is not convicted to remove their DNA from the database. There are a lot of cases where someone might not be convicted, for all sorts of other reasons in a rape case and then might go on..it’s the risk cases around rape are different. I just don’t think it crosses David Cameron’s radar screen to think about some of the issues that women face."

 

 

COOPER ON CAMERON'S LACK OF WOMEN MINISTERS

“It’s kind of odd, the reduction of the number of women around the Cabinet table, and a reduction of the number of women in the Government. Actually funnily enough often it is at the junior ministerial posts that it matters most because they are often dealing with the detail of policy and you saw a big reduction.

“It’s also when he admitted last September that he had a problem with women, he didn’t ask Theresa May for help. There was  bit of a well, can we find any women anywhere in the Cabinet Office and Number 10 to come and  advise us why things are going wrong with women. Actually, why didn’t he talk to women ministers? You cannot imagine any government in which Harriet Harman was part not knowing that they had a problem with women and why.

 

COOPER ON THERESA MAY

“There is a whole series of things that we just disagree on and disagree strongly. I just think that she badly mishandled the bordersgate problems. I think that she made the wrong judgements initially and then she didn’t follow them up and she wasn’t on top of it when it went wrong. I think she has got the wrong policies when it comes to crime and policing. Personal crime has already gone up 10%. That’s a steep rise in violence, robbery and theft. So I strongly disagree with her in terms of strategy but I’ve got huge respect for what she’s done as a woman to get to the top of the Tory party at a time when there’s actually been so few women.

“We were both elected in 1997 at a time when although there were quite a lot of Labour women who were elected at that time, the Tories there were very few of them. There was Theresa, there was Eleanor Laing. I think she has probably had a very difficult time over many years as a result of that. And it’s just outrageous that she still gets more comments on her jackets and her shoes than on policy things

“I have huge sympathy for her dealing with the Tory party. And I actually do wonder whether David Cameron does actually listen to her. Because she got a bad deal in the spending review and William Hague got a better deal in the spending review.”

 

 

COOPER ON THE LASAGNE PLOT,  ED'S COOKING AND THE LEADERSHIP

Did your daughter say ‘My mummy’s going to have that job’?

“You know we don’t talk about the kids whatever they say. There’s quite enough to talk about with Ed’s cooking...

 “I think if I cooked it wouldn’t be news so it is astonishing quite how much attention he gets for his cooking. However, the honest truth is the only news there would be would be that I can’t cook.

“Ed does more of the cooking. When we first lived together I used to do all the cooking. Then the more he did, the less I did. And he’s a good cook, that’s great. He does all the cooking, so much so that if he’s back late I kind of just have a bowl of soup or something…"

 Asked if she still believes, as she did in 2010, that she won't run for leader because of her children:

“I set out thoughts that I had then, which was like lots of women my kids are hugely important to me and will always be the most important thing in my life. Where are we now? Look, we’ve got a leader who’s doing a really good job. It’s true that I’m not content with being Shadow Home Secretary but that’s because I want to be Home Secretary in a Labour government, that’s the job I want to do. And that feels like a pretty big job. It would be a great job. All sorts of serious jobs have challenges with family life and so on, but that that was the right thing to do [at the time].

Does Ed still assure you that he will stand aside if you want to run one day?

“That’s what he said and that was his view very clearly at the time of the leadership election but it’s not something we talk about now because we are very clear that actually we will learn the lessons of what happened with the Labour party with Gordon and Tony when everybody was speculating always about the future. Actually that is the wrong way to do things."

Will one day it be natural to have a woman Labour leader?

“Sure. I think it will for all parties. You do see over time more ceilings are smashed.

 “I think more broadly I am more worried generally that some of the things that the Government is doing at the moment are at risk of turning the clock back on women’s equality. For example, the fact that 30,000 women gave up work last year because they couldn’t afford the cost of childcare.

“I’ve talked to some women in the police force who were saying that a lot of work had been done to encourage flexible working and to make it easier therefore, particularly for women with kids, to get promoted actually was being cut back because of the pressure the force was under. Equally we have seen some examples at high levels of the civil service where it looks as though there are fewer women in senior posts.”

