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While the struggling Tories meets in its conference city for its annual party conference, it has plenty to consider regarding its future direction. There is uncertainty if a clear direction remains open. These are difficult days for a political party that now has little, if anything, new or unique to say to the electorate.

What Could Have Been

The situation might have been vastly better if concrete steps had been made on an agenda that resonates with people throughout the UK: Social mobility. However the former leadership hadn’t got the basic understanding on how to convert his zeitgeisty rhetoric on levelling up into actual implementation. For the two years after the 2019 election, it debated what the concept truly represented.

I found it bizarre, because I had clearly defined for the Prime Minister what social mobility entailed when we initially discussed about it during his leadership campaign. The phrase was a term I developed and used at the education ministry to talk about equal opportunity. This became our guiding principle, and its definition is unambiguous: social mobility is the approach by which we achieve equality of opportunity – without removing chances away from those who possess it, but rather by extending options to those that are without.

Fundamental Idea

An additional vital education department term we used, “talent is spread evenly across our country, yet chances are not”, represented another a purposeful phrase, representing the two parts of a social mobility strategy. Initially, talent spread evenly but not cultivated evenly through our education system. Second, access not provided uniformly by businesses or our market. Thus, education and business were key to achieving stronger social mobility. This represented an agenda about the societal structure of our country – investing in people’s potential and providing access to opportunities.

The Actual Outcome

How did levelling up become under Johnson’s Conservatives? A towns fund overseen from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Street beautification and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. An official policy document was launched almost thirty-six months after the Prime Minister took office, which saw current strategies relabelled under the fresh social mobility slogan.

As a result, a wider fairness strategy went ignored, as well as all the reform that it may have generated – in investment, business, economic policy, tax and in place-making. And, of course, in schooling, including a university system that has become a target for elected officials – even though it remains the primary vehicle of life improvement for young working-class people, including myself, this country has had in recent decades. Possibly the only engine of social mobility, working extensively.

The Importance of Aspiration

Ambition is vital for our country to succeed. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a credible sense that effort and reward are related; that if people aim high, they can achieve. For all administrations, being able to create a outlook of positivity about the tomorrow is important. Research by the Institute for Policy Research at Bath University and others, published last month, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I launched while in office – community-focused methods to boosting academic achievement – led to youth in those neighborhoods being up to a significant margin more optimistic about their life ahead than those in equivalent locations without these initiatives in place. The evidence is clear: just making an sincere effort on fair opportunity strategies can rapidly and effectively change how people perceive their prospects.

Lost Potential

Unaware of these findings, and in the throes of its successor selection process, in September 2022, the Tory administration ended the initiatives. What reason would someone in those areas vote for a organization that took that action? The opportunity areas policy is one example of what had the potential to be a game-changing Conservative government agenda on levelling up, but that chance was completely wasted. Strategies such as this can inspire hope and aspiration. In contrast, as the Conservatives learned, failing to deliver of equal opportunity is the most expensive error any leadership can make. Voters penalized the government for its incompetence but, above all, for its failed pledges on levelling up.

The Current Landscape

Currently the responsibility on social mobility and fair access has passed to a opposition party. The levelling up rhetoric has been abandoned. Labour has its own public messaging of “eliminating hurdles to advancement”. The party that is steadily supplanting the failing Conservative party, the challenger, also has its own language – “industrial revival”. It’s a phrase to talk about fresh prospects in communities like the one I was raised in, in my hometown. It promises that an former economic strength can reincarnate into an industrial future.

For voters, it must seem like a déjà vu experience. Same issue, different language. However, so far, no progress.

Lessons for the Future

Should the current and alternative parties want to escape the same fate, both these parties should take lessons from the Tories’ mistakes on levelling up; that social mobility rhetoric is easy to say, but effective implementation of fairer outcomes is much harder. Our nation’s endemically weak equal opportunity remains the key issue for our country, with youth unable to get a decent career start, those laboring in employment with few results after the living expenses are met, and citizens throughout the UK without any genuine belief their offspring will be able to do any better in life than they have.

Leaders can discuss equal chances repeatedly. Yet where is the organization that has the comprehensive policy agenda on social mobility? I see none. Whichever party succeeds initially, wins. Not just for their organization, but, crucially, for a entire nation that has urgently needs equal access so urgently.