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While the beleaguered Tories gathers in its conference city for its annual party conference, it has plenty to consider regarding its path forward. It’s not even clear if a clear direction is available. These are challenging circumstances for a political party that now has almost nothing, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to the electorate.

An Alternate Reality

Things could have turned out so different if tangible progress had been made on an agenda that matters to people throughout the UK: Levelling up. But the former leadership lacked the basic understanding on how to convert the popular slogan on levelling up into concrete action. For the two years after the general election, it debated what the phrase actually signified.

I was perplexed, because I had clearly defined for Johnson what social mobility signified when we originally talked about it during the contest for party leader. The phrase was a concept I originated and used at the DfE to talk about life chances. It served as our guiding principle, and its definition is clear: levelling up is the method by which we achieve equal access – not by taking opportunity away from those who are already advantaged, but rather by extending chances to those that are without.

The Core Concept

An additional vital DfE phrase we used, “talent is spread evenly around the UK, but opportunity is not”, again was a intentional wording, embodying the two parts of a fairness agenda. First, potential shared equally but not nurtured uniformly through our learning institutions. Additionally, opportunities not spread evenly by businesses or our economy. Therefore, learning and employment were essential to achieving stronger social mobility. This represented an mission about the social fabric of our country – supporting human talent and providing access to chances.

What Levelling Up Became

What did the social mobility agenda become under Johnson’s Conservatives? A towns fund administered out of the the relevant ministry. Street beautification and redeveloped traffic systems. A white paper was published a significant period after the Prime Minister took office, which saw current strategies repackaged under the new levelling up banner.

Therefore, a wider fairness strategy went ignored, as well as all the change that it might have driven – in funding, enterprise, economic policy, revenue and in community development. Additionally, in schooling, including a tertiary education that has become a punchbag for leaders across parties – although it remains the primary vehicle of social mobility for young working-class people, like me, this country has had in recent decades. Maybe the sole mechanism of social mobility, operating at scale.

The Importance of Aspiration

Aspiration is crucial for our country to prosper. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a credible sense that effort and reward are related; that if people aspire, they can succeed. For political leadership, being able to create a outlook of positivity about the future is important. Research by the research body at the university and others, published last month, showed that the DfE’s 12 “opportunity areas” I introduced as education secretary – community-focused methods to boosting academic achievement – led to students in those neighborhoods being up to 18 percentage points more optimistic about their life ahead than those in similar areas without these programmes in place. The data shows: just making an genuine beginning on equal chance initiatives can rapidly and effectively change how people feel about their future.

Missed Opportunities

Unaware of these findings, and in the throes of its post-Johnson leadership contest, in that period, the Conservative government terminated the programmes. Why would anyone in those areas vote for a party that took that action? The targeted programme is one example of what could have been a game-changing administration strategy on levelling up, but that opportunity was totally misused. Methods such as this can generate optimism and ambition. On the other hand, as the Conservatives learned, reneging on commitments of social mobility is the biggest blunder any political party can make. Voters held accountable the leadership for its failure but, above all, for its broken promises on levelling up.

Today’s Political Reality

At present the responsibility on social mobility and equal chances has been taken up by a opposition party. The old slogan has been discarded. The current administration has its own political rhetoric of “removing obstacles to success”. The organization that is increasingly displacing the hapless Tories, the alternative party, also has its own terminology – “industrial revival”. The terminology to talk about fresh prospects in areas like the one I was raised in, in my hometown. It claims that an former economic strength can revive into an industrial future.

For voters, it must appear as a repetitive cycle. Identical problem, new terminology. However, so far, no progress.

What Must Change

If Labour and Reform UK want to escape the same fate, both these parties should take lessons from the Tories’ mistakes on social mobility; that social mobility rhetoric is one thing, but effective implementation of more equal results is much harder. Our nation’s chronically poor life chances remains the central problem for our country, with young people unable to get a decent career start, those putting in effort in occupations with few results after the rent has been paid, and citizens throughout the UK without any genuine belief their offspring will be able to do any better in life than they have.

Elected officials can discuss improved access however much they like. Yet where is the party that has the complete plan on social mobility? I see none. The first to achieve this, succeeds. Not only for themselves, but, more importantly, for a whole country that has urgently needs equal access so desperately.