🔗 Share this article

As the beleaguered Conservative party convenes in Manchester for its yearly gathering, it has a lot to reflect on regarding its future direction. Doubt remains if a road forward exists at all. These are challenging circumstances for a governing group that now has little, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to the electorate.

What Could Have Been

It could have been so different if tangible progress had been made on an policy focus that matters to people across the country: Levelling up. However the former leadership did not possess the first clue on how to transform the popular slogan on levelling up into actual implementation. Over twenty-four months after the general election, it argued over what the phrase even meant.

I was perplexed, because I had clearly defined for Johnson what levelling up signified when we first spoke about it during his leadership campaign. This terminology was a concept I originated and used at the education ministry to talk about social mobility. This became our departmental mantra, and its meaning is unambiguous: levelling up is the method by which we achieve equality of opportunity – without removing opportunity away from those who possess it, but rather by extending chances to those that are without.

Essential Principle

Another crucial DfE phrase we used, “ability is distributed uniformly throughout the nation, yet chances are not”, served as a deliberate expression, embodying the two halves of a equal opportunity plan. Initially, ability distributed uniformly but not cultivated evenly through our learning institutions. Furthermore, opportunities not spread evenly by the private sector or our market. Thus, learning and employment were crucial to achieving stronger social mobility. This represented an agenda about the societal structure of our country – investing in individual capabilities and connecting them to opportunities.

The Actual Outcome

What did levelling up become under Johnson’s Conservatives? A towns fund administered out of the DLUHC. Hanging baskets and redeveloped traffic systems. A white paper was released almost thirty-six months after the Prime Minister took office, which saw current strategies rebadged under the recently branded agenda.

Consequently, a broader social mobility agenda went undeveloped, as well as all the improvement that it could have inspired – in capital, business, financial planning, tax and in place-making. And, of course, in education, including a university system that has become a scapegoat for leaders across parties – despite the fact that it remains the most powerful engine of social mobility for young working-class people, including myself, this country has had in recent decades. Perhaps the primary source of social mobility, functioning widely.

The Importance of Aspiration

Ambition is essential for our country to thrive. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a realistic expectation that dedication and outcome are linked; that if people aspire, they can succeed. For political leadership, being able to create a sense of optimism about the tomorrow is critical. Studies by the Institute for Policy Research at the academic establishment and others, newly available, showed that the ministry’s focus zones I launched while in office – community-focused methods to boosting academic achievement – led to students in those communities being up to 18 percentage points more hopeful about their future than those in equivalent locations without these initiatives in place. The evidence is clear: just making an genuine beginning on pro-social mobility policy can rapidly and effectively change how people view their future.

Squandered Chances

Unaware of these findings, and in the throes of its new leader election, in autumn 2022, the Tory administration closed opportunity areas down. What reason would someone in those areas vote for a party that took that action? This specific initiative is a single instance of what might have become a revolutionary Tory policy platform on levelling up, but that chance was hopelessly squandered. Approaches such as this can inspire hope and aspiration. In contrast, as the Conservatives found out, reneging on commitments of social mobility is the most expensive error any leadership can make. Voters held accountable the government for its ineffectiveness but, perhaps most of all, for its broken promises on equal opportunity.

Present Circumstances

Currently the mandate on social mobility and equal chances has been taken up by a new administration. The old slogan has been abandoned. Labour has its own political rhetoric of “removing obstacles to success”. The organization that is gradually replacing the struggling incumbents, Reform UK, also has its own language – “economic renewal”. It’s a phrase to talk about new opportunities in regions like the one I was raised in, in the region. It claims that an industrial past can be reborn into an modern manufacturing sector.

For the public, it must seem like a Groundhog Day-style loop. Same issue, new terminology. But – as yet – no results.

What Must Change

If Labour and Reform UK want to prevent the same fate, the respective organizations should learn from the Conservatives’ failure on social mobility; that fair chance language is easy to say, but successful delivery of more equal results is significantly more difficult. Britain’s endemically weak equal opportunity remains the central problem for our country, with young people unable to get a decent career start, those working hard in full-time jobs with minimal progress after the housing costs are covered, and citizens throughout the UK without any actual expectation their children will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Leaders can discuss equal chances repeatedly. Yet where is the organization that has the thorough strategy on equal opportunity? I observe no such party. Whoever gets there first, wins. Not just for their organization, but, more importantly, for a entire nation that has never needed equality of opportunity so badly.