🔗 Share this article

While the struggling Conservative party gathers in Manchester for its annual party conference, it has plenty to consider regarding its path forward. There is uncertainty if a road forward is available. We are in difficult days for a political party that now has almost nothing, if anything, new or unique to say to the public.

The Missed Opportunity

Things could have turned out vastly better if concrete steps had been made on an policy focus that resonates with people throughout the UK: Levelling up. However Boris Johnson’s government hadn’t got the first clue on how to transform the trendy talk on social mobility into concrete action. During the initial period after the general election, it argued over what the term actually signified.

I found it bizarre, because I had clearly defined for Johnson what social mobility signified when we first spoke about it during his leadership campaign. The phrase was a term I developed and used at the Department for Education to talk about equal opportunity. This became our guiding principle, and its meaning is straightforward: social mobility is the method by which we realize fair chances – without removing prospects away from those who are already advantaged, but rather by providing options to those that don’t.

The Core Concept

The other key education department term we used, “talent is spread evenly around the UK, yet chances are not”, again was a intentional wording, reflecting the two halves of a equal opportunity plan. Initially, potential shared equally but not developed consistently through our learning institutions. Furthermore, access not provided uniformly by the private sector or our economic system. As a result, education and business were crucial to achieving better life chances. This represented an mission about the community framework of our country – supporting individual capabilities and linking them with opportunities.

What Levelling Up Became

What did levelling up become under Johnson’s Conservatives? A towns fund managed by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Decorative floral displays and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. A white paper was published nearly three years after the Prime Minister took office, which saw current strategies relabelled under the fresh social mobility slogan.

Therefore, a comprehensive equal opportunity plan went unpursued, as well as all the reform that it may have generated – in investment, enterprise, fiscal strategy, taxation and in place-making. Additionally, in schooling, including a higher education sector that has become a scapegoat for politicians of all stripes – despite the fact that it remains the primary vehicle of upward movement for young working-class people, including myself, this country has had over the past 30 years. Possibly the only engine of social mobility, operating at scale.

Why Hope Matters

Aspiration 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 attain. For political leadership, being able to foster a sense of optimism about the future is important. Analysis by the Institute for Policy Research at Bath University and others, published last month, showed that the ministry’s focus zones I introduced as education secretary – place-based approaches to boosting academic achievement – led to students in those communities being up to nearly one-fifth more hopeful about their life ahead than those in similar areas without these schemes in place. The data shows: just making an genuine beginning on fair opportunity strategies can quickly and positively change how people view their destiny.

Missed Opportunities

Ignoring this evidence, and in the middle of its new leader election, in that period, the ruling party ended the initiatives. Why would anyone in those communities vote for a organization that took that action? The targeted programme is a single instance of what had the potential to be a transformative administration strategy on social mobility, but that possibility was hopelessly squandered. Approaches such as this can generate optimism and ambition. Conversely, as the Tories found out, failing to deliver of social mobility is the biggest blunder any government can make. Voters punished the government for its failure but, above all, for its unfulfilled commitments on equal opportunity.

Present Circumstances

Currently the responsibility on social mobility and equal chances has been taken up by a opposition party. The previous terminology has been abandoned. Labour has its own public messaging of “breaking down the barriers to opportunity”. The party that is steadily supplanting the failing incumbents, the challenger, also has its own message – “industrial revival”. This expression to talk about fresh prospects in areas like the one I come from, in my hometown. It suggests that an industrial past can be reborn into an industrial future.

For the public, it must seem like a déjà vu experience. Similar challenge, new terminology. Yet, currently, little improvement.

Lessons for the Future

Should the current and alternative parties want to escape the identical outcome, the respective organizations should learn from the Conservatives’ failure on social mobility; that social mobility rhetoric is simple terminology, but effective implementation of more equal results is much harder. Our nation’s persistently low social mobility remains the central problem for our country, with young people unable to get a decent career start, those working hard in occupations with minimal progress after the rent has been paid, and people across the country without any genuine belief their children will be able to do any better in life than they have.

Politicians can talk about improved access as much as they want. Yet where is the organization that has the thorough strategy on life chances? None appear to exist. Whichever party succeeds initially, prevails. Not only for themselves, but, significantly, for a complete society that has desperately requires equal access so badly.