Labour leadership: Yvette Cooper moves into Chuka Umunna's pro-business patch

Yvette Cooper plans to bill herself as the pro-business candidate in Labour's leadership contest after the party's shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, dramatically quit the contest.

Cooper will argue that Labour needs to reset its relationship with Britain's business community and the shadow home secretary will promise to cut corporation tax in a speech later today.

The 46-year-old will also take a swipe at Ed Miliband's general election campaign, which saw the party lose 24 seats in the House of Commons.

"We need to reset our relationship with business around a shared vision for building an economy that faces the future," she will say.

"Too often in the past our rhetoric undermined that positive relationship with business, and with the creation of jobs and wealth for the future.

"People knew how we wanted to stop exploitation in the workplace, but not how we'd grow our workplaces to create more jobs and stronger growth."

The comments are reminiscent of Umunna's diagnosis of Labour's disappointing election campaign. The shadow business secretary admitted that Labour's messaging was off on the economy.

"In spite of the fact that our policy offer was pro-business, the rhetoric often suggested otherwise. And sometimes we made it sound like we saw taxing people as a good in itself, rather than a means to an end," he wrote in The Observer.

The piece was part of Umunna's short-lived leadership campaign, which saw the former lawyer quit the race over "uncomfortable" media attention.

Cooper, who launched her campaign after Umunna, will seek to corner the pro-business patch in a bid to differentiate herself from her rivals.

But the shadow home secretary comes with considerable political baggage after serving in Gordon Brown's government. The Oxford graduate is also married to controversial former shadow chancellor Ed Balls.

Cooper, however, is considered one of the Labour leadership front-runners alongside Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall. Mary Creagh, the MP for Wakefield, is also in the contest and Tristram Hunt may enter the race.