For women the Welfare Reform Bill, unaffordable childcare, the threat to maternity leave and disappearing child tax credits will have "a massive impact on your whole identity, your life and your decisions", the shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper tells Mary Riddell in the Gender Special Issue of the Fabian Review.

Cooper says that women's life chances have been flung into reverse. "I can't think of any example in the last century that involved a greater turning back of the clock... [The coalition] think about it as just money in people's pockets. For women, it's about really fundamental choices on how they live their lives."

Read the full interview as a PDF here 

"We can't wait for history"

 
Labour will be vindicated on the economy, Yvette Cooper tells Mary Riddell, but the damage the Government is doing to women's life chances needs to be stopped now.

Unexpectedly for such a disciplined multi-tasker, Yvette Cooper is a hoarder. Beneath the window of her Westminster office sit the heaps of old paperwork that she keeps meaning, and failing, to clear up. Still, a deep litter filing system has its uses.

Not long ago, the Shadow Home Secretary stumbled on a parliamentary question from 1999, asking for a Treasury analysis on the impact of Budget measures on both men and women. The document revealed that the analysis the coalition omitted to conduct on the effect of cuts on women was once routine. "Exactly. It could be done, and they [George Osborne's team] hadn't done it. Not because it's not possible, but because they had chosen not to."

Cooper, initially appointed to shadow William Hague on foreign affairs, also placed herself in the vanguard of Labour's domestic offensive by highlighting the unfair burden that women would have to bear as a result of the Government's deficit reduction strategy. As she has pointed out, men stood to lose £4.20 a week after the cuts began in April, while women would see an average loss of £8.80 a week, despite earning and owning less. Reductions in tax credits, benefits, pensions and attendance allowance would all hit women harder.

Osborne's March Budget did nothing to reassure Cooper, who noted that many part-time working mothers, as well as pensioners, would get nothing from the increase in tax allowance. The coalition has now established itself, in her view, as an anti-family government. "Very much [so]. I thought initially that this was maybe just a blind spot, but it's been repeated.

"I think [there's] a confluence of two ideologies – the paternalistic Tory one which said that traditional families would be supported. The married couples' tax allowance [would] only help women who stayed at home and could end up with families with children losing out. Some of Iain Duncan Smith's universal credit may well just end up being paid to the male breadwinner and have a disincentive for the second person to go out to work."

But that traditionalist instinct is, she says, "not the dominant strain. At the same time, you've got the George Osborne/Nick Clegg, Liberal Tory approach which says the family is entirely private and the public sector should have nothing to do with it unless there's a real crisis, because that will create dependence."

As evidence, she cites a measure in the Welfare Reform Bill to incentivise separated parents using the Child Support Agency to make private arrangements on child maintenance. Those who cannot do so will, under the proposals, have to pay £100 (or a staged £50 fee for those on benefit), plus a sizeable 'tax' on any payment agreed. "The consequence is that women are suddenly going to find they have less help for their children, and if they want someone to help them, they'll have to pay."

Women's chances, she argues, have been flung into reverse. "I can't think of any example in the last century that involved a greater turning back of the clock. After the First World War the nursery provision that allowed women to work closed down. Other than that, it is hard to think of any comparable period in history. I think they [the coalition] think about it as just money in people's pockets. For women, it's about really fundamental choices on how they live their lives."

Unaffordable childcare, the threat to maternity leave and disappearing child tax credits will, she says, have "a massive impact on your whole identity, your life and your decisions about how you balance work and family." On these issues, Cooper can speak with much authority.

Some think that, had she decided to run, she could now be leader of the Labour party. Did it always seem clear to her that, as a mother of three small children, she should step aside as her husband, Ed Balls, campaigned for the top job, or did she agonise over her decision?

"I did think about it, because people raised it with me. Ed took the view that I should stand if I wanted to. He was very clear about that, and that he would only stand if I didn't want to. But if you've got kids and you're working out how to balance work and family life, you always have to be quite ruthless and hard-headed about the things you can do and the things you can't. You have to be realistic about what's possible and what isn't.

"That's why, as a minister, I would not do evening dinners. It was just a step too far – not possible. You have to take decisions like that. I probably still work a lot more hours than a lot of parents would choose to, but I can balance that. We depend a lot on my mum, but there are things I know are just not right, right now. Running for the leadership, with all the time [the candidates] had to spend away from home [was one]."

Balls's campaign commitments left her not only running the home but also, as the non-cooking partner, "living on ready meals." Did she feel resentful? "No. [Working mothers] have to have the confidence about making the right decisions at different times. For Ed it was a different decision. We work in very different ways, and he is much better at compartmentalising things than I am."

Her choice of words seems to allow for the possibility – or, some might infer, the likelihood – that she will go for the leadership next time round. "I think right now we've got a leader who is doing a good job, and I'm certainly not going to speculate," she says. But she wouldn't rule it out? "All I'll say at the moment is that I'm concentrating on the job I'm doing. We're not thinking about future leadership but about the leadership we've got."

Some of Gordon Brown's closest allies believed long ago that Balls would some day be Chancellor but that his wife would lead the party. "That's very kind of them. I think this [her current job] is the right place to be."

She does not, however, seek to dispel the aura of toughness discerned by those who see her as a power-in-waiting. One columnist described her as "Iron Yvette", a label that provokes what sounds like delighted laughter. "Or steely. Pick your metal." Her female colleagues are, in some cases, more directly flattering. One backbencher told me not long ago that "Yvette walks on water." Cooper seems pleased by this compliment. "But I end up splashing sometimes," she says.

