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Inequality, mobility and opportunity: the politics of aspiration

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by Rt Hon Alan Milburn MP, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
09 November 2004

As we enter this key stage of the Parliament, the centre-left in this country should do so with a growing sense of optimism about Britain and the part New Labour is playing in making it work.

Look around the world and see two trends. The first a Britain that is moving ahead after decades of falling behind. More people in work than ever before and unemployment at its lowest level for 30 years. Economic strength and stability grounded in a distinctive British approach to macro-economic policy. Public services that elsewhere in the world are being cut back or going back - here in our country growing and improving as the British approach to combining extra resources with far-reaching reforms delivers results. So this British way on the economy and public services is helping Britain win.

And second, unlike virtually anywhere else in the developed world, here in Britain a progressive party - New Labour - dominating the centre ground and forcing our opponents to the Right, so that after seven years in office we on the centre-left can look forward to the next election with confidence as we aim for an historic third term.

Put these two trends together and what you have is a position where we can go into this next general election with a sense of optimism about the future because we know Britain is working because New Labour is working.

Progressive politics of course is more than about winning elections. It is about winning for a purpose - to make life better for the working people of our country. Today, I want to set out how I believe by deepening and entrenching this New Labour approach, we can make Britain a beacon for the world because it is both economically successful and socially mobile.

I will make the case for what I describe as ‘the politics of aspiration’ dedicated to the creation of a fairer Britain where everyone has a chance to share in rising prosperity. Where we break down every barrier - every impediment to the development of human potential. Where aspiration and ambition become the expectation of the many, not the birth right of the few.

This is what Labour has always stood for. The basic belief this generation shares with the generation of Keir Hardie and R.H. Tawney is in the harnessing of collective power to better develop individual human potential. The fundamental difference between Left and Right comes down to this: we have a fundamental optimism about the enduring potential of the British people - what George Orwell terms ‘the extraordinary genius of the common man’.

The Labour Party was founded on a belief that it is the duty of government not just to attack entrenched privileges that hold people back, but to promote equality of life-chances across the economy, politics and culture. As the socialist writer GDH Cole argued in 1943: "It ought to be so obvious as hardly to need stating that it is an obligation falling upon any decent human society to give all its members a fair chance in life" .

Sixty years later we still crave a Britain in which people can go as far they have the talent to go, where prosperity and opportunity are widely shared. Doing so means getting social mobility moving again in Britain. I believe that must be at the core of our ambitions for a Labour third term.

In these last seven years we have laid the foundations on which to build such an ambition. A strong and stable economy is the rock on which a Labour third term will be built. With Labour, Britain has witnessed the longest period of economic growth since records began, an economy now bigger than that of Italy and France. Interest rates and mortgages rates lower than at any point since the 1960s.

We now have the lowest unemployment and highest employment rate of any of our competitors for the first time since the 1950s. When last month, unemployment fell to its lowest level for thirty years, it was barely noticed. Who in Britain speaks of mass unemployment anymore?

Living standards are up for everyone - and for the poorest up most - thanks to the minimum wage and policies specifically helping working families with children. The country is seeing the biggest decreases in child and pensioner poverty, and the biggest increases in public service investment for decades. In the NHS waiting times are down. In state schools, results are up. The number of state-educated entrants to our top universities has risen by more than a third since 1997 without compromising high standards, a potent symbol of upward mobility.

So good progress. But nowhere near enough. It is true that steadily life is getting better for people. The country is getting stronger. In general people are far wealthier than they have ever been. I see that in my own family. My grandfather worked as a labourer, my mother as a secretary. My children have life experiences and opportunities that were unimaginable in my own childhood. Yet, in recent decades birth not worth has become more and more a key determinant of life chances.

According to research by Professor John Hills at the London School of Economics, the UK has witnessed dramatic growth in income inequality over the last twenty five years . At the end of the 1970s the richest tenth of the population received 21% of disposable income. This had reached 29% by 2002-03, with more than half the increase accounted for by the top 1% of earners. The poorest tenth received roughly 4% of disposable income at the end of the 1970s, but this had fallen to 2.5% by the mid-1990s.

