Yvette Cooper has dubbed Suella Braverman a “part-time home secretary” as she set out Labour’s stall on immigration.
The shadow home secretary, a minister under Gordon Brown when Labour was last in power, said she “knows what it’s like when people are serious about government”.
She said: “The problem with Suella Braverman is she’s a part-time home secretary, she’s a full-time Tory leadership candidate.
“All she’s doing is chasing headlines for the Tory party.”
In an interview with The Telegraph ahead of Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, Ms Cooper said: “She says things, you get the rhetoric, but she doesn’t do things.
“Instead, it’s just chasing headlines. I think it’s just more of a sort of pound-shop Trump approach rather than actually doing things about the serious challenges the country faces.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Ms Cooper said net migration is too high and said Labour will issue fewer work visas than are being issued under the Tories.
“We expect it to come down, we think it should come down,” she said on net migration.
She defended international students coming to the UK, arguing they bring “huge investment and benefits”. But Ms Cooper took aim at foreign workers, saying the doubling of the number of work visas is a “problem”.
“That reflects the failure of the government to properly make sure that there is training in the UK, to properly make sure we’re tackling skill shortages, having a workforce plan in the UK, for example around healthcare,” she told the paper.
Ms Cooper refrained from putting a number on how many work visas Labour would issue in government, but she said “we shouldn’t have the need for as many work visas as a result of the plans that we’re setting out”.
The interview came as Labour announced plans for police to use counter-terror style tactics to monitor the 1,000 most dangerous abusers and sex offenders in England and Wales.
Ms Cooper said officers would be told to “relentlessly pursue” perpetrators who pose the greatest risk to women and girls using “all the tools at their disposal”.
Under the plans, forces would use data and intelligence on named suspects and repeat offenders of rape, stalking and domestic abuse to devise a matrix of the most dangerous perpetrators in their area.
It forms part of Labour’s mission to halve incidents of violence against women and girls in a decade.
The party believes this would enable police across England and Wales to identify the 1,000 most dangerous alleged perpetrators, including those accused of murder or attempted murder.
The shadow home secretary said: “Violence against women and girls is endemic in our society and under the Conservatives it has remained shamefully and persistently high. Enough is enough.
“Under Labour, the police will be asked to relentlessly pursue the perpetrators who pose the greatest risk to women, and use all the tools at their disposal to protect victims and get dangerous offenders off the streets. The police should be exhausting every opportunity for enforcement, prevention and protection – too often failure to do so has had devastating and fatal consequences.
“For far too long, dangerous criminals have been let off and victims have been let down. Labour will be unrelenting in its mission to halve incidents of Violence Against Women and Girls in a decade”.
