ARE you one of the winners or losers from the first six weeks of Labour in power?
Chances are if you’re a winner, you’re a public sector worker or a train driver, and all the losers are the rest of us who need to catch a train or had hoped there wouldn’t be more strikes in the NHS.
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Most new governments use their first few months in power to show what their real priorities are — and who they are prepared to annoy.
So far, “resolving” the strikes with whopping wage hikes and announcing new policies on house building and green energy have been the main features of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.
Anyone hoping there might be a decent social care system, rather than the costly bin fire we have at the moment, will be disappointed.
Mind you, so will anyone who thought the strikes were actually coming to an end: As well as a bill that could come to around £14billion for pay rises in the public sector, we already have fresh train driver walkouts every weekend.
READ MORE ON YVETTE COOPER
And if you had been waiting for a sensible plan on tackling illegal immigration and making sure bosses don’t just look overseas to plug jobs gaps, then keep waiting.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper spent most of her time in opposition shouting at the Tory government for making a mess of things on immigration.
She wasn’t wrong. But she gave us precious few clues about what she planned to do herself, other than just do it better.
Doing things better is very much what Cooper lives for.
She is sphinx-like on what she really believes, almost more so than the civil servants she now works with in the Home Office.
Both she and the civil service just like doing things properly, even if they aren’t always sure what the “thing” they’re doing should be.
Cooper is much happier for civil servants to take the lead on policy decisions. In fact, her greatest flaw is that she is not very decisive personally.
As a minister in the last Labour government, she became known for taking as long as possible to take big decisions.
You can’t do that in a department like the Home Office.
Mind you, the Government has decided to stay away from talking too much about immigration during the recent riots because it does not want to validate anything the violent louts are saying, or to make it harder to have a mature conversation about immigration.
Violent louts
After the riots, the asylum dispersal problem has gone from being a political hot potato to being an incendiary issue.
It would test the mettle of any politician.
On Saturday, 492 asylum seekers crossed the Channel, official Home Office figures revealed, meaning that since Starmer came to power in early July, more than 5,000 have made the trip, making a total of 19,066 this year.
Cooper has had 14 long years of talking about how she would do things better. Now she needs to show she can.
Small-boat crossings have been rising over the summer. So far, Labour has pinned the blame on the last Conservative government.
Isabel Hardman
And with immigration still being one of the key issues for voters, ministers can’t afford to put off revealing their plans for too long.
Around 45 per cent of voters think it is one of the most important issues facing the country — and that has gone up from 39 per cent on polling day.
So far, the two immigration-related announcements from the new Government have been a crackdown on nail bars and car washes, with around 1,000 Home Office workers who had been assigned to the doomed Rwanda scheme now organising raids on illegal immigrants being exploited by these businesses.
The second is a set of skills reforms that Keir Starmer himself has been pretty keen on as a way of plugging gaps in the jobs market with Brits, rather than overseas workers.
Then there’s the new Border Security Command, with Cooper said to be close to choosing the new highly paid head of this unit, which will pull together the intelligence agencies, Border Force and immigration enforcement.
Already nearly 100 people have moved into the new unit, but they need a boss.
Small-boat crossings have been rising over the summer.
So far, Labour has pinned the blame on the last Conservative government.
Tough decisions
But the Tories are enjoying arguing that without Rwanda, there is no deterrent to coming here illegally.
And because Labour has generally been trusted less by voters on immigration, it won’t enjoy much of a breather before voters stop buying the line that this is still the Tories’ fault.
If strikes by emboldened unions become a feature of the next few months, then voters might reach the conclusion that Labour isn’t fully on their side.
They will be much less forgiving of procrastination on tough decisions about immigration.
It’s all very well dismissing Rwanda as a gimmick and promising instead to get a grip.
But Labour needs to show it really does know what getting a grip looks like now.