Since then, Labour’s policies have lifted almost two million people out of poverty of course. But let's be frank. If the trends of recent decades were to continue unabated Britain’s problem in the 21st century will not be too much mobility, but too little. There is a glass ceiling on opportunity in this country. We’ve raised it - but we haven’t yet broken it. Social mobility – by which I mean the ability of children to advance up the ladder relative to their parents - is nowhere near as advanced as it ought to be given our strengths as a country. Nor is it anywhere near the levels seen in other countries. Indeed Britain appears to be rather less socially fluid than comparable countries. Although the caricature of a classless American society is laid bare by visiting almost any US city and witnessing the extremes of wealth and poverty there, recent academic evidence suggests that the USA and countries like Australia, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands are rather more fluid than others such as France, Germany, Italy and Ireland. We in Britain seem to lie somewhere in the middle. And over recent decades we have fallen in the international league table of mobility.

The Cabinet Office Strategy Unit report on social mobility published in 2001 laid bare statistically what many feared was happening subjectively . While changes in the nature of the workforce mean there are many more professional jobs and fewer manual jobs - creating more room at the top - earnings mobility has actually declined over the last two decades.

Jonathan Gershuny has found steadily decreasing upward mobility from manual occupations to higher status professional and technical occupations . Research by Jo Blanden and Abigail McKnight confirms the slowdown. The economic status of the cohort of children born, like I was, in 1958 was far less dependent on the economic status of their parents than those born just twelve years later in 1970. The evidence from comparing the two cohorts of children is that economic mobility has fallen between the two.

I grew up in the North East. I spent my childhood in a County Durham mining town, Tow Law, and later in west Newcastle. I was very fortunate. I got the chance to go to university. Social mobility was in full swing. The 50s and the 60s saw Britain finally emerging from the aftershocks of the war years. There was of course the most appalling poverty and inequality. For many times were hard. This was not in any sense a golden age. And yet it was a time of great hope. Having won a gruelling war in which most families had made huge sacrifices, there was a shared determination to win the peace.

This determination had found expression in the post war Labour government’s towering achievements. Full employment as the cornerstone of economic policy. Universal education as the route to advancement. And a new welfare state with its jewel in the crown: the National Health Service. Together they brought new opportunities to millions of people in our country. The young, the post-war baby boomers generation, were particular beneficiaries. By the late 1950s when I was born, the prospect of a more classless society seemed to be within reach. Indeed Crosland thought it a realisable ambition. The prospect seemed so real that Michael Young published his book The Rise of the Meritocracy in that year, 1958, precisely to warn about the downsides of a genuinely meritocratic society.

Today that optimism looks hopelessly misplaced. The nature of inequality may have changed but its existence has not. If anything the gap has widened not narrowed. And social mobility has slowed down when it ought to be speeding up.

All of this should matter to New Labour, for three fundamental reasons.

First, the result of declining social mobility is entrenched inequality: the persistence of disadvantage across the generations. It is true that more people are better off, but poverty has become more entrenched.

We all pay the price. The taxpayers who pay the bills of social failure. The decent hard-working families who live in fear of crime. The loss we all feel from a declining sense of shared community. The growing inequality gap of recent decades undermines the shared values that are the foundations for a decent society.

Where I lived on a housing estate in Tow Law in the 1960s, poverty and unemployment were of course, facts of life. But the community I grew up in was just that - one community. There were not the social extremes there are today. One in the mainstream, the other outside, each with their own rules and ways of life.

In recent decades, we have faced a new phenomenon: families and sometimes whole communities permanently separated from mainstream society. A drug culture paid for by crime. Young men waging a war on their own neighbourhoods. Families living off the black economy. Too many people living a life of little hope and no ambition. Britain cannot afford this fragmentation either socially or economically.

Second, our success in a globally competitive economy depends on unlocking the talents of all our people. This won’t happen without adequate upward mobility. What is right on ethical grounds in the 21st century is right on economic grounds too. In the information-age, the most important resource of a firm or a country is not its raw materials, or its geographical location, but the skills of the whole workforce.

Technological change in the modern world is ‘skill biased’ - those with higher skills have seen the largest increases in productivity and pay since the late 1970s, while those with lower skills have found that technological change leads to a reduced demand for their labour, and lower average earnings. The low-wage problem poses a big conundrum in the long-run, as poorer workers find themselves locked into persistently insecure and low paid employment.

As my colleague John Denham MP has written in a recent study of low-pay: “The modern economy is creating a layer of jobs that offer little in the way of income, and little training, personal development or long-term security” . That holds them back, and it holds our country back.

