YouSaid · the spoken record

Yvette Cooper

lines on the record: 39
first: 2022-06-10
most recent: 2022-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We should go full on. And so I'd got some damasque curtain material, and we were going to do like kerchiefs and some lader hose and things. Only, of course, I'd left it to the last minute. So we ended up on the train from Munich to Salzburg and me getting the other parents we were traveling with and Ed in this like sort of conveyor belt of sewing and flattening these lady hose and we thought it's all right we'll get away with it it's like nobody knows us we're in the middle of you know of course exactly yeah but then of course the people opposite suddenly turn to ed and said in this west strong west midlands accent i do hope you'll come back into politics one day as he's”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the sound of music. That was such a great fun. So I come up with this idea. I thought I was going to railing. I haven't done that for a very long time. So we went interrailing, which was a little bit challenging because you're trying to hoard kids on, and one of the places we went was Salzburg. And they have this amazing, these tours of the sound of music sites. So, you know, in Salzburg, people think, well, we're the home of Mozart, but we, of course, weren't thinking, no, this is the home of the sound of music. And you know that scene in the sound of music where they sing Doad Deer and they're all dressed in curtain material and they're on the bikes along that long road. And so we went cycling along that road. We have a tour guide and a beatbox playing out. The sound of music songs and singing as we went. And I'd got this idea we should wear curtain material and we should have.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think We wanted to help. We've got our kids are older now, they're off doing their own things. We've got space to be able to help. And there is something about the sort of the plight of refugees. Obviously, you'd have war in Europe again, something we've not seen in generations that just think it's right to do what we can to help. What we've been trying to do is working with other families locally. So to help keep families together. So we have a mum and two children staying with us and their friends and other family staying nearby and trying to keep families together and a network of people to support them. And there's lots of families across towns who've come forward to help. And those are the most impressive Ukrainian women that you could imagine because they're keeping going, supporting their families, working, learning English.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to do stuff. I just want to, you know. And you can do stuff as a local MP. So, you know, we're able to do stuff to get investment in our town centres. We're able to do stuff to try and solve individual problems and things like that. But, you know, to be able to change things on a grander scale, to stop kids across the country just slipping into poverty or going hungry. I think it's about getting a Labour government, isn't it?”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in the end, if we're not credible and we're not serious, I think for Labour we don't win. And some of the scepticism about us in the 2019 general election was they just thought, you know, you'll never deliver this. It doesn't stack up. You can't actually make any of these things. You're going to make promises. You can't deliver them. So I think there's a first step, which is about actually being able to show, yeah, we are credible. You know, we can provide people with security, but then beyond that, you've got to have the optimism, the excitement. Here's the things, here's the way in which we want to change the country. Now, some of that is practical policies like Winfall Tax, but some of it is also about the kind of vision of a future where we believe we are stronger if we stand together than if we leave each other to sink or swim alone. We still believe actually we are the party of the many and not the few as well.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done about crime, nothing's been done about the drug dealer on the corner of the street. Nothing is being done about my burglary or all I get is a crime number. And people I think it's really underestimated. I think the national media is really underestimating how important this is in communities, in towns like mine, across the country, that real sense of frustration that there are no consequences. Nothing is being done. And the dropping confidence in policing, the dropping confidence in...”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, but I think she's, I think Pritter Crowd's also actually very unpopular. And I think that's because people can see through that just when you just have headlines, when you just have empty responses, then actually that doesn't make any difference. And you can get away with it initially. You can get away with the first round of just headlines. But then if after 12 months, things seem to have got worse, not better, if after a couple of years actually things seem to be going backwards. And that is what we're seeing happening. So, you know, the number of asylum decisions being made every halved since 2015, the charge rate for crimes has plummeted 1.3% of rapes are actually make it to court. Now, all right, you could say, okay, those are boring facts. Actually, no, they're not because what they capture is people sense that nothing's been.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the end, like the world's complicated, isn't it? And I like evidence and I like facts and I think that's probably not a bad thing. If you want to change the world, you've got to be able to do it in a way that makes sense and you've got to be able to deliver. And there's no point in just having a bunch of headlines if you can't actually deliver and people can see through it in the end.