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As the beleaguered Conservative party meets in Manchester for its yearly gathering, it has plenty to consider regarding its path forward. It’s not even clear if a viable path is available. These are difficult days for a governing group that now has very little, if anything, new or unique to say to the electorate.

The Missed Opportunity

It could have been vastly better if tangible progress had been made on an priority that is important for people throughout the UK: Levelling up. But the previous administration hadn’t got the first clue on how to convert the popular slogan on levelling up into policy reality. For the two years after the general election, it argued over what the concept truly represented.

It seemed strange to me, because I had clearly defined for the Prime Minister what social mobility meant when we initially discussed about it during the contest for party leader. The phrase was a term I developed and used at the education ministry to talk about life chances. It served as our departmental mantra, and its meaning is straightforward: levelling up is the means by which we attain fair chances – without removing chances away from those who possess it, but rather by extending options to those that don’t.

Essential Principle

The other key DfE phrase we used, “ability is distributed uniformly around the UK, but opportunity is not”, again was a deliberate expression, embodying the two halves of a equal opportunity plan. First, potential shared equally but not nurtured uniformly through our schools and colleges. Second, opportunities not spread evenly by the private sector or our market. Therefore, schools and companies were essential to achieving improved equality of opportunity. This constituted an priority about the societal structure of our country – fostering human talent and providing access to prospects.

What Levelling Up Became

What did levelling up become under Johnson’s Conservatives? Local investment schemes administered out of the DLUHC. Hanging baskets and redeveloped traffic systems. A white paper was launched nearly three years after the leadership change, which saw current strategies repackaged under the new levelling up banner.

Therefore, a broader social mobility agenda went unpursued, as well as all the reform that it might have driven – in capital, enterprise, fiscal strategy, revenue and in community development. Additionally, in education, including a university system that has become a punchbag for elected officials – although it remains the most powerful engine of social mobility for youth from modest backgrounds, like me, this country has had throughout modern times. Perhaps the only engine of social mobility, working extensively.

Why Hope Matters

Ambition is crucial for our country to succeed. For hope to exist, there needs to be a believable feeling that effort and reward are related; that if people aim high, they can achieve. For all administrations, being able to instil a outlook of positivity about the future is critical. Analysis by the academic institution at the university and others, recently released, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I launched while in office – community-focused methods to enhancing learning results – led to students in those communities being up to nearly one-fifth more positive about their prospects than those in equivalent locations without these programmes in place. The data shows: just making an authentic start on equal chance initiatives can quickly and positively change how people perceive their future.

Squandered Chances

Oblivious to this, and in the midst of its new leader election, in autumn 2022, the ruling party terminated the programmes. Why would anyone in those regions vote for a political group that took that action? The targeted programme is a clear case of what had the potential to be a revolutionary administration strategy on levelling up, but that possibility was hopelessly squandered. Methods such as this can generate optimism and ambition. In contrast, as the ruling party discovered, reneging on commitments of equal opportunity is the costliest mistake any political party can make. Voters punished the leadership for its failure but, perhaps most of all, for its broken promises on levelling up.

Present Circumstances

Currently the mandate on equal opportunity and fair access has been transferred to a new administration. 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 failing Tories, the challenger, also has its own terminology – “reindustrialisation”. The terminology to talk about new opportunities in regions like the one I come from, in South Yorkshire. It promises that an historical manufacturing base can revive into an modern manufacturing sector.

To the electorate, it must seem like a Groundhog Day-style loop. Same issue, different language. Yet, currently, little improvement.

What Must Change

Should the current and alternative parties want to avoid the similar destiny, both these parties should understand the previous government’s errors on levelling up; that equal opportunity talk is easy to say, but effective implementation of fairer outcomes is far more challenging. The UK’s endemically weak equal opportunity remains the key issue for our country, with youth unable to get a proper professional launch, those putting in effort in employment with few results after the living expenses are met, and citizens throughout the UK without any actual expectation their offspring will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Elected officials can talk about fairer opportunities however much they like. Yet where is the organization that has the thorough strategy on life chances? None appear to exist. Whichever party succeeds initially, prevails. Not just for themselves, but, more importantly, for a entire nation that has never needed equal access so badly.