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While the struggling Conservative party gathers in its conference city for its yearly gathering, it has plenty to consider regarding its future direction. It’s not even clear if a clear direction exists at all. We are in tough times for a political party that now has little, if anything, new or unique to say to the electorate.

The Missed Opportunity

The situation might have been markedly improved if tangible progress had been made on an priority that is important for people throughout the UK: Social mobility. Yet Boris Johnson’s government did not possess the slightest idea on how to convert the popular slogan on social mobility into policy reality. For the two years after the general election, it debated what the phrase truly represented.

I was perplexed, because I had previously explained to Johnson what social mobility entailed when we first spoke about it during the contest for party leader. This terminology was a term I developed and used at the DfE to talk about social mobility. This became our core mission, and its meaning is clear: social mobility is the method by which we attain equality of opportunity – not by taking prospects away from those who already have it, but rather by extending opportunities to those that lack them.

Fundamental Idea

The other key education department term we used, “potential is equally shared around the UK, but opportunity is not”, represented another a deliberate expression, reflecting the two parts of a equal opportunity plan. Initially, ability distributed uniformly but not nurtured uniformly through our schools and colleges. Second, access not provided uniformly by businesses or our economic system. Thus, learning and employment were crucial to achieving stronger social mobility. This was an mission about the community framework of our country – supporting individual capabilities and linking them with chances.

The Actual Outcome

What did levelling up become under the previous government? Regional development money administered out of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Decorative floral displays and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. A white paper was released nearly three years after the leadership change, which saw current strategies repackaged under the fresh social mobility slogan.

As a result, a wider fairness strategy went unpursued, as well as all the reform that it may have generated – in investment, business, financial planning, taxation and in local regeneration. Additionally, in learning, including a university system that has become a target for politicians of all stripes – although it remains the primary vehicle of life improvement for youth from modest backgrounds, including myself, this country has had in recent decades. Possibly the primary source of fair chances, working extensively.

Why Hope Matters

Ambition is crucial for our country to succeed. For hope to exist, there needs to be a credible sense that dedication and outcome are related; that if people aspire, they can attain. For any government, being able to foster a outlook of positivity about the tomorrow is critical. Research by the Institute for Policy Research at the academic establishment and others, newly available, showed that the education department’s targeted regions I launched while in office – community-focused methods to improving education outcomes – led to youth in those neighborhoods being up to 18 percentage points more positive about their life ahead than those in similar areas without these programmes in place. The research confirms: just making an sincere effort on equal chance initiatives can quickly and positively change how people feel about their future.

Squandered Chances

Unaware of these findings, and in the midst of its new leader election, in that period, the Conservative government ended the initiatives. What reason would someone in those regions vote for a party that did that? This specific initiative is one example of what had the potential to be a game-changing Conservative government agenda on levelling up, but that possibility was completely wasted. Methods such as this can create belief and drive. On the other hand, as the ruling party discovered, breaking the promise of equal opportunity is the biggest blunder any political party can make. The public held accountable the administration for its incompetence but, perhaps most of all, for its failed pledges on equal opportunity.

Present Circumstances

Currently the mandate on equal opportunity and fair access has been taken up by a new administration. The old slogan has been abandoned. The new government has its own public messaging of “breaking down the barriers to opportunity”. The organization that is increasingly displacing the hapless Tories, the alternative party, also has its own message – “economic renewal”. It’s a phrase to talk about additional chances in regions like the one I was raised in, in South Yorkshire. It promises that an historical manufacturing base can revive into an modern manufacturing sector.

For the public, it must feel like a repetitive cycle. Similar challenge, different language. But – as yet – no results.

What Must Change

If Labour and Reform UK want to prevent the identical outcome, each group should take lessons from the previous government’s errors on levelling up; that equal opportunity talk is easy to say, but actual achievement of fairer outcomes is much harder. The UK’s endemically weak life chances remains the central problem for our country, with youth unable to get a decent career start, those putting in effort in occupations with few results after the housing costs are covered, and people across the country without any actual expectation their offspring will be able to do advance in life than they have.

Leaders can mention fairer opportunities however much they like. Yet where is the political group that has the complete plan on life chances? None appear to exist. Whichever party succeeds initially, succeeds. Not just for themselves, but, more importantly, for a whole country that has never needed equality of opportunity so badly.