Third, a slowing down in social mobility is not just an issue for those at the very bottom of the social order. It matters to what Bill Clinton famously called the ‘forgotten middle class’. If the aspirations that most hard-working families have for themselves, their children and their communities are thwarted, then responsibility, innovation and enterprise are all undermined.

A good society rests not just on shared values but on shared rules, where if people put something in they get something back. This fairness code is especially strong in British society. It is at the heart of the contract between citizen and state. When those rules appear to be transgressed - as I suspect some feel is the case with failed asylum-seekers and benefit cheats - the balance between rights and responsibilities seems to move too far to the former and away from the latter. The incentive to work hard and play by the rules is then undermined.

This is why social mobility matters. When it is present it provides a fair set of easily understood rules - social incentives - that earn rights through responsibilities, and earn advancement through effort. When it is absent incentives for individual progress are weakened, rules are transgressed and fairness is undermined. It is then that decent people say what’s the point? Poverty of aspiration then kicks in, and worse, social resentment festers and grows.

That is why social mobility should be our cause on the centre-left.

The issue is whether it can be achieved, and if so, how. On the first it is not just the experience of more mobile nations that should be a cause of hope. It is our own British experience of the twenty years after 1945, when social mobility was the norm rather than the exception, when the relationship between class origins and class destinations was being steadily broken down in our country.

Social mobility having declined, however, getting Britain moving again will not be easy. Many of the determinants of life chances - genetics, family life, social attitudes - are way beyond the control of government. And where government can make a difference, it will require an approach distinct from the old Left model of redistribution, and a reappraisal of the Left’s traditional conception of equality. Broadly, these have been two-fold. One centred on a notion of equality of outcome. The other a notion of equality of opportunity.

The problem with the first is self-evident. It would need to be imposed by a central authority and decided irrespective of work, effort or contribution to the community. It therefore denies humanity, rather than liberates it. What people resent in Britain is not the fact that other people have done well. What angers people is that millions have been denied the opportunity to realise their potential.

For that reason, a narrow meritocracy isn’t the answer either. It provides the equal opportunity only to become unequal. As Anthony Crosland wrote in The Future of Socialism in 1956, "only a few exceptional individuals hauled out of their class by society's talent scouts can ever climb" . Meritocracy is in the words of Tawney the invitation for all to come to dinner in the sure knowledge that circumstances would prevent most people from attending. Neither does this weak version of equality of opportunity provide a guaranteed minimum beneath which no-one should be allowed to fall.

But there is a further reason why traditional conceptions of equality are no longer adequate. As Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winner for economics has noted, families and communities can not only suffer economic disadvantage, but social, educational and cultural disadvantage as well . So, a more expansive agenda is required for today’s world. This has to move beyond the focus of the traditional welfare state on correcting the outcomes of market-driven inequalities - such as low wages and family poverty - after the event. At best, ‘after the event’ redistribution through benefit policy, for example, offers palliatives rather than cures. At worst, benefits foster dependency rather than self-sufficiency, seeking only to cushion the blow of poverty rather than helping people to escape it. An unreformed welfare state fails both the needy people it is supposed to help and the working people who pay for it.

Instead, social inequality is best tackled, and mobility best advanced, if we tackle its roots not its symptoms before it becomes entrenched and inhibits life-chances. It means a new form of redistribution - of opportunity. Where people get chances at every stage, and every age, not just a one-off opportunity whether at birth, at 11 or at 16.

Fairness in life-chances is what we should seek. By giving more people a real stake in society. By liberating the potential of each individual as an individual. By enabling people, regardless of wealth or status, to take greater control over their lives. That requires an active State and it requires active citizens. Where the State seeks to equalise opportunities throughout life and citizens take them. Where power is passed into the hands of citizens and communities. Where people are helped to realise their own aspirations for progress.

Not for us then the Tory option of abandoning the individual to sink or swim in a sea of change - retrenching the state. But for us, equipping the individual to progress through enabling government - reforming the state.

This should be our agenda for any third term. In my view it should focus on developing what I call new routes to social justice. First, skills and employability. Second, education and childcare. Third, power firmly in the hands of local communities. Fourth, asset and especially home ownership. Let me take each in turn.

One, an economic policy which places renewed emphasis on high skills, not low wages as the best route to full employment in every region and nation of Britain.

