Labour needs to reclaim ambition and aspiration from Tories, says Umunna

Ambition and aspiration are not just Tory words from the Thatcher era and must be reclaimed by the centre-left, the shadow business secretary will say on Tuesday.

Chuka Umunna will make the case for Labour to talk more about the need for social mobility, saying the party wants to stand for a society where "the gates of opportunity are truly open to all".

In a speech to the Labour Finance and Industry Group annual dinner, Umunna will say his party's mission was to promote "dreams, ambitions, aspirations".

He will also echo the warning of former Conservative prime minister Sir John Major that Britain does not do enough to help people from poorer backgrounds improve their circumstances.

"In modern Britain – more than in most OECD countries – your background still determines your destiny," he will say. "Not your innate talent, ingenuity and sheer hard work. For too many, their future is still determined by the circumstances of their birth, not the content of their character or the quality of their brain.

"That's not good enough, and changing this is our party's defining purpose … Yes, it's about those words – dreams, ambitions, aspirations – made real through common endeavour … This is Labour's mission.

"Now the problem is that too often progressives, the centre left, have ceded this kind of language to our political opponents."

Umunna will say any mention of the words ambition or aspiration on Twitter will earn him the label of "Thatcher's child" or the question "Are you a Tory?". However, he will argue that Labour espouses an ambition for whole groups of people, rather than individual aspiration over community.

"It is about both pulling together," he will say. "That is the history of our movement, the story of our struggles, and our mission today.

"It is that it takes a community, it takes a movement, it takes a struggle, "to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential."

His comments follow the public debate about social mobility sparked by Major, who said David Cameron's Britain showed a "truly shocking" dominance of public life by a small elite. The prime minister acknowledged more could be done to improve social mobility in Britain.

Boris Johnson, the London mayor, got into hot water last week when he praised the value of greed as a spur to progress and controversially suggested some people struggle to get on in life because of their low IQs. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, accused Johnson of revealing his "unpleasant, careless elitism".