New Year and the flying prime minister falls back to earth in Westminster. Now in the cold grey light of dismal January, Labour's second term begins in earnest. A tottering in-tray awaits, with transport at the top, the NHS just beneath and a score of pressing questions awaiting answers. As he examines the pile of paper, where is his route map through it all? What is his guiding principle? The old answer, what works, does not take him far when high profile bits of it are patently not working well.  As the fog starts to clear, however, some new governing principles emerge, at the instigation and certainly with the approval of the prime minister himself. Rumblings of change are in the air. To left-of-centre critics Tony Blair used to say, tapping the side of his nose, "Wait for the second term. Mrs Thatcher didn't discover Thatcherism until well into hers." But disappointingly, the first months after a lack-lustre election ambled along in directionless confusion, saved only by September 11. It is since then that there have been startling changes of direction.   Somewhere on his desk Tony Blair will come across Where Now for New Labour? by Anthony Giddens (published this week by the Fabians, the Policy Network and Polity Press). He will find it interesting reading, not because it gives him the answer to the question it poses. Quite the contrary. Inadvertently, it shows how far the government has   already travelled since 1997. Five years is a very long time in politics. The world has moved on since the heyday of the third way, but its progenitor, Professor Giddens, is now urging Blair to slam on the brakes.   Giddens was a founding father of New Labour: his 1994 book Beyond Left and Right shaped the third way path to victory. Drawing on Clinton's triumphant rebranding of the Democrats, he erected Tony Blair's big tent, stealing the Conservatives' prime turf. The third way was a beacon for left-of-centre parties around Europe. All had similar baggage to shed - heavy-handed statism, trade union producer interests and inflexibility in the face of new problems. The third way was a magic carpet for transporting the left into power: not tax and spend, not soft on crime, not hostile to business. It buried old ghosts and Giddens deserves much of the credit. It generated wide support, but its neutral message never struck deep roots.   Now Giddens is warning against any departure from those original winning mantras - most of all on tax and spend. He attacks Gordon Brown's plans to raise tax to pay for public services. Denouncing "the myth of taxation", he describes how more money flows into the Treasury through the fruits of high employment and economic success than through raising tax rates. Raising rates to 50% for those earning over 100,000 would only bring in 3bn (actually a considerable sum). He points out that the top 1% of   earners already contribute 20% of all income tax - an interesting fact.   But stop and contemplate what it really reveals: the rich are not taxed through the nose, but they earn staggering sums of money compared to the rest. This thought, though, is illegitimate in third way thinking. Third wayers are never jealous of success. Third wayers believe in equality of opportunity: redistribution is only to pull the very poorest over the poverty threshold.    Giddens's vision of a successful economy relies on large numbers in minimum wage jobs. Britain's employment record is better than most of Europe because of easy access to flexible, low-paid work. He does say that there needs to be more in-work training to help these people up ladders (currently few ever climb out of marginal work). True, people are better off in work but while a third of people, in and out of work, live beneath what most people regard as a decent standard of living, that does require any social democrat to consider the depth of British inequality.   Somewhere at the heart of the third way was a fundamental unwillingness to face   this unpalatable fact. While Giddens rightly attacks the old left for its mindless refusal to give the government credit for anything, he is himself too dismissive of other European countries' social polices that deliver fairer societies.   Third way orthodoxy does not address an electorate now less tax-phobic than angry about public services. But Giddens sees the voter as an immutable beast: everything "must fall within the bounds of what is electorally feasible" as if leaders never shift the political climate. Yet those who voted for Thatcherism in election after election are not the same people who voted Blair back last year: people change, reacting to past errors, pursuing new goals. When Mrs Thatcher in her first budget cut top rates of income tax by a swingeing 38%, she knew the power of political symbolism. Sending out strong signals and sweeping the people along in her train, she changed the national mood in ways third wayers never dared try.   That is why the third way is history. The government is daring to try. Third way bounds are everywhere being burst at last as Labour begins to believe in the reality of its own power. The tax taboo is broken, cannabis decriminalised, student fees rethought, gross fat cat salaries at least a little checked by shareholder votes, art galleries and museums free, Railtrack turned into a non-profit company, asylum seekers vouchers rescinded.   None of these is an act of outrageous radicalism but all were once so unthinkable   that any minister whispering the words was forced to humiliating public apology. The ice is cracking and in the thaw ministers are starting to think for themselves. Those who do so most, like Charles Clarke, are emerging as the winners over clones still mouthing dead mantras. Originality pays because ministers need to think aloud about serious problems.   What is the emerging story? Good government was what New Labour promised, non-ideological, technocratic, what works. That is developing now into something more coherent: government is good. To make the case for higher taxes and better services, that key idea needs to lead the way. The market delivers prosperity best, the voluntary sector can refresh and inspire around the margins, but in the end the goods that only government can deliver are what everyone wants now. Well-managed and efficient, always room for improvement, public service is indispensable and precious. These are still only the green shoots of an ideology that profoundly divides right from left - but once it was a third way taboo.   So as the PM ploughs through his in-tray he has an emerging progressive idea for the next decisions he must take. The third way was Bill Clinton's emblem - an election winner that left a tragically empty legacy: there is no "Clintonism". Blairism already deserves a place in the dictionary for his global vision: now he has to establish its meaning at home.