This convert to the cause of pluralism should be provisionally welcomed

Something is going on at 10 Downing Street. A new tone is emanating from the centre, a demeanour of humility and a willingness to admit mistakes and to learn from them.

Above all, there is in Tony Blair's article, which we publish opposite, the promise to let go of previously hoarded power and to tolerate debate in the Labour Party. This is obviously part of a concerted attempt to reconnect the orbiting New Labour capsule with its home planet.

The new approach was evident in Mr Blair's series of interviews on Newsnight last week; in David Blunkett's apology to the police; in Alastair Campbell's recent admission that the Government had been too reliant on spin; and in Peter Mandelson's criticism of him for timidity in his first term.

As such, the initiative is in danger of being dismissed as just another expedient pose, another presentational device now that the old ones no longer seem to be working. There is bound to be an element of that. Mr Blair is a politician, after all, and a very good actor too. But if he says he will do the things this newspaper and others have urged on him for years, his expression of intent should at least be welcomed while we wait for tangible results.

His article is interesting not least because it abandons some of the more vacuous attempts to present New Labour values as new. More explicitly than before, he accepts that he is what most Labour leaders have always been, namely a pragmatic social democrat who wants to promote greater equality, both of economic circumstances and of personal dignity. That admission at last separates him ideologically from one part of the vast centrist coalition which he has tried to hold together for the past five years. His electoral reach has been reduced, but he gains compensating advantages both of clarity and of restoring some of his credibility with Labour's traditional base.

Less convincing, perhaps, is Mr Blair's conversion to the causes of devolution and pluralism. Although the Prime Minister does appear to have been persuaded to give up his doomed efforts to dictate the constitution of a reformed Upper House, there will be other tests of this new pluralism, such as whether he will let Ken Livingstone compete fairly to be the official Labour candidate for London mayor.

The central challenge for the second term, however, is a different form of letting go. It is whether reform of the public services means the genuine devolution of power to schools, local healthcare providers and their consumers. If the Prime Minister means what he says about letting schools pay more to attract and keep the teachers they need, that is an important step forward. On Newsnight, too, Mr Blair made much of the fact that three-quarters of NHS spending will be devolved to primary care trusts led by GPs, although he could not quite bring himself to say that he did not and should not know what would happen when they could decide how to spend it.

The Government has reached the equivalent of the Conservatives' Next Moves Forward in 1986, the point at which Margaret Thatcher restored a sense of direction to her government and her party. There are even signs that Mr Blair has reached a new concordat with his neighbour at No 11. If that makes a referendum on the euro more likely next year, so much the better.

Mr Blair's greater clarity about his values, combined with the recognition that he alone cannot deliver them from the centre, ought to be welcomed – with scepticism but not with cynicism.