LEADING ARTICLE: Tories may rule in defeat

AFTER so long a period of Conservative government, Labour is bound to accept much of the legislative programme of the past 16 years. There can be no return to the 1970s, no wholesale re-nationalisation, no restoration of mass picketing, no re-affirmation of teachers' rights to teach anything they please. Nor should there be. But the danger for Tony Blair is that he accepts so much of the Tories' new Britain that Labour becomes nothing more than a party offering a temporary respite.

Consider water privatisation. This was once at the top of Labour's list for a return to some form of public ownership. Now, Labour suggests that some greater measure of accountability would be sufficient. Consider rail privatisation. Labour was still committed to reversing it as recently as last October. Now, its leaders are suddenly coy about their exact plans. Consider schools opting out of council control. Labour once denounced this as "educational apartheid". Now, Mr Blair is sending his own child to an opted-out school and his education spokesman no longer talks of returning such schools to local councils, merely of establishing "links". Consider, too, Mr Blair's new version of Clause IV. It celebrates "the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition"; even Margaret Thatcher was never quite so eloquent about an economic system that is, after all, just a way of making the best of human greed. The "forces of partnership and co-operation" to which it would somehow be joined sound quite feeble in comparison.

Thus, it seems, a Labour government would accept the primacy of the market. Here and there, it would rein it back but it would not, apparently, challenge the principle that it is entirely proper for private capital to make profits out of the human need for water. The profits should be less excessive (as even the Prime Minister agrees) and the service should be regulated (as it already is in theory) but that is as far as Labour goes. It offers no vision of a re-vitalised public sector, no new forms of common ownership, no attempt to restore the lost traditions of public service.

Mr Blair's aim is to make Labour fireproof from any kind of Tory criticism. The Tories say they will sack teachers in "failing" schools (which happen invariably to be in areas where everything else is failing); Labour promises to sack more of them, more quickly. The Tories say they will cut taxes; Labour hints that it would not put them up again. The Labour leadership seems convinced that the party has lost in the past because people will not, in practice, vote to pay higher taxes to get better schools or hospitals. It never seems to occur to the Shadow Cabinet that perhaps the argument was not well put. The past three years have surely demonstrated the accuracy of Benjamin Franklin's observation that nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes. The Tories kept their promise not to raise the basic rate of income tax. But other tax changes have added up, on the Chancellor's own admission, to the equivalent to a 7p rise. The Tories have managed to cut taxes on income only because they have increased taxes on consumption - of heating and lighting, for example - and thus shifted more of the burden to the old and the poor. To leave this unchallenged is to concede one of the oldest and most fundamental differences between left- and right-wing parties.

So what will be the point of voting Labour at the next general election? There will be few dubious business deals; there will be no more privatisation and no more nonsense about vouchers in schools. In other words, there will be a temporary halt to the triumphal progress of Toryism and the free market. But Mr Blair shows no signs of dictating a new agenda as Attlee did in 1945 or Thatcher in 1979. On the contrary, it is all too likely that a Labour election victory would succeed only in moving British politics further to the right because the Tories in opposition might well commit themselves to a full-blooded anti-government, anti-welfare state, anti-taxation programme, as the Republicans have done in America. In the absence of clear red water, the Tories will rush to the clear blue water. Is that why the likes of Rupert Murdoch have suddenly decided that they could tolerate a Blair government?