YVETTE COOPER knows that the Morning Star has readership and some influence in the trade union movement, so it’s understandable that she should publicise her opposition to the Tories’ anti-union plans.

Setting up a website and asking Labour members and supporters to sign a petition against the government’s proposals may raise awareness of the scale of destruction in preparation.

But for a candidate who is not a regular contributor to our paper’s columns something a little more profound might have been expected.

Opposing Tory plans and pledging to repeal any such laws that the government succeeds in driving through Parliament is not exactly a unique selling point.

Andy Burnham, Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Kendall have all delivered the same pledge. It doesn’t cry out as a pressing reason to back one candidate or another.

For someone who was a minister for all but two years of Labour’s 1997-2010 period in office, she ought perhaps to have explained why the government rejected concerted trade union demands to repeal anti-trade union legislation enacted by the Tory governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Cooper’s accusation that the Tories’ proposed anti-union law “seeks to pit workers against employers and will make it harder for successful conclusions to be reached when there are disputes” is difficult to credit.

The legislation doesn’t arise out of a vacuum. Anti-union laws are demanded and welcomed by bosses because they skew the balance of bargaining power against workers and their unions.

Cooper has lashed out justifiably at sexist media coverage of her leadership campaign and that of Liz Kendall.

She has made the point that having a woman as Labour prime minister is long overdue, which is true, but there have to be more reasons than gender alone to justify a vote for her.

One of the first policy statements issued by Jeremy Corbyn was Working with Women in which he championed the key demands of today’s women’s movement.

From 50-50 male-female parliamentary representation to gender pay audits, restored funding for women’s refuges and positive action to encourage young women into science, technology, engineering and maths careers, he declared: “The time for timid measures is over.”

Compare that with Cooper’s underwhelming call to celebrate advances already won while looking forward to working with trade unions “to end maternity discrimination for good” — nothing else — and this is another opportunity missed.

Her investment target of 3 per cent of annual GDP for science, research and development, including cutting-edge green technologies, could indeed create two million more manufacturing jobs.

However, she gives no indication as to where this investment would come from.Why should capitalists, home-grown or overseas, end what has effectively been their long-term investment strike in Britain’s manufacturing sector?

Does Cooper share Corbyn’s enthusiasm for a National Investment Bank funded by corporate taxation and reduced subsidies to business that would generate seed corn for public-sector projects and have a positive knock-on effect for the private sector?

The suspicion must be, given her statement that she would refuse to serve in a shadow cabinet led by Corbyn, that her approach would be very different.

But this is guesswork, because the most difficult task in this election — exemplified by Cooper’s Morning Star article today — has been to put any meat on the bones of her sparse political offerings.

Her supporters praise her brightness, inner strength and prime ministerial demeanour, but does anything but New Labour’s austerity-lite orthodoxy lurk behind the image?