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the overall level of net migration is about the same now as it was before Brexit was implemented. So the compositions changed, but the overall level is about the same. The big thing that's changed in the labour market is a big drop in the number of over 50s working. I think some of this has also been affected by not just things like long-term sickness, but also about things like lack of childcare, lack of affordable childcare as people giving up work to look after their grandchildren and things like that. So it's a much more complicated situation.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's done so the question is, I mean, you know, we had those debates and, you know, I was one of those arguing for different ways that you could implement Brexit. And we had a lot of those things. We've now got a legal agreement in place. And what I think the challenge for us is how you set out what is a positive, optimistic vision for the country.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I argued that the time. I think one of the things, though, that I think I got wrong on it was I genuinely thought that somehow it would be possible to build consensus and that maybe, okay, if things took a bit longer and it took longer, then there would be more chance of people coming together, finding a way through this, finding a way to build some consensus. But actually the opposite happened. And the longer it took, the more polarised everything became. And I got that wrong. But I think pinks became more polarised. But I think, you know, look, it's, you know, what we've got to do now is move forward. You know, we're outside the EU. We have a new relationships to build. We've got to set out now a positive future for the country that moves on”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we got a lot of things wrong, and I think a lot of people got things wrong. I mean, I obviously said I thought we shouldn't have the second referendum wasn't the right policy for the general election, but look, there were different views on that. That was my view. I also took the view that we shouldn't have a no deal, and that would be damaging.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to get through this, and all of that's been tainted now, so that tradition of respect, which I think Keir Starmer has been working very hard to restore in the Labour tradition, is just a really important one.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that tradition of respect, which actually has always been an important part of the Labour tradition. It's always been you go through 1945, you go through 1997, it's always been a strong part of the Labour tradition, and it was like we were losing it. It was like we were becoming a party that just talked about a kind of the things that affect cities but not towns. There was a sort of economic divide growing. And on a whole series of different things, not showing respect, but that I think is the same reason why people in towns like mine, people in Castleford, feel so angry with Boris Johnson right now, because again, it's that total lack of respect for people, disrespecting people who made huge sacrifices during COVID, disrespecting the fact that communities came together during COVID.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's actually more than that. I think it's about respect for the rules or respect for whether that was respect for, we've had a referendum for the referendum result, whether that was respect for”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think underpinning both those things, like both Brexit and our leader, Jim Corbyn's leadership, were big factors, underpinning both of them, I think was a feeling among a lot of people in towns like ours that Labour was disrespecting them. And that the party sort of disrespected them on things like security. They didn't think we had a leader who would keep them safe. They didn't think we respected the big institutions of the country, all of the issues around patriotism. But they also thought that the second referendum was disrespecting the result of the referendum. And I think that was damaging as well. So I think there was that was an important part of it. I think people also...”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, definitely not because it's also the best job in the world. You know, there are times when it totally drives you up the wall, but the whole mix of things, you know, look, if you can get into government, that is amazing because you can do things. And there was stuff that I did that's still in place now that even the stuff I did as a junior minister, I was at a school in Nottingley a couple of weeks ago, just as the crates arrived of the apples and pears. And that was something that had been my idea when we were in government to bring in free fruit in primary school, you know, the generation that had Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher. Actually, we wanted to come back. And that is still there.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And other MPs, you find ways of just dealing with that, of just ignoring things and so on, but for your family, it's really hard. And I think especially, I mean, obviously after Joe Cox was murdered, obviously David Amos as well. You have that happen. We had the Westminster terror attack as well. I think, yeah, it is really hard for close family members and probably in some ways harder for them than for us because, you know, at the same time I'm wandering around Castleford chatting to everybody and you see all the nice bits that the people chatting to you, talking about things. You know that it's not all just that small minority of people who are abusive or hostile or threatening or in the worst cases that awful violence. It's not like that at all”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that is probably one of the hardest thing the period as well and with the rise of social media. We have seen a lot more abuse and the abuse is higher for women. It's also higher for those who are black or ethnic minorities. There's a racist element to it as well. I guess”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After them to grab this child, and I couldn't even stop and explain, Oh, hi, yes, oh, hello, gotta go. She had to get off the train. Was it ever mentioned? No, no, he never mentioned it again. They just sort of looked in shock at charging down.