🔗 Share this article

While the existentially challenged Tories meets in Manchester for its yearly gathering, it has much to ponder regarding its path forward. Doubt remains if a viable path remains open. These are challenging circumstances for a political party that now has almost nothing, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to the public.

An Alternate Reality

It could have been vastly better if tangible progress had been made on an priority that resonates with people nationwide: Equal opportunity. Yet the former leadership lacked the basic understanding on how to transform the popular slogan on levelling up into actual implementation. For the two years after the 2019 election, it debated what the phrase truly represented.

I found it bizarre, because I had previously explained to Johnson what levelling up signified when we originally talked about it during his leadership campaign. The expression was a concept I originated and used at the Department for Education to talk about social mobility. It was our guiding principle, and its purpose is clear: levelling up is the means by which we attain fair chances – without removing prospects away from those who already have it, but rather by providing opportunities to those that are without.

Essential Principle

The other key DfE phrase we used, “potential is equally shared throughout the nation, yet chances are not”, again was a deliberate expression, representing the two halves of a equal opportunity plan. Initially, talent spread evenly but not developed consistently through our learning institutions. Furthermore, chances not distributed fairly by businesses or our economy. As a result, education and business were crucial to achieving better life chances. This was an mission about the social fabric of our country – supporting people’s potential and connecting them to chances.

The Reality of Implementation

How did the social mobility agenda turn into under the previous government? A towns fund administered out of the DLUHC. Decorative floral displays and rearranged intersections. A white paper was launched a significant period after the Prime Minister took office, which saw current strategies repackaged under the recently branded agenda.

Consequently, a comprehensive equal opportunity plan went ignored, as well as all the improvement that it could have inspired – in funding, business, economic policy, taxation and in community development. Moreover, in learning, including a tertiary education that has become a punchbag for elected officials – despite the fact that it remains the most powerful engine of social mobility for young working-class people, including myself, this country has had throughout modern times. Possibly the sole mechanism of equal opportunity, functioning widely.

Why Hope Matters

Ambition is crucial for our country to succeed. To foster ambition, there needs to be a credible sense that effort and reward are related; that if people aim high, they can achieve. For political leadership, being able to create a sense of optimism about the future is crucial. Studies by the Institute for Policy Research at the university and others, newly available, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I established during my tenure – locally targeted strategies to improving education outcomes – led to young people in those communities being up to nearly one-fifth more optimistic about their life ahead than those in comparable communities without these initiatives in place. The evidence is clear: just making an genuine beginning on fair opportunity strategies can rapidly and effectively change how people perceive their destiny.

Lost Potential

Oblivious to this, and in the midst of its post-Johnson leadership contest, in September 2022, the ruling party terminated the programmes. What reason would someone in those communities vote for a organization that made that decision? The targeted programme is a single instance of what might have become a revolutionary Conservative government agenda on levelling up, but that opportunity was totally misused. Approaches such as this can generate optimism and ambition. In contrast, as the Tories found out, reneging on commitments of social mobility is the most expensive error any government can make. The electorate punished the government for its failure but, above all, for its unfulfilled commitments on levelling up.

Today’s Political Reality

At present the mandate on life chances and equal chances has been transferred to a Labour government. The levelling up rhetoric has been discarded. The current administration has its own political rhetoric of “breaking down the barriers to opportunity”. The organization that is steadily supplanting the struggling Tories, the challenger, also has its own terminology – “economic renewal”. It’s a phrase to talk about new opportunities in regions like the one I grew up in, in South Yorkshire. It suggests that an industrial past can be reborn into an modern manufacturing sector.

For voters, it must appear as a déjà vu experience. Same issue, alternative phrasing. However, so far, no progress.

The Way Forward

Whether the government and opposition want to escape the identical outcome, each group should understand the Tories’ mistakes on social mobility; that social mobility rhetoric is simple terminology, but actual achievement of more equal results is far more challenging. The UK’s endemically weak equal opportunity remains the central problem for our country, with young people unable to get a proper professional launch, those putting in effort in employment with minimal progress after the rent has been paid, and people across the country without any actual expectation their next generation will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Leaders can mention improved access as much as they want. However, which party has the organization that has the thorough strategy on social mobility? I observe no such party. Whoever gets there first, wins. Not just for themselves, but, more importantly, for a entire nation that has never needed equality of opportunity so urgently.