In a highly competitive world market - with India and China growing at rates far in excess of anywhere in the West - flexibility in our economy gives Britain the edge over other European nations. The Government’s job is to get the environment right for innovation, for example by investing in science. Economic stability is fundamental but it is knowledge that holds the key to Britain’s future competitiveness. This is the point underlined by Gordon Brown in his CBI speech today and it will be at the core of Patricia Hewitt’s DTI five year plan.

Employability is the route map both to greater economic success and faster social mobility. Our employment record is excellent, but we should not rest until everyone who wants a job has a job. That is why when Alan Johnson publishes his DWP five year plan early next year it will look at how we can help those trapped on Incapacity Benefit to return to work. We know that one million IB claimants say that they want to work, if only they were given the right level of support.

Work is the best antidote to poverty. It is the first rung on the ladder out of adversity. Getting on to the next rung requires a new emphasis on re-training and up-skilling so that we can provide better careers and not just more jobs. We need to build on the success of new adult skills programmes, modern apprenticeships and Employers Training Pilots so that there is as much emphasis in our third term on vocational education and skills training as in our first two terms we put on academic education and school standards. A world of ever faster change makes lifelong learning a necessity, not a luxury.

Decent careers, of course, need decent pay. And it needs reform in pay systems to put in place the right incentives for people to acquire skills and responsibilities. That’s why last month’s announcement of the ‘Women and Work’ Commission chaired by Baroness Prosser to make recommendations for closing the persistent pay gap between men and women is so welcome.

In the meantime Government should lead by example, opening up access to better jobs in the civil service and public sector, by breaking down rigid occupational boundaries and professional demarcations. By putting in place better career ladders drawing on what is already being done to help nursing assistants and classroom assistants move up to become fully qualified teachers or nurses. By opening up opportunities, for example, to the talents of Britain’s ethnic minorities through better training and career development. Our vision is of a Britain where everyone, regardless of colour, has the opportunity to make the most of their potential.

If we are to achieve genuine upward mobility in the workplace, we need to close down the closed shop mentality, and break down the barriers of discrimination wherever they exist in the public or private sectors.

Two, as the premium on knowledge in the modern economy becomes ever greater, education becomes more, not less significant as the true motor of economic and social mobility. Today, three in four young people born into the top social classes get five or more good GCSEs. The figure for those born at the bottom is less than a third. Staying on rates in the UK have traditionally been lower than in other comparable countries.

Strong progress is underway in tackling these historic deficits. Charles Clarke is leading our efforts to raise standards and widen opportunities in the recognition that educational excellence for an elite will no longer do for a modern Britain in a more competitive world. It is this that makes reform of higher education funding so vital if more young people are to get the opportunity that a university education brings. It is why through school reforms the opportunity of a personalised education and greater parental choice needs to be made available to those without wealth, and not just those with it.

These reforms - just like John Reid’s efforts to extend choice in the NHS so that it becomes as accessible to those without the ability to pay for treatment as those with it - are about redistributing opportunity in our society so that access to excellence is not narrow but wide.

And yet by themselves these reforms are not sufficient. Children's life-chances are determined before they even set foot in school. Working with children and their families from the start helps to prevent long-term problems - crime, unemployment, and dislocation - later. Investment in early years education, better childcare, support for parenting - are ladders out of adversity, far more effective than state hand-outs.

Results from programmes in the US show that for every dollar invested in early years, $7 is saved in lower crime, better jobs, and higher educational outcomes. Research from University College, London shows that even by age 22 months, the children of professional parents are ahead of working class children in the performance of cognitive tests. Performance at 22 and 42 months is a strong predicator of later educational outcomes. By their second year in primary school, bright children from poorer backgrounds have been overtaken by less able children from better off homes. And the social class divide widens the longer children remain in the system. Gosta Esping-Andersen argues that social mobility is higher and social inheritance lower in Denmark compared to Britain because for decades the Danes have enjoyed universal day-care provision for pre-school children. And since better childcare helps more women to get jobs, there is a positive impact on child poverty .

It is time Britain learned these lessons. We are beginning to do so. Already Sure Start is making the difference in hundreds of communities with over 500 centres now open. Part-time nursery places for all three and four year olds are doing the same. Now we want to, and can go, further. Our aim is for universal childcare to become a new arm of the modern welfare state, providing enhanced opportunities for children from all backgrounds to enjoy the best start in life. This Thursday, the Prime Minister will set out Labour's plans for childcare. I believe that the Tony Blair Government’s plans for universal childcare are as ambitious for our time as the Clem Attlee Government’s plan for universal education was for his.

