ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So Ed Miliband’s challenge is to show he has leadership qualities and personality but to get elected Labour might need some policies as well. In a moment I’ll be asking Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary for some of those. Well let’s say a very good morning then, joining me now from the Labour Party Conference in Manchester, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. First of all, Ms Cooper, it is rather poignant that you are meeting in Manchester today as this is National Police Memorial Day and we all remember the two women police officers who lost their lives in Manchester ten days or so ago.

YVETTE COOPER: Good morning Dermot. Yes, you’re right because here in Manchester ten days ago two police officers were shot in a very brutal act and they were just answering a routine 999 call and I think it does remind all of us and it should remind all of us the risks that police officers take routinely every single day to keep us safe and that’s why I think it’s right that we all pay respect for Police Memorial Day today.

DC: With that in mind and as Shadow Home Secretary we know that you are thinking about the future shape of policing in the UK an awful lot, how does that inform your attitude to reforms of the police and of course to the cuts they’re facing?

YC: Well I think it’s so important that we do recognise the vital work that the police do in our communities. Theresa May has described the police as being simply crime fighters, I think they do so much more than that. They help communities, they keep communities strong, they keep us safe, they deal with suicide threats, they deal with people who have got lost, missing people, so many more things but they are also crucial to the fight to tackle crime and that’s why I think it’s wrong that the government is cutting 20% from police budgets and we’re losing 15,000 police officers across the country. I think that is the wrong thing to do but we are also setting out this week the approach that Labour’s Police and Crime Commissioners will take in preventing these huge swathes of privatisation of things like neighbourhood patrols that the government has been pushing forward. We don’t want companies like G4S patrolling our streets, we want police officers and PCSOs in our communities policing our streets.

DM: Do you think, I mean you plucked that number, 15,000 front line police officers, do you think that number could be reduced by Labour or stopped altogether?

YC: Well that number, that 15,000 number was produced by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, that was their assessment of the impact of the cuts. Now we did say of course the police need to make savings, our approach would be to say you could do about a billion pounds of savings over the course of the parliament, that was based on work that was done in the Home Office before the election and also work by the Inspectorate, and still protect the front line, protect the number of police officers. Instead of the one billion, the government has gone for two billion pounds of cuts with the steepest cuts in the first two years and that’s why we are losing so many officers and from the front line too. Over 6000 officers have gone already from the 999 units, the neighbourhood response, the very people we rely on in an emergency. I just think that’s the wrong approach, it’s not the approach Labour would take.

DM: There are other issues of course as well with the police, it isn’t all sweetness and light as we remember in particular the contribution of front line officers today because of course we’ve had the Hillsborough Report and all the deficiencies that highlighted, news that fifteen Metropolitan police officers have been suspended for corruption over three years, there are issues there aren’t there?

YC: That’s exactly right and I think you have to face up to those problems because you cannot let things like Hillsborough or hacking cast a shadow over the vital and brave work that police officers do each day. Sometimes things do go badly wrong and you need a strong enough system to sort things out. We’ll be setting out reforms to do that this week because I think you have got to have public sector reform, you’ve got to have policing reform in order to keep improving standards. Work that the police did, things like the introduction of neighbourhood policing, putting police back on the beat, these are some of Labour’s reforms, did help to cut crime by 40% while Labour was in government but it’s not going far enough. We have to keep going further, keep tackling the new challenges and set out the reforms for the future including dealing with those serious problems that you raised.

DM: Talk to me about the Labour Party Conference there in Manchester. We’ve been hearing some more ideas from you on your particular portfolio, is this the conference where Labour finally reveals a bit more about its policies as we move ever closer to the next general election?

YC: Well the government has said we have still got two and a half years to go until the general election so of course we will set out more and more as the months go by but already we’ve made clear, look, you’ve got to be acting now to kick start growth, actually we shouldn’t even be waiting to the election. We’ve set out for example things like the banker’s bonus tax that should be used to boost jobs and particularly guarantees for young people to get into work. Measures we are talking about today including banking reform for the future and stamp duty cuts for first time buyers to get the housing market moving, the kinds of things the government should be doing but they’re not because they’re letting down working people across the country and leaving us in a double dip recession which is letting people down.

