🔗 Share this article

While the existentially challenged Tories convenes in its conference city for its yearly gathering, it has much to ponder regarding its path forward. It’s not even clear if a clear direction remains open. These are tough times for a political party that now has almost nothing, if anything, new or unique to say to voters.

What Could Have Been

It could have been vastly better if concrete steps had been made on an priority that matters to people across the country: Social mobility. However the former leadership lacked the first clue on how to convert the popular slogan on levelling up into actual implementation. For the two years after the 2019 election, it argued over what the concept actually signified.

I was perplexed, because I had clearly defined for Johnson what levelling up entailed when we initially discussed about it during his leadership campaign. The phrase was a term I developed and used at the Department for Education to talk about social mobility. It was our core mission, and its definition is straightforward: levelling up is the method by which we attain equality of opportunity – not through reducing opportunity away from those who possess it, but rather by expanding chances to those that don’t.

Essential Principle

An additional vital DfE phrase we used, “potential is equally shared throughout the nation, but opportunity is not”, again was a deliberate expression, representing the dual components of a social mobility strategy. First, talent spread evenly but not developed consistently through our learning institutions. Furthermore, access not provided uniformly by businesses or our market. Therefore, schools and companies were crucial to achieving improved equality of opportunity. This represented an priority about the community framework of our country – fostering people’s potential and connecting them to chances.

The Actual Outcome

How did the social mobility agenda evolve into under Johnson’s Conservatives? Regional development money administered out of the DLUHC. Street beautification and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. An official policy document was released almost thirty-six months after the leadership change, which saw existing policy approaches relabelled under the fresh social mobility slogan.

Therefore, a wider fairness strategy went ignored, as well as all the change that it may have generated – in funding, business, fiscal strategy, tax and in community development. Additionally, in schooling, including a higher education sector that has become a punchbag for politicians of all stripes – despite the fact that it remains the most powerful engine of upward movement for individuals from less privileged homes, like me, this country has had throughout modern times. Possibly the only engine of fair chances, functioning widely.

The Importance of Aspiration

Ambition is vital for our country to prosper. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a believable feeling that hard work and results are linked; that if people aim high, they can succeed. For political leadership, being able to instil a outlook of positivity about the future is important. Research by the academic institution at Bath University and others, published last month, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I launched while in office – place-based approaches to improving education outcomes – led to young people in those communities being up to 18 percentage points more optimistic about their future than those in similar areas without these programmes in place. The data shows: just making an authentic start on fair opportunity strategies can rapidly and effectively change how people feel about their prospects.

Squandered Chances

Unaware of these findings, and in the midst of its new leader election, in that period, the Tory administration terminated the programmes. Why would anyone in those regions vote for a party that made that decision? The targeted programme is one example of what could have been a revolutionary Tory policy platform on social mobility, but that chance was completely wasted. Approaches such as this can generate optimism and ambition. In contrast, as the Conservatives learned, reneging on commitments of equal opportunity is the costliest mistake any government can make. The public held accountable the government for its incompetence but, primarily, for its unfulfilled commitments on equal opportunity.

Today’s Political Reality

Now the mandate on life chances and fair access has passed to a opposition party. The old slogan has been abandoned. The new government has its own public messaging of “breaking down the barriers to opportunity”. The political group that is increasingly displacing the failing incumbents, the alternative party, also has its own language – “industrial revival”. This expression to talk about fresh prospects in communities like the one I was raised in, in the region. It suggests that an historical manufacturing base can revive into an industrial future.

For the public, it must feel like a repetitive cycle. Similar challenge, alternative phrasing. Yet, currently, little improvement.

Lessons for the Future

Whether the government and opposition want to avoid the same fate, the respective organizations should learn from the Conservatives’ failure on levelling up; that fair chance language is simple terminology, but actual achievement of more equal results is much harder. Our nation’s persistently low equal opportunity remains the central problem for our country, with youth unable to get a proper professional launch, those working hard in occupations with few results after the housing costs are covered, and people across the country without any actual expectation their children will be able to do any better in life than they have.

Politicians can mention equal chances however much they like. But where is the organization that has the thorough strategy on life chances? I observe no such party. The first to achieve this, succeeds. Not just for their party, but, crucially, for a complete society that has never needed fair chances so desperately.