Critics of Tony Blair, including this paper, have frequently complained that this government, though undeniably superior to its Tory predecessors, lacks long-term vision or purpose. Old Labour has been cast aside, the trade unions sidelined, Clause Four jettisoned, Rupert Murdoch appeased, Middle England reassured. But what are we left with? Is it just a slightly milder version of Thatcherism - a bourgeois hegemony, perhaps, without the triumphalism?

The Bournemouth conference has given the critics an emphatic answer: the vision is of full employment, an end to child poverty, an NHS that gives as good a service as the private sector, a restored NHS dentistry service (an aspiration that has been foolishly mocked in some quarters) and a higher education system that admits one in every two young people. These are extraordinarily ambitious goals, accompanied, moreover, by talk of solidarity, social justice, equality, even socialism - terms that, if not exactly banned, had begun to play a minor role in the Labour lexicon. Mr Blair has heeded warnings to pay more attention to his core supporters, and it would be churlish to deny it.

And it is clever politics, too. The vision that Mr Blair and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, outlined in Bournemouth is quite plainly one that cannot be achieved in a single term or even two terms. If you want full employment, an end to child poverty and an evens chance of a university place for your child - and who does not? - you must, it is implied, vote Labour over and over again. Indeed, the vision contains an in-built safeguard against short-term failure, even an admission that so far Labour has failed. As an ICM poll in the Observer showed last weekend, more than 40 per cent of voters think that Labour has broken its promises to improve state schools and reduce poverty, while more than half think it has failed to deliver on the health service and as many as two-thirds are disappointed by its performance on public transport. The implication of "we have only just begun", recited by several ministers at Bournemouth, is that henceforth the government should be judged not on results (as it initially demanded), but on its aspirations.

This, then, is a government that is perhaps not as confident as some commentators have suggested. And that may explain why Bournemouth was shorter on firm policy prescriptions than almost any party conference in recent memory. All Mr Blair had to offer was cut-price cinema tickets for 16 year olds, an announcement that risked the same degree of derision as John Major's cones hotline. The vision may be there, but it remains curiously disconnected from any evidence that ministers will be sufficiently bold in their actions. It is all very well for them to pat themselves on the back for Scottish and Welsh devolution, the abolition of hereditary voting rights, the national minimum wage, trade union recognition and so on. They deserve great credit for all these measures, which would certainly not have been implemented by the Tories, but they include nothing as breathtakingly original and far-reaching as Margaret Thatcher's sale of council houses or her privatisation programme or her marketisation of state schools.

Are ministers, for example, prepared to consider the inheritance tax that Julian Le Grand and David Nissan propose on page 25? Will they use the proceeds, as the authors further propose, to finance state gifts to every young person on his or her 18th birthday? Will they accept that, though the class war may be over, the hereditary curse on our educational system is still, as R H Tawney famously wrote, its organisation along lines of social class? And that this can only be ended if private schools lose their tax breaks and if the elite universities are compelled to discriminate in favour of state-school pupils? Such measures, unlike any that new Labour has taken so far, challenge entrenched power and privilege. Yet without such bold thinking it is hard to see how Mr Blair's equality of opportunity can be more than the meaningless platitude to which all postwar politicians have subscribed.

At Bournemouth, Mr Blair identified "conservative forces" as the enemy, implying that only a handful of huntsmen, earls and trade union leaders could frustrate his purpose, that his new, progressive Britain could be eagerly embraced by more or less anybody connected to the Internet. But if he is to achieve his dream, he will have to face harder and more determined enemies than any he has yet known. Only just begun? He hasn't really begun at all.

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