DM: Do you feel as well on the personality side, on the leadership side, that your leader is looking much more secure now exactly two years into the job and people like you aren’t being talked up as one of his possible replacements?

YC: Well I think Ed is doing a great job and I think it’s the result of Ed’s leadership that we have I think a strong, united party that we are building. We know we’ve still got work to do, we know that we lost badly at the lost election and I think we have learnt a lot and done a lot of work since then and that’s as a result of the strong leadership that Ed has shown but we want to do more now to make sure that we’re listening to the really serious problems that people face, the squeezed middle that Ed’s talked about, the squeeze on living standards and the pressures that families face and set out what we can actually do to help people and support people and not turn our backs, as I think David Cameron’s doing.

DM: You talk about that listening process and what you will have heard on Ed Miliband I’m sure, and you’ve talked over the last couple of years about giving him time, well he’s had the time now and people still don’t really know him and on that key issue of the economy, whether he can be trusted to take the really hard decisions on spending and taxation and things like that, he’s not entirely trusted.

YC: It always takes people time to get to know Opposition leaders compared to Prime Ministers who you of course see every day of the week but I think you can’t…

DM: Forgive me but two years now, two years.

YC: I think you can’t divorce what’s happening with, you can’t separate out the leader from the party. The fact that the Labour party is doing better now, we are in a much stronger position – we know we have still got work to do but we are in a much stronger position than we were at the time of the election is as a result of Ed’s leadership. It’s as a result of the things that Ed has been talking about, whether it was taking on the serious problems around hacking and around what happened with News International, that was Ed’s leadership. Whether it’s about looking at the serious long term problems in our economy, that was Ed’s leadership, highlighting those things. So time and again I think Ed is talking about the things that people are worried about across the country and saying what needs to happen for the future as well.

DM: But there is a key question isn’t there that Labour addressed, yes it was a lot closer to the election where you won power in 1997, it’s about spending, it’s especially critical now and it’s would you adhere to Conservative and Lib Dem spending plans? How far would you go with those cuts?

YC: Okay, well first of all they haven’t even set out what their spending plans are going to be by the end of this spending review but we’ve said they’ve certainly taken the wrong approach in what they’ve done and the scale of spending cuts, they’re cutting too far and too fast in the current spending review because as a result of what’s happened we’ve seen the economy go back into double dip recession and that’s actually costing us more. So they have ended up spending far more on unemployment but they are also getting far less in in tax. Time and again we have said if you don’t get the economy growing it costs you more, that is what we’re seeing. That is why what George Osborne and David Cameron said what they said they would do to get the economy moving, it has failed. That’s why we need a Plan B and that’s why you have got to get the economy growing as well. Of course you’ve got to have a serious spending restraint, of course you’ve got to make tough decisions in different areas and I’ve said already that we would have said there should be savings in the police budget but by going too far too fast they are doing huge damage to our public services, women are being harder hit than man. They are deeply unfair, the damaging decisions they are taking.

DM: Let me lastly just try one specific proposal on you, could you envisage or would you rule out Labour going into the next election with a commitment to a referendum on the EU in your manifesto?

YC: Well obviously our view of Europe .. Douglas Alexander will be doing the work and setting out the approach that we will take to Europe but specifically on that, I do think there is a big problem that the government is taking a very ideological approach. We have seen the arrest related to the alleged abduction of Megan Stammers under the European Arrest Warrant and yet you’ve got most of the Conservative party, it seems even David Cameron, wanting to say that we should rip up the European Arrest Warrant that is allowing us to pursue criminals who might flee the country and flee to other countries and to bring them back to stand trial and to stand fair trial in Britain. So look, of course there is a debate that will we will have about Europe and about the prospects for Europe in the run up to the election but let’s be honest also about the real consequences of some of the anti-European hysteria that we have seen in the Conservative party.

DM: Okay, Shadow Home Secretary, thank you very much. Yvette Cooper talking to us from the party conference there in Manchester.