While the struggling Tories convenes in its conference city for its yearly gathering, it has plenty to consider regarding its path forward. Doubt remains if a road forward is available. These are challenging circumstances for a political party that now has little, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to the public.
An Alternate Reality
Things could have turned out vastly better if real advances had been made on an policy focus that is important for people across the country: Social mobility. Yet the former leadership did not possess the basic understanding on how to convert the trendy talk on levelling up into policy reality. For the two years after the general election, it argued over what the term even meant.
I found it bizarre, because I’d already told Johnson what levelling up meant when we originally talked about it during the contest for party leader. The phrase was a term I developed and used at the DfE to talk about social mobility. This became our guiding principle, and its meaning is unambiguous: social mobility is the means by which we attain equality of opportunity – without removing opportunity away from those who already have it, but rather by providing options to those that don’t.
Essential Principle
Another crucial ministry expression we used, “ability is distributed uniformly around the UK, but opportunity is not”, represented another a purposeful phrase, representing the dual components of a social mobility strategy. Initially, potential shared equally but not developed consistently through our education system. Additionally, opportunities not spread evenly by businesses or our economy. As a result, learning and employment were crucial to achieving improved equality of opportunity. This represented an priority about the community framework of our country – fostering human talent and linking them with opportunities.
The Reality of Implementation
What did the social mobility agenda evolve into under Johnson’s Conservatives? Local investment schemes managed by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Hanging baskets and redeveloped traffic systems. A government strategy was released a significant period after the Prime Minister took office, which saw current strategies relabelled under the new levelling up banner.
Consequently, a wider fairness strategy went ignored, as well as all the reform that it might have driven – in capital, commerce, financial planning, tax and in place-making. Moreover, in schooling, including a university system that has become a punchbag for elected officials – despite the fact that it remains the most powerful engine of upward movement for individuals from less privileged homes, including myself, this country has had throughout modern times. Maybe the sole mechanism of equal opportunity, operating at scale.
Why Hope Matters
Ambition is essential for our country to prosper. To foster ambition, there needs to be a realistic expectation that effort and reward are linked; that if people aspire, they can achieve. For political leadership, being able to foster a sense of optimism about the tomorrow is crucial. Research by the Institute for Policy Research at the university and others, published last month, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I established during my tenure – community-focused methods to improving education outcomes – led to students in those areas being up to 18 percentage points more optimistic about their prospects than those in comparable communities without these programmes 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
Unaware of these findings, and in the midst of its post-Johnson leadership contest, in that period, the Tory administration ended the initiatives. What reason would someone in those regions vote for a political group that took that action? The targeted programme is a single instance of what could have been a revolutionary Tory policy platform on levelling up, but that possibility was completely wasted. Approaches such as this can generate optimism and ambition. Conversely, as the Tories found out, failing to deliver of fair chances is the biggest blunder any government can make. The public punished the leadership for its incompetence but, primarily, for its failed pledges on equal opportunity.
Today’s Political Reality
Now the baton on life chances and fair access has passed to a opposition party. The levelling up rhetoric has been discarded. Labour has its own public messaging of “removing obstacles to success”. The political group that is increasingly displacing the struggling Conservative party, Reform UK, also has its own language – “industrial revival”. This expression to talk about fresh prospects in areas like the one I come from, in South Yorkshire. It claims that an former economic strength can be reborn into an modern manufacturing sector.
To the electorate, it must appear as a repetitive cycle. Similar challenge, new terminology. But – as yet – no results.
The Way Forward
If Labour and Reform UK want to escape the similar destiny, the respective organizations should take lessons from the previous government’s errors on levelling up; that equal opportunity talk is one thing, but actual achievement of fairer outcomes is much harder. Our nation’s persistently low equal opportunity remains the central problem for our country, with the next generation unable to get a proper professional launch, those laboring in full-time jobs with little to show after the rent has been paid, and citizens throughout the UK without any real hope their offspring will be able to do improve in life than they have.
Politicians can talk about fairer opportunities however much they like. But where is the political group that has the thorough strategy on social mobility? None appear to exist. Whichever party succeeds initially, prevails. Not just for themselves, but, significantly, for a whole country that has urgently needs equality of opportunity so desperately.