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit tricky. I would have that same sense of trying to pretend I'm professional. We had this one point where I was on the train. It was the train aiming to get off at Doncaster. And the toll Tony Blair prime ministerial entourage comes sweeping down the platform and I literally hid. I thought, I've got small kids with me. I can't pretend to be a professional minister. And also, you know, deal with the kids. So I ducked, I literally hid as they all came down so nobody would see me as they got on. And I thought it's okay. I'm under a different carriage. Nobody will notice. And then just before I had to get off at Doncaster, I thought I've got to change child, small child's nappy. Small child has a very different view of this. And while I'm halfway through nappy changing, set off down the train, you know, without a nappy, set off down the train, ran straight past Tony Blair and Cherie and the whole entourage with me then.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And we would go back every week on a Thursday or a Friday morning, come back down Sunday evening and so on. And that, especially when the kids, especially when you've got going through the potty training phase.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And, you know, you do it in different ways. But we also have this mad process as well of it was the traveling to and fro. There was a real chaos, you know, getting the kids to and fro each week. Because you're considering...”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, I mean, there were, it was, we had a big increase in the number of women in 1997, so that, I think, made it much easier for me than safer Harriet and Harriet Harmon and for her generation. But it was a bit mad. And there was a sense as well that you should try and...”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just understanding the difficulties when people actually are desperate to work, really want to, but long-term sickness or difficulties or disabilities can end up holding people back. And that's actually what you need to do is to support people. It's certainly what's happening now. You've got massive drop in the number of people who are in the labour market. You've got a big increase in the people with long-term sickness, partly because of long COVID. And you need to actively help people, and I don't think that's happening.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, and it was one of the things, I mean, I wasn't, I was only in the work and pensions department for about nine months. But one of the things I did get them to do is they were doing some of the changes was to go back and look at actually what do some of these assessments mean for ME and actually how they should be changed. But we didn't really get very far with that process because we then had a general election. I think...”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had an ME for it was probably for about two or three years in total, but I had a year where I was just completely off work. Couldn't really do anything. And that was such a sort of big psychological challenge as well because I always just done things. I've just always been busy, always had, you know, slightly chaotic mix of things going on and then suddenly I couldn't do anything. Suddenly I could, you know, barely go out the flat, barely do anything at all and also not knowing when it was going to end. So that would probably was the hardest time I've ever been through after I'd been ill for a few months. I then got depressed, you know, quite understandably. And it was, yeah, that was really hard.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, he really wasn't at all. The one person that I did meet was Michael Gove, who then tried to persuade me to join the Oxford Union. And I remember thinking, do you know what? I don't want anything to do with any of this. It felt quite sort of smug and entitled the whole thing. And it also, it was really expensive. Pay a lot of money. So I think that was a little bubble of its own. The idea that that kind of thing had anything to do with most people's lives. It just didn't feel real at all”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was the point which it became actually government. Because, you know, there were all sorts of other things, you know, you get involved in and probably as a result of my dad probably had that sense of just challenging things or questioning things all the way through. But that was quite a powerful, actually just it really matters what governments do.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been, it was the late 80s, the budget, and I think it was probably the 1988 budget when Nigel Lawson cut taxes for higher earners at the same time as freezing pensions. And effectively, that meant a real cut in pensions. And my anti-list, she didn't have a full pension because of the jobs she'd done. So she didn't even have a full pension. She was really founding it hard to make hens meet. And remember my mum being so angry, just furious, standing in the kitchen. So to the point of tears, that how could a government do this? How could a government cut taxes for those in the highest incomes and cut my Auntie Loses' pension?”