How does aspiration translate to real life when the country seems to be going backwards - David Behrens

Aspiration on a national level is abstract, which is why it’s a useful straw for an untried – some would say novice – politician to grasp; it’s impossible for her to be judged a failure in implementing a policy that can’t be measured in the first place. In that respect it’s like the previous administration’s shovelled-under-the-carpet policy of levelling up the North.

But the statistics tell their own story about our national rate of progress.

According to the social charity Nesta, only two in five Yorkshire parents think their children will grow up to be better off than them. In a country where social betterment from one generation to the next has been the expectation since the end of the war, that’s a shocking indictment.

Yet in truth, the downward slide has been gaining momentum for some years. The phenomenon of getting richer as you got older peaked with those who missed the draft and were caught in the safety net of a final salary pension scheme with generous early retirement options. Those people are in their 70s now. Not all of them benefited from the prevalent conditions but at least some did.

I’m just slightly behind them in years but a long way behind in benefits. Final salary pensions were as extinct as the gold standard by the time my career was at its height – and retiring early had become a euphemism for redundancy, not a perk.

Nevertheless, I’m fortunate compared to those behind me – and it gives me no satisfaction to think that my son might not have the opportunities I did. His generation is already saddled with student loans that would have been unthinkable when I was his age, and home ownership is an option only for those with deposit accounts at the Bank of Mum and Dad. It’s not much of a legacy.

So if they can’t own a house or look ahead to retirement, what does aspiration mean to them? Is it really just a treadmill of going to work, coming home and raising children who will be even less well off?

Those figures from Nesta, by the way, reflect the extent of the regional divide that Boris Johnson failed to level up. Further south, around half of those questioned remained optimistic for the next generation, despite the price of property down there.

Surveys aren’t scientific; they are easily skewed by the way the questions are phrased. But there are a number of litmus tests with which the country’s collective temperature can be taken – and the first of those is the sense of whether care will be there when you need it. At the moment there is no such sense.

Liz Truss acknowledged this on her first day in office, when she made it a priority to make doctors’ appointments universally available once more. That’s a measurable aspiration and one to which she will be held accountable at the polls.

The second test of the national health is the standard of schooling we are giving the next generation – and last month’s GCSE figures betrayed another frightening regional disparity. Nearly a third of students in Yorkshire didn’t do well enough to go on to further education, and less than a quarter managed the top grades. That compares with one in three in the south.

That’s a problem rooted not in schools but in the communities they serve.

Behrens Junior’s expensive university education qualifies him to teach maths to the under-achievers of West Lancashire, where he lives – but he would sooner put his fingers in the sausage mincer at Morrisons than set foot again in one of the zoos he was sent to for training.

Only a fine line, he said uncharitably, prevented them from being labelled young offenders’ institutions. No wonder that half of newly qualified teachers are threatening to quit and no wonder either that those who are left gravitate to areas where the pupils actually want to learn.

On our side of the Pennines, the Conservative MP Robbie Moore sounded a similar note in April, calling on ministers to raise aspirations in towns like Keighley, so that young people might be steered away from taking and selling drugs. His constituency was characterised, he said, by violent gangs openly challenging each other on the streets.

The belief in these communities that education is not worth aspiring to undermines any attempt at levelling up. Parents in the 1930s could see the value of schooling precisely because they had seen too little of it themselves; it’s not a lesson we should have forgotten.

And ultimately this is the measure that will determine whether Britain really is aspirational – or just an alliteration nation of empty political rhetoric.