As The Guardian notes this morning:
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is the only minister yet to agree a spending settlement with the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. In the Times Chris Smyth says police budgets are expected to rise by more than inflation, but other parts of the Home Office budget may face cuts.
I think there is rather more to this than meets the initial eye.
My question is, might Cooper be on manoeuvres, looking for an excuser to quit because she wants to oppose Starmer from the backbenches, giving her the chance to mount a leadership challenge?
Ed Balls is taking very aggressive stances with Labour ministers in interviews on breakfast television at present. Could this all be part of a co-ordinated opposition?
For the record, Cooper is not the answer to any known question. If she replaced Starmer it would be one extreme centrist replacing another.
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Cooper quits to be replaced by Streeting????
The other big need for funds, after police, is asylum and border force. It would be helpful to have a fully rounded human being looking after that.
Thank you, Richard.
As I watched the BBC breakfast news today, the thought sprang to mind. Her hubby has been on manoeuvres, too.
The Home Office tends to be a graveyard, other than for Theresa May, put there by the Cameroons to keep her out of their way and have a woman in a senior position.
” the thought sprang to mind. Her hubby has been on manoeuvres, too.”
oh dear god no…. not Balls on Strictly…….again! the gurning brainless chimp.
(in a previous incarnation he was the dog on the record label “his master voice”).
Remembering her fatuous 2015 Leadership campaign – as I recall she had a web page with only a frontispiece and zero content!! – all I can say is that she has sunk from being one of Gordon Brown’s most capable ministers to become “the (wo)man upon the stair” in:
“The other day upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
Oh how I wish he’d go away.”
Just another empty vessel in Starmer’s Cabinet of Keystone Kops 4th-raters, who has effortlessly acclimatised herself to the environment of incompetence she finds herself in.
Cooper was my initial choice for leader in 2015, as the least worst candidate; until I watched the hustings and heard Jeremy Corbyn’s reply to the question of renewing Trident, and his support for policies that used to be mainstream Labour ideas.
At a local hustings, I asked Cooper’s representative (Geraint Davies, Swansea West) about Cooper’s support for renewing Trident. “Yvette knows that we need four boats.” Why? “There is a real threat from Russia, we have to be prepared.”
The words have stayed with me. They sounded formulaic then, it sounds worse now. She is not the answer to any question, just more of the same knee-jerk, unthinking word salad.
Yvette Coper has hue amount of practical experience in politics. Unknown to me, until today, was her involvement in the Bill Clinton 1992 campaign. I think it was a mistake for her to resign from Corbyn’s front bench and become chair of the home office committee. She has opposed Tory immigration policy for 10+ years. Unfortunately for her, her present boss wants Tory immigration policy.
That post got me playing a sort of nihilistic “Fantasy Reshuffle”.
Do not read on if you are of a senstive disposition.
Home Secretary – Liz Kendall (Cooper wasn’t tough enough and Liz does that hard cruel look so well).
Work & Pensions – Bridget Phillipson (The DWP does not require a SoS who can make the public case for cruelty and discrimination, but one who in complete ignorance, will obediently recite the age-old DWP mantras, such as their version of the Nazi’s “arbeit macht frei”, (“work is the best route out of poverty” – even if you can’t work) irrespective of the evidence).
Education Secretary – Luke Akehurst (an externally decided appointment, just in case Starmer goes rogue on Israel, no knowledge of education required).
In a few weeks, Darren Jones as Chancellor when Reeves finally implodes, so that there can be a fresh face to carry out the old policies, and a convenient opportunity for the NEXT set of “ironclad” fiscal rules and the next set of “difficult choices”.
I thought of moving Wes Streeting (to Education), but he refused to leave his protected NHS spending allocation, and private education providers are not well represented in his personal financial portfolio
I have no respect left, for ANY MP still taking the Labour whip. They should leave now, and start enforcing the “change” they were elected to deliver, but from the opposition benches – they can have FAR more clout over there than they ever will have on the Labour benches. There’s plenty of room over there too.
Sadly RobertJ, with a couple of honourable exceptions – most LINO MPs are time servers, making up the numbers till the LINO extinction event in 2029.
They were selected on the basis of being invertebrates (am pointing @ you McSwine).
Robertj- this horrible scenario will come to pass, unless Labour MPs face the reality that Keir Starmer is massively (for good reason, even beyond his slavish genocide-support) unpopular. And must be overthrown, if they are to have any chance of survival.
I once heard her described as the Lionel Messi of Centrist politics. More Blair than Messi, I fear.
An extreme centrist at that.
Luke Akehurst can’t string a sentence together on TV, or in the commons. Should that not be a requirement for education secretary?
Andrea Jenkyns held the post…