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While the struggling Conservative party meets in its conference city for its yearly gathering, it has a lot to reflect on regarding its path forward. Doubt remains if a clear direction is available. We are in difficult days for a governing group that now has very little, if anything, new or unique to say to voters.

The Missed Opportunity

The situation might have been vastly better if concrete steps had been made on an agenda that is important for people throughout the UK: Levelling up. However the former leadership lacked the basic understanding on how to turn the trendy talk on levelling up into policy reality. During the initial period after the general election, it argued over what the concept actually signified.

I found it bizarre, because I had clearly defined for the Prime Minister what levelling up signified when we originally talked about it during the contest for party leader. The phrase was language I created and used at the education ministry to talk about equal opportunity. This became our guiding principle, and its definition is straightforward: social mobility is the approach by which we realize equality of opportunity – without removing prospects away from those who possess it, but rather by providing opportunities to those that don’t.

Essential Principle

An additional vital ministry expression we used, “potential is equally shared across our country, yet chances are not”, served as a deliberate expression, representing the dual components of a fairness agenda. Initially, potential shared equally but not cultivated evenly through our learning institutions. Furthermore, opportunities not spread evenly by the private sector or our economic system. Thus, schools and companies were key to achieving better life chances. This represented an agenda about the societal structure of our country – investing in individual capabilities and providing access to prospects.

The Actual Outcome

What did levelling up become under Johnson’s Conservatives? A towns fund administered out of the the relevant ministry. Decorative floral displays and rearranged intersections. A government strategy was published nearly three years after Johnson became leader, which saw existing policy approaches repackaged under the recently branded agenda.

Therefore, a wider fairness strategy went ignored, as well as all the improvement that it could have inspired – in investment, business, financial planning, revenue and in community development. Additionally, in learning, including a higher education sector that has become a punchbag for politicians of all stripes – even though it remains the primary vehicle of upward movement for young working-class people, including myself, this country has had in recent decades. Possibly the only engine of equal opportunity, working extensively.

Why Hope Matters

Hope is vital for our country to prosper. For hope to exist, there needs to be a credible sense that hard work and results are related; that if people aspire, they can succeed. For political leadership, being able to create a outlook of positivity about the tomorrow is important. Studies by the research body at Bath University and others, recently released, showed that the ministry’s focus zones I introduced as education secretary – locally targeted strategies to improving education outcomes – led to young people in those neighborhoods being up to 18 percentage points more hopeful about their prospects than those in similar areas without these schemes in place. The evidence is clear: just making an sincere effort on fair opportunity strategies can swiftly and beneficially change how people perceive their future.

Lost Potential

Ignoring this evidence, and in the midst of its new leader election, in that period, the Conservative government ended the initiatives. Why would anyone in those communities vote for a party 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 opportunity was hopelessly squandered. Methods such as this can generate optimism and ambition. In contrast, as the Conservatives learned, failing to deliver of fair chances is the costliest mistake any leadership can make. Voters penalized the government for its ineffectiveness but, perhaps most of all, for its broken promises on social mobility.

The Current Landscape

At present the baton on equal opportunity and equal chances has passed to a Labour government. The previous terminology has been abandoned. The new government has its own policy language of “breaking down the barriers to opportunity”. The party that is steadily supplanting the struggling Tories, the challenger, also has its own terminology – “economic renewal”. This expression to talk about fresh prospects in areas like the one I was raised in, in South Yorkshire. It promises that an industrial past can be reborn into an modern manufacturing sector.

To the electorate, it must feel like a déjà vu experience. Similar challenge, alternative phrasing. However, so far, no progress.

What Must Change

Whether the government and opposition want to escape the identical outcome, each group should take lessons from the Tories’ mistakes on levelling up; that equal opportunity talk is one thing, but actual achievement of improved opportunities is much harder. Our nation’s chronically poor equal opportunity remains the primary challenge for our country, with youth unable to get a good job beginning, those putting in effort in employment with minimal progress after the rent has been paid, and individuals nationwide without any real hope their offspring will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Elected officials can talk about equal chances however much they like. Yet where is the political group that has the comprehensive policy agenda on social mobility? I observe no such party. Whoever gets there first, wins. Not just for themselves, but, crucially, for a complete society that has urgently needs fair chances so badly.