"Where organisations are under huge pressure just to keep the lights on, just to keep things going, then you are less likely to see new things being tried.”

 

COOPER ON QATADA

"I just think most people would be shocked at it.  It’s the Home Secretary’s own assessment, the security services assessment that he is a very serious risk to public safety and national security.  If they’ve said that, if the judges agree with that assessment, then I think that the public should be protected. Therefore, I think people are pretty shocked that he’s been released from jail at all.  The judge basically said it was clear that negotiations with Jordan were at a very early stage.  Well why were they at an early stage?

"Why have they not made far more progress?  Why had that not been a priority?  Why weren’t ministers travelling out to Jordan to have those discussions, before a judge was asked to give him bail, rather than after?  If they had done so before gone before, I think there is a serious question that might have made a difference to the judgement.  I think it might have been possible to keep Abu Qatada in jail because they were making progress, because things were happening with negotiations.

"I think people will be pretty shocked to start with that someone with that level of security concern about him could be out on the streets.  But I think even more worried that the Government government could itself tie its own hands behind its own back, when it comes to being able to provide proper protection in the future as well

"We’ve always said that emergency legislation might well be needed before the Olympics. I don’t have access to the full security assessments that the Home Secretary has, so I can’t judge on the basis of particular, individual security threats.  But on the basis of what we’ve seen previously, that might be needed this year. But that is a mad way to do legislation.  It’s a mad way to treat the police and the security services but also more importantly the public to have through a disorderly process of emergency legislation.

"Also you don’t get proper Parliamentary scrutiny in those circumstances.  They’ve got rid of an annual vote on control orders. So I would reintroduce the Parliamentary scrutiny at the same time as strengthening powers.

 

COOPER ON CONTROL ORDERS BEING REPLACED BY TPIMS

"I think that it’s completely unwise to do this in Olympics year for a series of reasons.  I think first of all there was clearly a reduction in the anti-terror measures that you can impose that you can compare to the control orders, and are significant if you can’t relocate someone in London.  And in Olympics year, that just seems to be deeply unwise.  We don’t know what the cases are that the Home Secretary will face.  And she herself has faced some difficulties over the last twelve months, and concluded that people did need to be relocated.  The courts have concluded that as well.  Now I’m a strong believer of strong checks and balances, so I think you have to make sure where there are strong powers there are also very strong checks and balances as well.  So you have to have judicial checks and balances, Parliamentary checks and balances as well.  So I would actually have more of a role for overview and scrutiny on some of these kinds of things to the Intelligence and Security Committee as well.  So you have confidence that powers aren’t being abused.  But equally, I just think especially in Olympics year, the Home Secretary needs to have the ability to protect the public.

 "And the other thing that’s interesting as well about this, there is obviously the Abu Qatada case, where there may well need if they can’t make progress with Jordan -  I think they should have started negotiations with Jordan much earlier -  then there is a significant risk that they will need to use the TPIMs and won’t be able to use the same kinds of things that they could have done through control orders.

"So there’s that case.  There’s also things that other people have raised with this, which is the uncertainty that there is with new powers.  Because there is always the problem of sorting out case law, people getting used to using new legal framework.  So to have that uncertainty, the police and security services have to then spend their whole time talking to lawyers about what they can and can’t do.  It’s just adding to resource pressures and problems at a time when I just think you shouldn’t take the risks in this year."

 

 

COOPER ON THE CLINTON CAMPAIGN, HER ENGLISH ACCENT AND HEALTHCARE

Recalling her time as a junior helper for the Bill Clinton campaign in Little Rock in 1992, and James Carville's 'the economy stupid," memo.

"The slogan was first,  written in Carville’s hand writing 'The economy, stupid'. Then somebody else had written in a different colour pen, because it was on a whiteboard, ‘and don’t forget healthcare’. I think ‘the economy, stupid’ was written in red and then somebody else had gone in blue with one of those markers that wasn’t quite working properly, a scrawly ‘and don’t forget healthcare’.

“I was doing a mix of policy on crime and drugs. Somebody else was maybe doing the crime side of it and also healthcare policy.

“Every so often they had a whole team of people just answering the phones. So if members of the public rang up to want to know what Bill Clinton’s policy was on guns or free trade, there would be somebody who would answer the questions. And every so often, the people on the phones would get just so weary of somebody’s continued questions that they would refer them through to the policy expert. You would always dread those calls because they would be calls from the person who was either incredibly knowledgeable or just obsessed or really angry.

"I remember one guy, all I did was I simply answered the phone and he said ‘Are you the person I’m supposed to talk to about health care?’ And I said something like ‘Yes, happy to do so!’ And it was the English accent, he was just absolutely furious. ‘So, they’ve got a Brit in to talk about healthcare? That NHS, the socialist provision, it’s rubbish’ and he was furious. And yet actually what you could see, this was 1992, was huge numbers of people with no healthcare insurance, that we had the strength of the NHS provision compared to what the Americans had and also still have.

“I have a friend who’s just had a bone marrow transplant recently. Bone marrow transplants on the NHS cost around £100-150,000, in the US they cost $500,000 to a million dollars. So it’s not just about the quality of care, it is also about getting pretty good value for money.”

“It is hugely important and actually far more so here than in the US. There they were trying to make healthcare the issue because they were trying to win an argument. Here the NHS is just part of our core values as a country, it’s part of our identity as a country but it is also a service that we depend on, every single one of us, every day."

 

 

COOPER ON HER MUM

"I think grandmothers are completely underestimated. We would not survive at all without my mum. She’s like this sort of fourth emergency service. Whenever things go wrong, you suddenly find you’ve got clashing events and there’s going to be nobody to look after them in the evenings, she’s there.”

“I think there are things in terms of grandparents particularly who end up adopting the grandchildren, they often don’t get the support that they need. It can be a shadowy areas where they fall between different support. We want childcare more generally to be a central part of policy work that we are doing.

"Families will always support each other and should be able to support each other.

“Lots of people nowadays can’t depend on grandparents because they live so far away.  And often mum is still working. There are some interesting questions about what happen particularly to people over 50, when people want to work part time. We are interested in some of the issues around older women between work and retirement. But we are at quite an early stage on that.

 

 

COOPER ON COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS

“I went to a comprehensive. There are some great comprehensives, some great education.

“I think most people want a good local school so the key thing is what can you do to make sure all schools can be good schools. I think a lot of work that the Labour government did to raise standards in schools was hugely important. And to do that in a way that people can rely on their own local school improving rather than feeling that the only way is a sort of travel long distances, I think it’s hugely important.

“It’s important to raise standards across the board. What’s happened in Pontefract in my constituency is they have got two comprehensives that are now working closely together, got a really good relationship, they both decided not to go down the academy route but to become these two comprehensives working together in a way that actually would have been harder for them in that route . They were good performing ones, but now they’ve improved and got better."

“There’s a whole series of academies in East London that have done great jobs. Some of it has now become a bit confused what people are actually mean by it because the Labour Government had been very different.”

 

COOPER ON IMMIGRATION CAPS

"I think it is more sensible to get a wider debate on the kinds of things that the public are actually concerned about.  They are more concerned about, for example, the impact on the job market, than students for example. And at the moment the government has a bigger focus on students than it has on the job market.  Those are the kind of things that we want to discuss in the next couple of years as part of our policy process.”

 

COOPER ON TWITTER and her infamous ‘hhhhhghhghhhhghghghghgh’ Tweet.

“I was on Twitter on a train and I suddenly thought ‘Oh my god I’ve left my car at Doncaster this week'. So I just shove everything in my bag, charge off, literally tumble off the train just as the doors are closing. I get into my car, deep breath, check my Blackberry, check my phone.. And suddenly I’ve got multiple retweets. Someone said it’s the most sense I’ve heard from a politician in years!”