When Yvette Cooper today called for UK councils to each take a quota of Syrian refugees, it illustrated the pitfalls of political ambition. As is the custom for the modern breed of politician, she first went to Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics in which she gained a first class honours degree. The daughter of the former leader of the Prospect union, she left Oxford to gain further qualifications at Harvard and the London School of Economics respectively. Then it was time to gain employment in the real world.
Her first job in 1990 was as a policy researcher for the then Labour leader John Smith. By 1992, she had left these shores to help Bill Clinton with his presidential campaign. Any chances of real experience of the real world were dashed when she came back to become a policy advisor to Harriet Harman. This was followed by a role working as a research associate at the Centre for Economic Performance. By 1995, she had progressed to become Chief Economic Correspondent for the Independent before finally achieving the dream which she had undoubtedly harboured since childhood. She became an MP in a safe seat in 1997. 1997 was the year Blair promised us all that things could only get better and she was one of the many Blair Babes.
She soon climbed the political ladder to serve under both Blair and Brown. Always a firm Blairite, she also married the man who would become synonymous with Blair's nemesis Gordon Brown. Ed Balls was arguably one of the highest profile casualties of the recent Ed Miliband leadership. Together, Balls and Cooper were ordered to pay back £1,363 in relation to mortgage over-payments on one of their second homes. For Labour, the 2015 election will go down as one of their most disastrous and Blair and Brown must both accept the blame for that.
When Cooper (who chooses not to take the surname of her husband) made her plea for UK councils to take in Syrian refugees, she was perhaps overlooking her own role in that. As a major player in the Blair government which erroneously took us to war with Iraq, she started a ball rolling which has led us to the current Middle East crisis with huge swathes of Syria, Iraq and Libya being over-run with civil war or with Islamist terrorists. The history books now show that the vote taken by the Blair government was taken with false information. Worse still though, Cooper herself admitted that she would vote for the same cuts currently being meted out by the Tories. In other words, she was a true Blairite content to try and appear to be more conservative than the Tories themselves. It is another example of the sort of decision making of which the UK electorate becomes weary very quickly.
More recently, her lifelong quest to scale the political ladder has been derailed by an old school socialist whose policies are unwavering and based on real conviction. For a New Labour darling, this really must be the the ultimate insult. The very party which she has spent her life saving from the perceived ills of socialism is about to be reclaimed by a real life socialist. Oh the irony!
But let us return to that contest. Cooper has tried to throw all kinds of accusations at Jeremy Corbyn and each time she does, his odds of winning the contest just get slashed even more. Put simply, she has fallen in to the same trap as Miliband. By concentrating too much on her opponent, she has neglected to tell her electorate about her own policies. Just as the UK electorate would not sanction the appointment of the Brownite Blair as Chancellor in May, neither will they sanction his wife as Labour leader. The kiss of death for her chances of leadership was delivered this week when Gordon Brown came out in support of her.
She will be one of the last remnants of a time in UK politics when image took centre-stage with policies quietly taking their place on the back seat. Thanks to the decision of Labour to seek candidates from all sides of the party, we can now wave goodbye to that unhappy episode in our political life. We can now get back to the real lives of real people who have real experience of the challenges which sometimes mean the difference between
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