The anti-Farage? Yvette Cooper vs. Reform UK

LONDON — Keir Starmer has a major Nigel Farage problem. He’s hoping his steely interior minister Yvette Cooper has the answer.

Britain’s home secretary on Monday unveiled a hardline blueprint to address Brits’ concerns about migration to the U.K. — just days after voters turned in their droves to Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party in regional elections.

Cooper has vowed to end what she’s called the “failed free-market experiment” with migration. On Monday she unveiled controversial plans to end the recruitment of care workers from overseas to fill holes in the U.K. labor force, and to force businesses to prove that they are actively trying to increase domestic recruitment.

A cut to the duration of graduate visas, and a new levy on the income universities generate from international students, are also on the cards.

In a hard-hitting speech in No.10 Downing Street, her boss, Prime Minister Starmer, warned the U.K. risks “becoming an island of strangers” without strong rules on immigration, and said the new measures would mean net migration falls “significantly” over the next four years.

Yet delivering on that loaded promise means navigating the notoriously hard-to-manage Home Office — not to mention a restive Labour Party worried about the wisdom of tacking in Farage’s direction on the hot-button issue.

Starmer hopes Cooper’s previous senior ministerial experience (she is one of the few in the current administration to have served in Cabinet in the last Labour government) and long apprenticeship shadowing the role and chairing parliament’s powerful home affairs committee will pay off.

“She’s probably the most prepared home secretary that there has been,” said one of her former advisers, Danny Shaw, once a home affairs correspondent at the BBC.

On the front line

Success is personal for Cooper, whose own parliamentary seat in Yorkshire faces a strong threat from Farage’s insurgent Reform UK.

“She really understands what people are thinking, what their concerns are, and the political weather on the ground [in her constituency],” Shaw says.

Cooper claims to have seen Britain’s 2016 Brexit vote coming after campaigning in Yorkshire, according to her husband Ed Balls’ autobiography.

Balls, a former Cabinet minister himself, wrote that Cooper pushed for then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to keep advocating changes to European freedom of movement ahead of the Brexit vote — even after his renegotiation with Brussels failed to yield results.

Almost 10 years later, Cooper appears to be fighting similar battles, now as a government minister. She has been leading internal opposition to proposals for a full-blown European youth mobility scheme as part of Starmer’s reset with the E.U., which culminates in a summit next week.

Cooper has long argued privately that such a plan would “not be compatible” with pledges to bring down net migration, according to a person familiar with the thinking at the top of the Home Office, granted anonymity like others in this article to speak frankly.

Yet Cooper faces competing demands to fire up the stagnant British economy — and that could risk blunting her efforts to show voters the Labour government is serious about reducing migration.

In Farage’s camp, there’s some grudging acceptance that Cooper means business. A Reform official privately pondered that the home secretary had been making progress with the public after the government’s high-profile media blitz around deportation of foreign criminals and others with no right to remain in the U.K.

Cooper’s boast that she had driven removals of foreign criminals and immigration offenders to the highest level since 2018 “wasn’t quite cutting through, but it was certainly close if that momentum had kept up,” the Reform official conceded.

Yet the same official said Britain’s recently inked trade deal with India, which extends an exemption on national insurance contributions for some Indian workers, will undermine Cooper’s efforts, and offers an easy attack for her opponents pushing the idea that British workers will be undercut.

“You are further back than square one now because of the India deal,” the official quipped.

Cooper served in the last Labour government — booted out of office in 2010 — as chief secretary to the Treasury, effectively the holder of the departmental purse strings.

A government official, who has witnessed interactions between Cooper and colleagues, said the home secretary was skilled at calming Treasury fears the Home Office is “arbitrarily coming up with something that is a sledgehammer” to curb migration at the expense of the economy, and credited her seriousness and attention to detail.

“Credit where it is due: Labour has had to challenge two of its core constituencies, universities and the public health/care system, and we will hear plenty of loud complaints from both over the coming weeks,” David Goodhart, head of demography, immigration and integration at the center-right Policy Exchange think tank, said after the publication of the immigration white paper on Monday.

Polar opposites

Cooper’s tendency to keep her cards close to her chest is noted by colleagues — and a clear contrast to the plain-speaking bloke-in-the-pub persona cultivated by Farage.

“She is a very serious career politician who doesn’t do ‘down the pub for a pint,’” one former colleague, who served on the House of Commons home affairs committee with her, said.

“She is completely mindful of her image. She is completely humorless,” the former colleague said, lamenting her committee Christmas parties as “not the biggest let your hair down in town.” 

“A glass of cold chardonnay and a couple of Twiglets and bob’s your uncle,” the former colleague bemoaned.

But Shaw, the former adviser, says that while Cooper is “quite direct and business-like,” she has got a “real human side to her, and a brilliant sense of humor” with the “ability to laugh at herself.”

This side is rarely seen in public. Cooper, who unsuccessfully stood to be Labour Party leader as the party rank-and-file tacked sharply to the left in 2015, is never raised in focus groups, according to one pollster. Farage, on the other hand, is among the most recognized U.K. politicians.

She is also under plenty of fire on her own side. A Labour MP on the left of the party warned that aping the language of the right would only make Reform stronger.

“You tell people that what they have been saying is true, and the more extreme they become, you validate them,” the MP said. As if on cue, Farage was straight out of the traps Monday declaring the government would “not do what it takes to control our borders.”

“She isn’t trying to emulate [Farage],” the government official quoted above insisted. “She is trying to make the progressive, serious, workable case for what our system should look like, rather than just knee-jerk, net-zero migration stuff.”