In Labour politics, women are still more prone to sink without trace. Both Eds, Miliband and Balls, were part of the charmed circle of (mostly male) special advisers who quickly became MPs and ministers, leapfrogging female counterparts as well as sitting MPs. What can be done to change that bias?

She suggests the Labour party is making osmotic progress. "We actually have a situation where about half the shadow cabinet are women. We changed the rules to [make it] 30 per cent, but the way people voted went further... The image I have is that every generation of women stands on the shoulders of the women who have gone before. It's only because of the battles Harriet [Harman] and other women fought that it was possible for me to become a minister and take maternity leave."

There are, however, limits to Cooper's sisterly inclinations. When she first took over the Home Office portfolio from Balls in the reshuffle following Alan Johnson's resignation, almost her first job was to respond to Theresa May's announcement of the government review of counter-terrorism measures. The Commons encounter between two women attracted almost as much notice around Westminster as the contemporaneous furore over two male Sky sports presenters' complaints that a female linesman was unlikely to understand the offside rule.

Do she and May get on? "Despite the fact that we were both elected at the same time, I wouldn't say I knew her well." When I ask the same question later about William Hague, her former opposite number, she is much more enthusiastic. "Very well, actually. He was very good at providing briefings and very open about things he was concerned about and that might become a problem later. I think his judgment on individual country issues was often pretty good."

Although she criticises Hague's realist foreign policy and the bungled response to early events of the Arab spring, her chillier response is reserved for May's handling of police cuts. Does Cooper agree with the findings of the Windsor report on pay and conditions, which signalled a curb on bonuses for senior officers?
"The problem is you have a series of reviews happening at the same time as a 20 per cent cut in the police budget. The scale of cuts is a serious problem. For Theresa May to pick a fight with the police, which is the way she's been handling this, is the wrong approach. Of course you should debate reforms, but ultimately it should be about the police and government working together.

"What was really destructive is Theresa May's speech a week before the Windsor report, pre-empting a report she hadn't seen... It creates a climate of picking a fight rather than constructive reforms, and I think that's the wrong approach when over 12,000 police officers' jobs are being lost."

More surprisingly, Cooper has also found herself at variance with her own close colleague,Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary and one of Ed Miliband's closest allies. After Khan made a speech deploring some aspects of Labour's crime strategy, Cooper said Labour should be "proud" of its crime record. Her remarks were interpreted as a slap down to Khan. Is that how she intended them to sound?

"Sadiq's [Guardian] article was exactly right. You've got to be tough on crime, and we've got to maintain that approach. It's the right thing to do." But Khan also said in his speech that Labour should have done "much better" in tackling reoffending and "should have been bolder in putting forward progressive arguments." The aim should be, he added, to get prison numbers down.

While Cooper concedes that objective is desirable, crime levels permitting, she appears to widen the division, saying:  "I think you've got to look at the whole strategy. I don't think you can pick out [different areas] because overall ... we did the right thing. The overall impact was to bring down crime by 43 per cent... You can have a debate on where you go from here, but I don't think we should say we got it wrong in terms of our overall approach. I don't [believe] we did."

In other words, she and Khan still disagree? "Well, we've talked a lot about it. I think we would agree on the importance on bringing down crime... There will be strong agreement between Sadiq and me about that."
On other parts of the record, Cooper is more critical. Labour, she says "had not done enough on women caring for [elderly] parents, aunts and uncles... We'd made progress around childcare; the next stage was to make progress on social care and helping older women."

Though eager to stress Labour's successes, she also lists the "things we didn't get right." She cites the attempts to introduce 90 days and 42 days detention without charge of terror suspects. "We shouldn't have done that. We got ourselves into the wrong place. We should have done the transitional arrangements around immigration [from] Eastern Europe. You can look back on what should have happened on bank regulations, not just in Britain but around the world."

On the high watermarks of office, she returns to crime. "I think the crime record is a hugely important one. It was right to increase the number of police, right to have new anti-social behaviour powers and right to do a lot of the things we did on crime."

Whatever Labour's other flaws, she warns against "falling into the prissy caricature that Nick Clegg is trying to create. There are areas where we didn't do the right thing, but equally what they [the coalition] are doing, by trying to knock or get rid of the Human Rights Act and electing police commissioners, is actually removing the traditional checks and balances in our unwritten constitution." She and Khan, she says, will be working jointly on constitutional issues.

Although Cooper will be backing a Yes vote on AV in the May referendum, her endorsement of the campaign being led by Ed Miliband is conspicuously tepid. "I think actually the most important thing is local elections ... and council services. It [AV] is not an area in which I've ever had a strong interest and involvement. I think it would be better than the current system, but no system is perfect. The more significant issue affecting most people at the moment is what's happening in terms of the impact on their services."

Does she think the coalition will survive for a full term? "If Nick Clegg was prepared to do such a complete reversal on student tuition fees, it's hard to see what would be too big for him to swallow as the price of staying in power. I find it hard to see what issue would be big enough to make the Lib Dems walk away. Also, they don't want to go back to their electorate any time soon.

"On the other hand, you see these huge tensions... But it [a collapse of the coalition] doesn't look the most likely scenario at the moment." That leaves the question of whether Labour can regain power. "I do think we can win again, but we have to recognise that we still have a tremendous amount of work to make that possible."

Ultimately, she thinks Labour's handling of the economy will be vindicated. "That is the story that history will tell. But we can't wait for history. We have to make those arguments now." Labour's as-yet unwritten history allows for the possibility that, after some future victory for the centre-left, Yvette Cooper will lead her party and country.