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As the beleaguered Tories meets in Manchester for its annual party conference, it has a lot to reflect on regarding its future direction. Doubt remains if a clear direction exists at all. These are challenging circumstances for a governing group that now has very little, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to voters.

An Alternate Reality

The situation might have been markedly improved if concrete steps had been made on an priority that matters to people across the country: Levelling up. However Boris Johnson’s government hadn’t got the basic understanding on how to turn the trendy talk on social mobility into policy reality. For the two years after the 2019 election, it debated what the concept truly represented.

It seemed strange to me, because I had previously explained to the Prime Minister what social mobility meant when we initially discussed about it during the contest for party leader. The expression was a term I developed and used at the education ministry to talk about equal opportunity. It served as our core mission, and its meaning is unambiguous: levelling up is the means by which we achieve fair chances – not by taking prospects away from those who are already advantaged, but rather by providing options to those that don’t.

Essential Principle

An additional vital education department term we used, “potential is equally shared around the UK, however access isn’t”, served as a intentional wording, reflecting the two halves of a social mobility strategy. First, potential shared equally but not cultivated evenly through our education system. Additionally, chances not distributed fairly by employers or our economy. Therefore, education and business were essential to achieving stronger social mobility. This constituted an priority about the community framework of our country – supporting people’s potential and connecting them to prospects.

What Levelling Up Became

What did levelling up become under the Tory administration? Local investment schemes overseen from the the relevant ministry. Street beautification and redeveloped traffic systems. A government strategy was launched a significant period after Johnson became leader, which saw existing policy approaches relabelled under the fresh social mobility slogan.

Therefore, a broader social mobility agenda went ignored, as well as all the reform that it might have driven – in funding, business, economic policy, tax and in community development. And, of course, in learning, including a tertiary education that has become a punchbag for leaders across parties – despite the fact that it remains the primary vehicle of upward movement for individuals from less privileged homes, like me, this country has had in recent decades. Possibly the sole mechanism of social mobility, functioning widely.

The Importance of Aspiration

Hope is essential for our country to succeed. For hope to exist, there needs to be a realistic expectation that effort and reward are connected; that if people aspire, they can achieve. For political leadership, being able to instil a sense of optimism about the future is important. Studies by the Institute for Policy Research at the university and others, recently released, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I introduced as education secretary – place-based approaches to improving education outcomes – led to youth in those areas being up to nearly one-fifth more optimistic about their future than those in equivalent locations without these programmes in place. The research confirms: just making an authentic start on equal chance initiatives can quickly and positively change how people perceive their prospects.

Squandered Chances

Unaware of these findings, and in the middle of its successor selection process, in autumn 2022, the Conservative government closed opportunity areas down. What reason would someone in those regions vote for a political group that made that decision? The opportunity areas policy is a single instance of what could have been a revolutionary Conservative government agenda on levelling up, but that possibility was completely wasted. Strategies such as this can generate optimism and ambition. On the other hand, as the ruling party found out, failing to deliver of fair chances is the biggest blunder any leadership can make. The public punished the government for its ineffectiveness but, above all, for its unfulfilled commitments on levelling up.

The Current Landscape

Now the baton on social mobility and equal chances has been transferred to a Labour government. The previous terminology has been abandoned. The current administration has its own political rhetoric of “breaking down the barriers to opportunity”. The party that is steadily supplanting the hapless incumbents, the alternative party, also has its own terminology – “reindustrialisation”. The terminology to talk about additional chances in communities like the one I grew up in, in my hometown. It suggests that an industrial past can be reborn into an revitalized economy.

For the public, it must appear as a repetitive cycle. Identical problem, new terminology. Yet, currently, little improvement.

The Way Forward

If Labour and Reform UK want to avoid the similar destiny, each group should learn from the Conservatives’ failure on levelling up; that equal opportunity talk is easy to say, but actual achievement of more equal results is far more challenging. Britain’s chronically poor social mobility remains the key issue for our country, with the next generation unable to get a decent career start, those laboring in occupations with little to show after the rent has been paid, and citizens throughout the UK without any actual expectation their next generation will be able to do any better in life than they have.

Leaders can talk about improved access however much they like. Yet where is the party that has the complete plan on equal opportunity? I observe no such party. Whoever gets there first, prevails. Not only for their party, but, more importantly, for a whole country that has urgently needs fair chances so desperately.