Yvette Cooper helps Labour steal Tory territory on crime

By exploiting weakness in a traditional Conservative strongpoint, Labour is seeking to persuade sceptical voters it can provide law and order, says Sean O’Grady

Yvette Cooper channels Tony Blair at the Labour conference in Liverpool (Getty)

It’s one thing for Labour to campaign on the NHS, an issue where they invariably enjoy a polling lead, and, with incessant strikes and more than 7 million on waiting lists, it’s another winner for them going into an election year. Keir Starmer also declared, explicitly, that his party would “fight the next election on economic growth”, again an issue that’s often favoured Labour when a Tory government loses its reputation for competence. Now, though, the party is also majoring in law and order – deep into traditional Tory territory. Levels of knife crime, shoplifting and hate crime are beginning to drive political choices. The polling suggests that Labour has edged ahead of the Tories, but is that simply due to a public impression of rising crime, or does Labour have a genuinely attractive “offer”? In rounding off the conference, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper sought to prove that they do.

What’s Yvette Cooper’s big idea?

Not necessarily the biggest, but the most eye-catching is her youth programme: “A new 10-year programme bringing together services and communities to support young people. New youth hubs, with both mental health workers and youth workers, to tackle the crisis in youth mental health, to give teenagers the best start in life, to stop the knife crime that is killing our children. Imagine it – communities coming together with that same awesome capacity to transform lives. A youth programme focused on tackling knife crime and a mental health crisis among young people. We need urgent interventions to stop young people getting drawn into crime or exploitation”.

Will it work?

You’d have to be sceptical to readily agree that glorified youth clubs would have an enormous impact on a generation corrupted by social deprivation, poor educational and employment opportunities and the drug trade. The young are usually at the bottom end of the criminal “food chain”, and fighting organised crime and gangs requires a much wider, intelligence-led approach and, arguably, accompanied by even tougher sentencing. That said, youth hubs might be better than doing nothing and could help in rebuilding community policing.

Any other ideas?

Yes. Cooper has promised to target shoplifting and abolish what she claims is a Tory law that effectively permits shoplifting to the value of £200, because offences “aren’t investigated even if the same gang comes back time and again.” Of course, she doesn’t say what her new de minimis level would be set at – Mars bar? Sirloin steak? Food processor? The police might also object to being called out to deal with kids with a bottle of pop in their pockets. Stiffer sentencing is also promised.

Isn’t she just recycling the New Labour approach?

Funnily enough, yes. Cooper served in Tony Blair’s government and Gordon Brown’s cabinet and is famously married to Ed Balls – so very much a product of the New Labour era. It’s back in fashion now, but did Cooper have to regurgitate one of Blair’s best-known soundbites? Anyway, she did shamelessly without a hint of irony or acknowledgement: “Too often when teenagers say they don’t feel safe, no one listens. Too often when they start to struggle with mental health, or go off the rails, or are groomed by criminal gangs, nothing is done. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. We said it, we mean it, that means we have to act.” (The last bit doesn’t necessarily follow.)

Anything she’s forgotten?

It may be just a generational thing, but Cooper barely mentioned fraud and completely forgot to talk about digital crime and how the new technologies could raise police productivity. This is odd because digital crimes are some of the fastest growing and most devastating – such as life savings disappearing. Cooper’s antique approach stands in sharp contrast to the modernising, reforming zeal of other shadow cabinet members such as Wes Streeting, Liz Kendall and Bridget Phillipson, and of course Rachel Reeves and Starmer himself.

Why aren’t the Tories doing better?

They jolly well should be. They actually have managed to recruit 20,000 new officers, as promised, and they dish out the most vicious rhetoric about criminals, as well as making performative panto remarks about forces supporting Pride and so on. Suella Braverman never passes on the opportunity to display her “anti-woke” credentials and interfere in operational matters.

However, it is to no avail. The government is still having to live down the loss of 20,000 police personnel and the destruction of community/neighbourhood policing at an earlier stage in Conservative rule. The expertise lost and police stations closed by David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May (as home secretary and PM), have left a grim legacy. So too have a series of scandals that have left public confidence in the police badly damaged.

What do the public really think?

To a disturbing degree, they don’t trust any of the politicians to sort crime out. Labour are narrowly the best rated, at 22 per cent, ahead of the Conservatives on 16 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 6 per cent. However, it is the “don’t knows” on 27 per cent who “win” this contest. Braverman and Cooper have more in common than they might think – the voters don’t rate either of them.