🔗 Share this article

While the beleaguered Tories meets in its conference city for its annual party conference, it has much to ponder regarding its future direction. Doubt remains if a clear direction remains open. We are in challenging circumstances for a political party that now has almost nothing, if anything, new or unique to say to the public.

The Missed Opportunity

It could have been vastly better if tangible progress had been made on an policy focus that is important for people throughout the UK: Levelling up. However the former leadership lacked the slightest idea on how to convert the trendy talk on social mobility into concrete action. For the two years after the general election, it argued over what the term even meant.

I was perplexed, because I’d already told Johnson what levelling up signified when we initially discussed about it during the contest for party leader. This terminology was a concept I originated and used at the DfE to talk about social mobility. It was our departmental mantra, and its definition is clear: social mobility is the method by which we attain fair chances – not through reducing prospects away from those who possess it, but rather by extending options to those that don’t.

Fundamental Idea

Another crucial education department term we used, “ability is distributed uniformly around the UK, however access isn’t”, served as a deliberate expression, representing the two halves of a social mobility strategy. First, potential shared equally but not nurtured uniformly through our education system. Second, access not provided uniformly by the private sector or our economic system. Thus, schools and companies were key to achieving stronger social mobility. This represented an priority about the community framework of our country – supporting individual capabilities and connecting them to chances.

The Actual Outcome

What did the social mobility agenda evolve into under Johnson’s Conservatives? Regional development money administered out of the the relevant ministry. Decorative floral displays and rearranged intersections. A white paper was released nearly three years after the Prime Minister took office, which saw current strategies relabelled under the recently branded agenda.

Therefore, a broader social mobility agenda went unpursued, as well as all the improvement that it might have driven – in funding, commerce, financial planning, revenue and in place-making. Moreover, in learning, including a tertiary education that has become a target for leaders across parties – although it remains the primary vehicle of upward movement for individuals from less privileged homes, like me, this country has had in recent decades. Perhaps the only engine of equal opportunity, working extensively.

The Role of Ambition

Hope is vital for our country to succeed. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a realistic expectation that effort and reward are linked; that if people aim high, they can achieve. For any government, being able to create a outlook of positivity about the future is crucial. Research by the academic institution at the university and others, published last month, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I introduced as education secretary – place-based approaches to enhancing learning results – led to youth in those neighborhoods being up to nearly one-fifth more positive about their future than those in similar areas without these initiatives in place. The evidence is clear: just making an sincere effort on fair opportunity strategies can swiftly and beneficially change how people perceive their destiny.

Missed Opportunities

Oblivious to this, and in the middle of its new leader election, in September 2022, the ruling party closed opportunity areas down. Why should any person in those communities vote for a organization that took that action? The opportunity areas policy is a clear case of what might have become a revolutionary Tory policy platform on levelling up, but that opportunity was hopelessly squandered. Strategies such as this can create belief and drive. On the other hand, as the Tories found out, reneging on commitments of equal opportunity is the costliest mistake any government can make. Voters penalized the government for its failure but, above all, for its broken promises on equal opportunity.

The Current Landscape

Currently the mandate on life chances and equality of opportunity has passed to a opposition party. The old slogan has been cast off. The current administration has its own political rhetoric of “eliminating hurdles to advancement”. The political group that is gradually replacing the struggling Tories, Reform UK, also has its own message – “economic renewal”. It’s a phrase to talk about new opportunities in regions like the one I come from, in South Yorkshire. It suggests that an industrial past can revive into an revitalized economy.

To the electorate, it must seem like a repetitive cycle. Same issue, alternative phrasing. However, so far, no progress.

Lessons for the Future

Should the current and alternative parties want to prevent the identical outcome, the respective organizations should take lessons from the previous government’s errors on levelling up; that social mobility rhetoric is easy to say, but effective implementation of fairer outcomes is significantly more difficult. Our nation’s endemically weak life chances remains the central problem for our country, with young people unable to get a decent career start, those laboring in occupations with little to show after the housing costs are covered, and citizens throughout the UK without any genuine belief their next generation will be able to do advance in life than they have.

Politicians can talk about fairer opportunities however much they like. Yet where is the political group that has the thorough strategy on social mobility? I observe no such party. Whichever party succeeds initially, wins. Not only for themselves, but, significantly, for a whole country that has never needed equality of opportunity so desperately.