Leading Article: Mr Blair's betrayal of his party and his own politics

THE PRIME MINISTER once described the reformed Labour Party as "almost literally a new party", and that was what was on show at Blackpool this week. Yes, the ballot for the National Executive gave Tony Blair a bloody nose and, yes, there has been an air of mutual unease rather than a bond of trust between the party leader and many of the delegates in the Winter Gardens. But step back for a moment and take the long view.

Compare the trivial rebellion of Mark Seddon and Liz Davies with the ideological trench warfare of the Seventies and early Eighties. Compare the polite expressions of doubt and uncertainty about the wisdom of some of the Government's policies with the screaming denunciations and heckling of ministers in the Wilson-Callaghan era. Above all, look at Mr Blair's speech on Tuesday. Which other Labour leader could have started his speech with a joke about how the first thing he was shown on entering Downing Street was how to press the nuclear button?

And look at the things he said which were applauded, often warmly. Support for marriage. The sack for incompetent head teachers. Child curfews. A tough inflation target. This is essentially a modern social democratic party, a coalition of different traditions - this week saw Peter Temple- Morris, the former Conservative MP for Leominster, speak from the same rostrum as several of Peter Mandelson's "blue-collar, working-class, northern, horny-handed, dirty-overalled people". But it is surprisingly united.

When Mr Blair declared in our pre-conference interview that "there is no ideological alternative" being put forward by the Labour left, he was not exaggerating. Not much, at least for the moment. The dirty-overalled tradition exerts a strong sentimental hold on a substantial section of the party. But in his speech Mr Blair asked his party to put aside foolish and sentimental things, and what is striking about this conference is the extent to which it responded.

What is really extraordinary, though, is how Mr Blair has arrived at such a situation in which there is no serious body of ideas opposed to his Government, either within the Labour Party or for many miles around it. He has done it not primarily by compromise and fudge but by "permanent revisionism" - a phrase from his Fabian pamphlet which is much more descriptive and evocative than its title, The Third Way.

We can argue about the policy details, but to the broad thrust of pro- European, free-market social democracy there is no credible alternative.

It is in the field of organisation that we have our doubts. The openness and pluralism of Mr Blair's thinking have not been matched by the institutions of the Labour Party. The control freaks are out of control. The result is the creation of an apparatus of placepeople and bureaucrats rather than a vibrant party of imaginative Blairites. We have seen it in the selection of candidates for the European Parliament, where positions on the party's lists have been allocated by faceless officials in a way that might have been designed solely to discredit list systems of proportional representation. Similar central control has been exerted over candidates for the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly. There are also justified fears of a similar rooting out of dissent at Westminster. Of course, quality control is important, but so is the ability to think for yourself. Vigorous debate is vital and Mr Blair and his cohorts should be big enough to tolerate healthy dissent.

This is the betrayal that matters, not of a misty vision of socialism that was wrong in the Seventies and remains wrong now, but of Mr Blair's own radicalism about democratising his party and turning it into a vibrant instrument of a new politics.