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my great auntie Lizzie. She was a proper matriarch. My mum's auntie and my mum's mum died when I was very small and don't really, I don't remember her at all. But my grandchild is, she was one of those women who, you know, before the NHS was set up, she would be going to help with the babies being born in the community. She would go and lay out the bodies when somebody dies. She was just one of those pivotal people in the community and she worked hard and she was a single mom after her husband died and not only looking after her own children but also bringing up her sister's children as well and so she was just one of these remarkable you know incredible hardworking outspoken women and i remember as well so she had a huge impact on my mum and i really remember i think it would have been”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we didn't really talk about party politics or political party activism so much, but I guess there was always issues. So, you know, my dad was very much in the trade union. He always had a huge skepticism about institutions, readiness to challenge, to question, and probably encouraged us to really, you know, always believe that actually if an institution's doing something, chances are it may be wrong and you should be questioning and challenging. My mum's family's mining family grew up in Lauka mining village in West Cumberland and very much had that sense of solidarity, that labour solidarity, community kind of ethos of hard work but helping others and supporting others in the community.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably not because I think that, I mean, my dad was a trade union official. He took me on, I went with him on the People's March for Jobs in the early 80s, you know, marching with the union banners and so on. But we never felt publicly exposed growing up, which is probably why it was sort of such a big shock in some ways, you know, then being elected and having to respond to all of that. But I think you just saw it with other people's kids and there was all the stuff about John Gummer and feeding his daughter a beef burger during the BSE scandal, all of those kinds of things. And he thought, I don't want that for my family. We're not going anywhere near that. We want our kids to have as normal a family life as possible.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your parents, and you, yeah, and you know, we had newspaper stories attacking us about our wedding. We had newspapers, you know, newspapers trying to contact our parents and ask them things and so on. And I think I probably just develop quite a strong protective wall, you know, about, and especially once the kids were born, we were quite fierce about protecting their privacy. And then if actually that is the most everybody wants to ask about your hinterland, about, you know, and if your hinterland actually is about your family and about your kids and you haven't got a bunch of mad hobbies and things like that, exactly, which you don't have time for, then you end up, or I end up anyway, just probably not talking very much about that.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess I think I probably would talk much more about family issues, about personal issues and so on when I was first elected, but bear in mind I was first elected when I was 28. I was a bit thrown in the deep end. I didn't expect to get selected in 1997. I thought I was just having a go because other people just encouraged me, said, go on, have a go. And so I was a bit in the deep end. And I think you then quite quickly find actually that everyone you care about is fair game. And so it became probably about protecting everybody else as well. And I think that is maybe more so for women than for men in politics too.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who knows what he'll do next? He might even do strictly. And immediately the Sun newspaper started ringing up the BBC. There must have been some deliberate ploy behind this and started badgering them. So I sort of tell myself, I think that's what gave the BBC the idea to then ask him. And it clearly means that we could...”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did tap the lessons when I was a child. You know, I really liked tap dancing and thought that would be great fun and I wasn't particularly good at it, but I did really like it. So the dancing thing for me has always been great fun. And it was actually partly because I'd thought dancing was great. We'd always just have fun doing ridiculous dancing at weddings and so on that I'd always thought after 2015, after Ed lost his seat, do you know what the great thing for him to do would be strictly. And I never thought that would happen. I just thought that was a totally mad idea. But I thought it would be fun. And so it was, I was actually, I was asked repeatedly when we were in the leadership election campaign. And there was one of the interviews where I was asked repeatedly about whether, in fact, Ed was going to be in the driving seat kind of thing. And as a throwaway remark, and I was just going a bit fed up of the questions, I said, well, you know.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I suspect that's not quite your thing. Another life I could have had. Oh, he is having a wail of a time, isn't he? So, yeah, he's having a great time, and there are times, especially, you know, when we have a series of votes that we just keep losing and we're just walking around in circles in the voting lobbies and dutifully voting on something that we're making no difference on at all. There are times when you think, yep, other people are having an awful lot more fun. Other people, she says. I was reading which I...”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The frustration of not being able to do things is huge. And you're right, this is, we've had 12 years of this now. We're nearly going to have been as long out of power as we were in power. And there's just this massive difference. And it is incredibly frustrating. It's frustrating in terms of all the things that you can do in government, but it's also frustrating watching them right now because it feels like they are damaging everybody.”
2022-06-10 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Yvette Cooper One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source