It isn't friends that Mr Blair needs more of. It's enemies

'In the politics of competence, sooner or later the electors may decide to give the other lot a try'

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The Government this week set about tackling two sets of problems: the ones created by those who don't care about politics and the ones created by those who do. Yesterday the Labour chairman, Charles Clarke, took some careful steps towards opening up debate within the party – including the vexed issue of how to stop the fall in political engagement and voter turnout. On Tuesday, Tony Blair made a speech at the LSE which sought – in part – to convince his own sometimes restive supporters that Labour had higher aims than getting re-elected. Both moves were an attempt to allow political ideas to be heard above the white noise of Enron, Mittal and the Byers affair. Each could prove a somewhat more liberating experience for the left than is yet apparent.

In his speech, Mr Blair referred to the nostrum that "success in politics is not changing your own party; it's changing the opposition". That, after all, is what Margaret Thatcher helped to do, and what Labour is doing now. He might – though he didn't – have cited Michael Howard's recent remark that he had been wrong about the independence of the Bank of England. This was an astute move, carrying with it the rare but voter-friendly subtext that the best politicians are prepared to admit their mistakes. But it is also a reminder of the impressive speed with which Conservatives have accepted much of the Government's platform. Even on Europe, where the Tories are diametrically opposed to Labour, they have – deliberately – kept stumm.

That is a cause for some self-congratulation. But it also carries dangers, as the Prime Minister well knows. It took Labour three successive election defeats to accept the main Thatcher economic reforms it and the rest of the country now take as read. By continuously opposing her outright on all of them throughout the 1980s, Labour paradoxically helped to define her government, giving it a flinty image of ideological coherence even when, on occasions, the substance was lacking. This is not now happening to Labour.

There is good and bad Tory opposition. But what there isn't – despite one of the most right-wing Conservative leaderships in the party's history – is the kind of sustained ideological onslaught that Labour mounted, with heroic stubbornness, in the 1980s. Which is one reason why New Labour finds its task of self-definition much more difficult, including among its own supporters. In this sense it isn't friends that Mr Blair needs more of. It's enemies.

Along with this is the problem – recognised by Mr Blair in his speech – of looking managerial and technocratic. In a brand of politics in which competence becomes the only measure of success, and so the only issue, sooner or later the electors may simply decide to give the other lot a try. Unless the Government argues for – and demonstrates in practice – a set of values that differs from those of the alternative, it has no protection from losing voters just as a producer or retailer loses customers for no better reason than its rival's marketing is better.

The issue is how far Mr Blair succeeded in so arguing on Tuesday, especially to his own ranks. Well, he did, as even Roy Hattersley, one of his sternest critics, has acknowledged, make a – for him – pretty rare mention of the word equality. He was resolute in saying that, without investment, reform won't work and that new structures for the health service are useless without dealing with its chronic undercapacity. He didn't mention tax. But that may owe more to the sensitivity of the pre-Budget discussions he will be having with the Chancellor in the next few weeks than to some chronic aversion to mentioning the word. Everything in his body language suggests he believes the British public is ready for higher taxes as long as it senses that the money will be properly spent.

Much of the speech, it's true, was a fairly routine account of what New Labour types irritatingly describe as the Government's "narrative": that instead of being wasted, as some on the left believe, the first term created the fundamentals, notably in the economy, needed for a second-term programme a good deal more ambitious than he feels his critics allow: which consists of further engagement with Europe (by implication including entry into the euro) and transformation of public services. That will look a lot less impressive, of course, if the public service improvements are less tangible than the Government hopes; or if there is no euro referendum.

But that's not what most worries articulate critics such as Hattersley. More, it is what Blairites sometimes call social mobility and what they see as Mr Blair's adherence to the idea of meritocracy. This revives a half-century old debate; Michael Young, justly hallowed in the post-war history of the left as the author of the 1945 Labour manifesto and much more besides, coined the word as a pejorative term. He envisaged a kind of – repellent – Darwinian society in which the most intelligent and able rose effortlessly to the top and became a kind of hypereducated superclass that enjoyed all the privilege and power.

What the current revival of this argument misses, however, is what the idea of true social mobility in the 21st century entails, if ruthlessly applied. Mr Blair did implicitly acknowledge that some of Labour's goals were taking longer to realise than originally envisaged. But he did not go as far as David Miliband, the former head of his policy unit and now the MP for South Shields, who in a recent lecture spelled out some of the stark facts: "Despite nearly five years of Labour government, Britain –remains a country scarred by divisions of class... Relative social mobility – the chance of a son or daughter of a plumber becoming a doctor, relative to the chance of the son or daughter of a doctor being an accountant – has remained unchanged in 100 years. Last year, only 800 students across the whole of Britain from the bottom two social classes went to university. In South Tyneside, my borough, only 17 per cent of 18-year-olds went to university."

No believer in equality can regard that with equanimity. But that's not the only point. Mr Blair's emphasis on social mobility and equal opportunity sets an important benchmark against which he can be held to account, not least by his own party. It may raise some difficult questions in the medium to long term – for example whether class divisions in education can be broken down without some action on private schools, to which middle-class parents, especially in London and the South-east, are increasingly in flight. Or whether it is right to sustain a regime of inheritance tax that creates an uneven playing field between the children of the best-off and the rest. And so on.

This may form the basis of a much more creative argument within the left than the old one about meritocracy vs equality, which doesn't begin to engage the most electorally successful Labour prime minister in history. Not to make deep inroads into the inequalities described by Mr Miliband by the end of the second term would be a failure. There is a lot to chew on in the internal debate started by Charles Clarke yesterday.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk