Ms Cooper said Sir Keir had a “bring me solutions, not problems” style of management.
Yvette Cooper launches astonishing attack on Keir Starmer (Image: Getty)
Keir Starmer insisted he would “front up” Labour’s immigration reforms despite others drawing up the policies, Yvette Cooper has revealed. The former Home Secretary, in an astonishing attack on her old boss, said the former Prime Minister’s leadership style “doesn’t necessarily work in politics”.
Revealing the internal rift over immigration, Ms Cooper said: “When we did the immigration white paper … we did a lot of the work on it in the Home Office, and we had a whole set of plans to bring legal migration back under control, a whole set of reforms around illegal migration and so on. But then Number 10 wanted Keir to announce it on his own and to front that up, and so I didn’t see what was going to be said or what the announcement was.”
Yvette Cooper has compared Andy Burnham to Keir Starmer (Image: Getty)
“And that was the way the No 10 operated. It was like, well, you can sit in the front row of the launch, but actually the Prime Minister is going to launch it.
“But actually, the Prime Minister’s not really been involved in the development of the policies.”
Sir Keir unveiled plans to ramp up deportations by increasing the number of offenders eligible for removals, overhaul how Article 8 of the ECHR is used in immigration cases, scrap the social care visa route, require foreign workers to take graduate level jobs and boost English language skills.
The Home Office predicted the changes will lead to 100,000 fewer people coming to the UK, meaning net migration could settle at around 240,000-250,000 by the end of this Parliament in 2029.
Shabana Mahmood, the current Home Secretary, has since gone further, declaring migrants will have to wait at least 10 years before they can apply for settlement rights.
And migrants could be barred from claiming benefits unless they become British citizens.
Arrivals applying for indefinite leave to remain after 10 years must have no criminal record, speak English to A-level standards and have no debt, under Labour’s new proposals.
Ms Mahmood has also told asylum caseworkers that “no weight” should be given to Article 8 claims when the family unit has been established whilst they did not have the legal right to be in the UK. Article 8 guarantees “respect for your private and family life”.
The French prepare to launch a migrant rescue vessel (Image: Getty)
New legislation will also place a greater burden on relatives living together. A foreign criminal, failed asylum seeker or immigration offender will have to prove they have a “genuine and subsisting relationship”.
It comes amid concerns that sex offenders, paedophiles, drug dealers and killers are avoiding deportation using Article 8 despite not being in their children’s lives.
Labour is hoping that by tightening the rules, it will lead to more removals.
Speaking to former chancellor George Osborne on the Political Currency podcast, Ms Cooper, now the Health Secretary in Andy Burnham’s government, said “I don’t think we’ve done Government very well in the last couple of years.”
She explained: “I think we’ve been pursuing a lot of really important things – a lot of things we’ve made massive progress on and achieved.
“We’ve got 3,000 more neighbourhood police on the beat in the first year, really big shift for somewhere like Castleford town centre.
“We’ve got NHS waiting times and lists coming down.
“You’ve got a whole set of things, you know, new policies being introduced that make a massive difference but I think the focus shifted quite a lot.
“So, we had ‘missions’ in the first six months and then they kind of disappeared.”
Ms Cooper said that in “contrast”, the Prime Minister’s drive to reform social care has largely “come from Andy because it’s something he’s been passionate about”.
The Prime Minister has pledged to work cross-party to create a care system where patients can “move seamlessly between hospitals, home care and community services”, while being “fully and sustainably funded”.
Ms Cooper continued: “He wanted to then talk a lot about – what are the problems here? How should we be thinking about it? How should we be trying to solve it?
“And he wanted me to be part of the event launching it, to be speaking at it, to be talking about it.
“And I think there’s, maybe there’s a difference in style of operating.”
Ms Cooper also said that “in a world of social media, it’s really obvious what he cares about, feels, can feel passionate about” while at the same time being “a lot older” than he was when he left parliament in 2017 to become the mayor of Greater Manchester for almost a decade.
The Health Secretary had earlier told the podcast she wanted to be the shadow health secretary when Labour was in opposition.
Referring to the reshuffle when Mr Burnham became Prime Minister, she said: “Twenty-seven years ago, I was a junior health minister.
“So, on the one hand, there’s this amazing, this incredible job and on the other it’s, ‘hang on, this is a massive shift’.
“You’re having to switch the things that you’re focused on and, you know, having had a series of different reshuffles, there’s obviously something frustrating about all of those things you were working on that you’re no longer able to see through, things that you wanted to do, and so on.”