Andy Burnham<\/a>, and argued in favour of trying to form a national consensus around social care and reintroducing Sure Start-style children\u2019s centres for young families under his leadership.<\/p>\nContrasting the new prime minister with Starmer, the health secretary said there had been \u201ca style of leading the government that maybe doesn\u2019t necessarily work in politics\u201d under the last administration.<\/p>\n
As an example, she was critical of how she was in effect excluded from launching the immigration white paper in May 2025 while home secretary.<\/p>\n
At the launch, which was fronted by Starmer, he spoke of introducing policies to deal with the risk that Britain could become an \u201cisland of strangers\u201d, which Cooper later had to defend.<\/p>\n
She told Osborne: \u201cKeir wanted the immigration white paper. Actually, we did a lot of the work on it in the Home Office, and a whole set of plans to bring legal migration back under control, a whole set of reforms around illegal migration and so on.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then No 10 wanted Keir to announce it on his own and to front that up, and so I didn\u2019t see what was going to be said or what the announcement was \u2026 that was the way that No 10 operated.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like, well, you can sit in the front row of the launch, but actually the prime minister is going to launch it.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cI think Keir\u2019s style of leadership was \u2018bring me solutions, not problems\u2019. And I\u2019m not sure you can do that in politics \u2026 the thing you see with Andy is \u2018hang on, bring me the problems. I want to talk to you about the problems. I want to engage. I want to hear about the problems, and I want us to work together in solving them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Cooper contrasted Starmer\u2019s desire to be presented with a set of options with Burnham\u2019s more discursive approach on social care, saying he was \u201cpassionate about it\u201d and wanted to talk about the problems and how to solve them.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe wanted me to be part of the event, launching it, to be speaking at it, to be talking about it,\u201d she said. \u201cI think Keir\u2019s style of leadership, which is very effective in other ways, actually, was \u2026 it just didn\u2019t fit with that emotion that you need to drive change and involve people and include people in politics.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the podcast, Cooper also spoke about her ambition to build a consensus around a solution to the social care crisis, saying it was about \u201ctrying to create a sense that somebody\u2019s going to have to solve this, and you know if it\u2019s not this government, it\u2019s going to have to be the next government, or we\u2019re going to end up with a never-ending, growing crisis for our NHS because we\u2019re not doing things to solve social care\u201d.<\/p>\n
She said she also wanted to build national agreement around the principles of Sure Start, a programme to help young families that was cut when Osborne was chancellor.<\/p>\n
Telling Osborne she was \u201cstill angry\u201d about his decision to cut funding for Sure Start children\u2019s centres, she said: \u201cI actually want to build that same national consensus on how we start our kids\u2019 lives, so that no future government of whatever party would think, you know what, it\u2019s OK to rip up Sure Start, because actually we establish this as something that\u2019s so important in children\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yvette Cooper admits Labour has \u201cnot done government very well\u201d in the last couple of years, and accused…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[5,6],"class_list":["post-102582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117087130492386226","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}