And yet by itself even this is not enough. Education alone won't make Britain more socially mobile. Evidence cited by Breen and Goldthorpe demonstrates a strong association between class origins and class destinations even after controlling for educational attainment and intellectual ability. Further research demonstrates that child poverty exerts an earnings penalty throughout life.

If Britain is to get moving again socially, there have to be further opportunities for people to overcome economic disadvantage. Not just to get a job or to have a career, to benefit from training or from childcare - but instead to enjoy greater control and to have a bigger say in how they lead their lives.

That brings me to the third new route to social justice. If we are to lift individuals up, we need top lift communities up. If you live in a degraded area marked by concentrated disadvantage - crime, violence and drugs - it undermines the hope and self-belief that are required for getting on. For decades policy-makers practised a top down approach to lifting people up. You can see it in the old fashioned inner-city regeneration schemes of the 1980s, where resources were allocated regardless of the views of those who were supposed to benefit. It is unsurprising that such schemes came and went - and failed to achieve sustained results.

John Prescott has learned those lessons. His New Deal for Communities has broken new ground by actually involving local communities. Through the ODPM five-year strategy, he will deepen this approach with reforms to re-invigorate local government and pass power downwards and outwards to local communities themselves. Margaret Beckett will set out further proposals for improving local neighbourhoods in the forthcoming DEFRA five-year plan. Together with David Blunkett’s proposals for police reform it will put more power in the hands of local people to combat street level disorder and enhance community liveability. These plans are about finding new ways of allying the authorities - whether they are police or councils - with the majority in every community who work hard and play by the rules, against the minority who do not. They are about giving people more than just a say about their future. They are about giving them a stake in the future. I shall say more about this bottom-up approach to sustainable communities in a forthcoming speech.

For now, let me concentrate on the fourth area of policy that I believe could make the biggest contribution to social mobility: establishing Britain as an asset-owning democracy. Over the last decade, beginning with Michael Sherredan’s work in the early 1990s, there has been growing interest in the role of assets to extending opportunities in society. Owning assets creates a buffer in times of crisis. People act differently if they own assets. It gives them a real stake in the future. It enables people to act independently and make their own choices.

Indeed, there is a proud labour movement tradition that champions self-help, not state aid. It is the tradition of Robert Owen, the early friendly societies, the co-operative movement, and the Workers Educational Association. By reaching deep into our heritage, we can shape new policies for the future.

Research commissioned by David Blunkett when he was Secretary of State for Education shows that financial asset holding improves individual and social outcomes over and above factors such as educational attainment. Evidence from the National Child Development Survey of a cohort of children born in 1958 demonstrates a positive link between asset holding at age 23 and welfare outcomes later in life. Those with assets tend to spend less time unemployed, enjoy better health, and are less likely to get divorced. Similarly, research from the US shows that homeowners are more active in local politics and neighbourhood organisations. Deprived inner city estates owned by their occupants have a higher level of social capital.

Wider asset ownership could open up a new front in the battle for more equal life-chances. Traditionally, the centre-left’s focus was on income as a proxy for social justice, but this approach is geared too narrowly towards income transfers, offering low-income and poor people few incentives to save and build personal assets. As Michael Sherraden notes, people rarely spend their way out of poverty . While income support fuels consumption and a ‘live for today’ mentality, building assets leads people to save, defer consumption, plan ahead, and work hard to turn what they have into bigger assets such as a home.

Giving more people an economic stake in society can be a new weapon in Labour’s arsenal, as we seek to tackle poverty and unlock aspiration.

Next April, two million families will benefit from the Child Trust Fund - or ‘baby bond’ - with government and families providing endowments for future generations. It is an exciting and welcome venture into new territory. But it is just a first step. I believe we should go further. Indeed I believe we must if we are to get British society on the move again.

Research by the IPPR shows that the most substantial inequalities in society are not simply between income groups, but between those who own shares, pensions and housing, and those who rely solely on wages and benefits. Changes in the housing market are opening up a larger gulf between those with assets and those without. On the one hand, the IPPR itself has produced evidence showing that the value of the net equity of personally owned housing in the index of real growth in assets has risen from 67 in 1970 to 329 in 2001 - a five fold increase. The value has risen from £36 billion to £1,525 billion during those three decades. On the other hand, the proportion of individuals who own no assets at all has doubled from 5% to 10% in the last decade.

