🔗 Share this article

As the beleaguered Conservative party meets in its conference city for its annual party conference, it has a lot to reflect on regarding its path forward. Doubt remains if a road forward remains open. These are tough times for a political party that now has very little, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to voters.

What Could Have Been

It could have been markedly improved if concrete steps had been made on an policy focus that resonates with people nationwide: Social mobility. Yet the previous administration hadn’t got the basic understanding on how to transform the popular slogan on social mobility into concrete action. For the two years after the 2019 election, it debated what the term truly represented.

I found it bizarre, because I had previously explained to the Prime Minister what social mobility entailed when we initially discussed about it during the contest for party leader. The expression was a concept I originated and used at the education ministry to talk about social mobility. It was our core mission, and its meaning is straightforward: levelling up is the approach by which we realize equal access – without removing opportunity away from those who possess it, but rather by expanding opportunities to those that lack them.

The Core Concept

Another crucial education department term we used, “ability is distributed uniformly throughout the nation, but opportunity is not”, represented another a purposeful phrase, reflecting the dual components of a social mobility strategy. Initially, potential shared equally but not nurtured uniformly through our schools and colleges. Second, access not provided uniformly by businesses or our economy. As a result, education and business were key to achieving improved equality of opportunity. This was an mission about the community framework of our country – investing in people’s potential and linking them with prospects.

The Reality of Implementation

What did levelling up turn into under the previous government? A towns fund managed by the DLUHC. Street beautification and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. A government strategy was published nearly three years after Johnson became leader, which saw current strategies repackaged under the fresh social mobility slogan.

Therefore, a broader social mobility agenda went unpursued, as well as all the change that it may have generated – in funding, business, financial planning, tax and in community development. Additionally, in education, including a university system that has become a punchbag for politicians of all stripes – although it remains the most powerful engine of life improvement for young working-class people, personally, this country has had over the past 30 years. Maybe the sole mechanism of fair chances, operating at scale.

The Role of Ambition

Hope is essential for our country to thrive. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a realistic expectation that hard work and results are connected; that if people aspire, they can achieve. For political leadership, being able to foster a sense of optimism about the future is important. Analysis by the academic institution at Bath University and others, recently released, showed that the DfE’s 12 “opportunity areas” I launched while in office – community-focused methods to enhancing learning results – led to students in those communities being up to nearly one-fifth more optimistic about their future than those in comparable communities without these programmes in place. The research confirms: just making an genuine beginning on fair opportunity strategies can swiftly and beneficially change how people perceive their destiny.

Missed Opportunities

Oblivious to this, and in the throes of its successor selection process, in autumn 2022, the Tory administration closed opportunity areas down. Why should any person in those areas vote for a political group that made that decision? This specific initiative is one example of what could have been a transformative administration strategy on social mobility, but that chance was hopelessly squandered. Approaches such as this can inspire hope and aspiration. On the other hand, as the Conservatives found out, breaking the promise of equal opportunity is the biggest blunder any leadership can make. The public penalized the government for its incompetence but, perhaps most of all, for its broken promises on social mobility.

Present Circumstances

Currently the mandate on equal opportunity and fair access has been taken up by a new administration. The old slogan has been abandoned. Labour has its own policy language of “removing obstacles to success”. The party that is steadily supplanting the struggling Conservative party, the alternative party, also has its own message – “reindustrialisation”. The terminology to talk about additional chances in areas like the one I grew up in, in my hometown. It promises that an industrial past can reincarnate into an industrial future.

For voters, it must feel like a repetitive cycle. Identical problem, new terminology. However, so far, no progress.

Lessons for the Future

If Labour and Reform UK want to avoid the identical outcome, both these parties should learn from the Tories’ mistakes on levelling up; that equal opportunity talk is simple terminology, but actual achievement of more equal results is significantly more difficult. The UK’s endemically weak equal opportunity remains the key issue for our country, with youth unable to get a proper professional launch, those working hard in occupations with minimal progress after the housing costs are covered, and people across the country without any real hope their children will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Elected officials can talk about improved access as much as they want. But where is the organization that has the thorough strategy on life chances? I see none. The first to achieve this, prevails. Not only for their organization, but, significantly, for a complete society that has urgently needs fair chances so badly.