TONY Blair's mini-manifesto revealed that, just as the Tories have now accepted, New Labour is indeed a changed party, not the old one in disguise.

For what is most striking about this package is how much of the old ideology-driven socialist baggage has been dumped.

There is hardly a word in the 40-page "New Labour, new life for Britain" booklet that would scare the voters - perhaps, least of all, the disgruntled Tory ones that Mr Blair seeks to charm.

But then, of course, if this is a much-sanitised form of socialism, cynically aimed at grabbing power, then it has to be.

For Labour's traditional redder policies - the bomb-banning, nationalising, picket-friendly, donkey-jacketed stuff that the modernisers have purged - cost the party four general election defeats in a row. The emphasis now is on pledges that are popular and targets that can be achieved without putting taxes up.

And on the first of those thrusts, few voters would quibble with the five key pledges in yesterday's package.

Labour aim to cut the sizes of classes for five to seven-year-olds, crack down on young offenders, slash NHS waiting lists and red tape, get young people off benefit and into work, and set tough rules for government spending and borrowing to strengthen the economy.

On the second thrust - the question of where the money will come from for these plans if taxes are not to rise - Mr Blair has answers ready, but leaves some doubts remaining.

Class sizes will be reduced by recycling funds from the phased-out assisted places scheme currently subsidising the fees of less well-off pupils in private schools. Hospital waiting lists will be cut with £100million saved through axing NHS desk jobs. And 250,000 under-25s will get jobs with money from windfall taxes on the privatised utilities.

But if primary class numbers are cut, might they only come down at a creep if the assisted places scheme - itself popular with working class voters who are ambitious for their bright sons and daughters - can only slowly be got rid of? As for treating more patients on the NHS, the promised war on management levels may, as this newspaper has already argued, not provide the funding - not least because the Tory health reforms which bloated bureaucracy are to remain essentially in place.

And on creating jobs for young people, how will that initiative prosper if the utility companies respond, as they should do to the threat of windfall taxes, by being less greedy and reducing their profits?

At best, Mr Blair might only reap a one-off kitty.

The Tories, no doubt, will seize on such apprehensions.

They will have to do this with a will because new-look Labour has, certainly from the tone of this manifesto, pulled off the trick - shamelessly, its old guard might say - of ditching its old tax and spend image and of setting reasonable and ostensibly affordable goals in place of the socialist dreams rejected time and again by the electorate.

If they are in any doubt of this they only have to look at the opinion polls.

Given this, the election campaign will get dirty and will intensify this summer as the prospect that we envisage of an autumn election looms larger.

And the Achilles' heels in this package at which Tory strategists may snap hardest - in addition to the doubts on Labour's costings - will be New Labour's havering on a single European currency, the threat to UK unity through devolution and what the price of a still-to-be-fixed minimum wage will be.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.