You can see that in London. The child of home-owning parents stands to inherit around £250,000 on average. The classmate whose family rents stands to inherit nothing. The housing market is making inequality wider and further impeding social mobility.

Given a choice, most people would choose to buy not rent. Of course Britain needs more social housing. We need to deal with the challenge of homelessness. We have to offer greater choice and flexibility in housing provision to cope with different demands, ranging from supported housing for the elderly to more single flats for young people. We need to create a better social mix of tenure breaking down the one-class monolithic housing estate. But we need to do something else too. We need to break the prevailing orthodoxy that the only future for those who don't own their own homes is social housing. Instead, the Government is rightly establishing an increase in home ownership as an explicit objective of government policy. And as John Prescott takes forward measures to help more first time buyers onto the housing ladder, I hope we can encourage mortgage-lenders to learn the lessons from the USA where more flexible forms of borrowing have helped millions more from low and moderate income families onto the housing ladder.

Nor should help for tenants to take equity shares in social housing simply be left on the back burner. It should be actively pursued as part of a wider policy effort to make Labour the modern party of home ownership.

Traditional income redistribution deals only with symptoms, not causes. Today, a different approach is required opening the door to greater independence, self-reliance, and aspiration for more people.

In an era where citizens are better informed and more inquiring, doing things to people will no longer work. It is doing things with them that holds the key, whether fighting crime, or improving health, or improving estates or regenerating communities. Today, the priority must be to fashion an active citizenship where the state enables more people to make choices for themselves, so they are better able to realise their own aspirations.

This is the means to rebalance rights and responsibilities. It is the means to reward work and effort and ambition and enterprise. And it is the means to reconnect with those who form the backbone of Britain - working people, middle and low income alike, hard-working families - who want to know there are fair rules in play, and there is a Government on their side working hard to put those rules in place.

In the 1997 and 2001 elections, New Labour assembled a popular coalition of support around politics that were understood to support the many, not the few. As we advance towards the next election, our task is to rebuild the New Labour coalition around ‘one nation politics’ that recognise while life is hard for many, all should have the chance to succeed. Where if you play by the rules you get a fair chance to progress. This is the time to reclaim for New Labour the banner of ambition and aspiration.

The next election will involve a fundamental choice between those who believe more people can make the grade, who celebrate success, who are optimistic that more people can get on and are determined to give them the means to do so. And those who want to bang shut the doors of opportunity, who want to hang up a sign saying ‘no vacancies’, who run down our success as a country and who at heart are profoundly pessimistic about the potential of ordinary people to get on - epitomised by their determination to abandon school targets, cap university places, cut Sure Start and give priority to helping people who can afford it to opt out of public services rather than helping the great majority get access to improved public services.

The next election will not just be a clash of tactics. It will be a clash of ideals and beliefs. Every Labour membership card summarises our ambition. Wealth, power and opportunity in the hands of the many not the few. Our goal: social justice. The great progressive cause to which parties of the centre-left have long aspired. A fair society, where nobody is left behind, but all can the bridge the gulf between what they are and what they have the potential to become. A country that is open to the innate talents of people according to their worth, not birth.

This is a Labour end. Achieving it requires New Labour means. In the last seven years we have learnt much. We are more experienced and more confident. We know what works and what does not. And we know now that the biggest reforms always produce the best results - Bank of England independence, the new constitutional settlement, choice in our public services. No change without controversy, no prospect of social justice without reform. As we look to the future this is not the time to retreat from New Labour but to entrench it, to deepen it not narrow it. The New Labour way is the only way for a successful progressive party.

New Labour has a modern progressive purpose: not just to beat poverty, but to unleash individual aspiration. The New Labour model is about levelling up, not levelling down.

The journey I have been able to travel in my own life has been blessed with opportunity. A strong family, a decent community, a good education, a home of my own. These are life-chances that should be open to all in our society.

We pursue the politics of aspiration not because they are electorally necessary, but because they are socially necessary. We will not succeed in realising our values of fairness and compassion unless we make Britain a socially mobile society. We will not succeed in a competitive global economy unless we open up Britain to the talents of all. Where no one is excluded. Where no area is passed by. Where opportunity is the new route to a fair society.

This is our mission, our passion, and it should be at the core of our agenda for a third term.