Tony Blair ought to be hugging himself with delight. The events of Budget week (putting aside the mild embarrassment they may have occasioned by confirming that Gordon Brown really runs the country) immensely enhanced the prime minister's reputation among people who once doubted his intellectual capacity to steer a steady political course. Indeed, the whole health service package - the way the money will be spent as well as raised - came very near to vindicating his theory of government. Last week, the third way arrived in Whitehall. Like the idea or not, critics can no longer dismiss it as a name looking for a theory to which it can attach itself.  On Wednesday morning, the front pages of the Tory newspapers read like the lurid bits in the Book of Revelation. The great beast - better known as old Labour - had risen out of the earth and the Two Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse, Tax and Spend, were galloping through suburban England. But by Thursday, there was a new heaven and a new earth. The same newspapers announced that the health service reforms - on which the increased national insurance contributions were to be spent - replicated Tory plans to bring the discipline of the market into the provision of medical care. The Blair philosophy is to mix and hope that there is a match.   I remain entirely sceptical about the possibility of the health service crisis being resolved by a free enterprise solution. It costs more to build a hospital by the private finance initiative than it does to pay for it out of public funds and the quality of service usually deteriorates when entrepreneurs replace public servants. The idea that by "introducing the market into state monopolies", risk is transferred from government to private companies is a myth. A hospital could not be allowed to go bankrupt and out of business. The rigours of competition will not make surgeons perform appendicectomies more quickly.   None of those objections to "privatising the health service" is ideological. They are all an accountant's complaints. John Redwood (not a doctrinal socialist) will forgive me for repeating a comment he made to me after we appeared together on Question Time. The private sector had, he said, "taken the government for a ride" by pretending it would accept the risks of involvement in public services. It would accept the profits and claim compensation for the losses. Perhaps the prime minister was initially happy to be conned. The arrangement allowed him to point to his partnership with business as proof that he was truly New Labour. But you do not have to be old Labour to object to the government throwing money away.    The only item of old Labour ideology that really matters is the commitment to greater equality. The budget, the biggest overt redistribution of income for 20 years, proclaimed as well as implemented that principle. The debate about how the money is spent ought to be more practical than philosophic. If private enterprise can make an egalitarian health service more efficient, its involvement should be welcomed. If it cannot, it must be rejected.   The examination of the Blair government's record has been profoundly prejudiced by the notion that its critics are filled by a nostalgia for what used to be. And the artificial division between old and new has been exploited by a prime minister who recognised the electoral appeal of a fresh start. The budget was right because it redistributed the nation's income - an objective associated with past Labour governments more as a result of what they preached than as a consequence of what they practised. The health service reforms may be a mistake not because they are, in Labour terms, an innovation, but because they seem unlikely to achieve their stated objective.   Foolishly, critics of privatisation have allowed themselves to be represented as public enterprise Bourbons, who have forgotten how dissatisfied we all were with the monolithic state-owned utilities. When prominent members of the present cabinet were arguing for the nationalisation of 100, or was it 1,000, commanding heights of the economy, I was doing my best to prevent the government wasting its money on acquiring the shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Public versus private ought to be a question of judgment, not faith.   Yet anyone who questions the transcendental efficiency of private enterprise is caricatured as a Stalinist obsessed with state control. It is the supporters of the "project" who are addicted to an unreasonable theory. They believe, despite all the evidence, that private enterprise can solve all the public sector's problems. There are legitimate reservations about the proposed health reforms that are purely pragmatic. But they will be described as doctrinaire because they are advanced by pragmatists who are labelled old rather than New Labour. If there is to be a sensible debate on these subjects, there needs to be an end to adjectives.