The Differences Between Brown and Blair Are Wafer Thin

So that's it, is it? Knuckles soundly rapped by backbenchers on Monday night, Labour's two warring giants sheath their swords, yet again, and knuckle down to getting re-elected. That is what Labour MPs, party and voters want, as well as countless readers emailing to say please, not one more word on who said what when. After all, nothing - absolutely nothing - is going to happen. Tony will not sack Gordon. Gordon will not challenge Tony. Even after the election, no change is still odds-on favourite.

In the last few days, ringing round key local councillors and influential backbenchers, the anger and regret runs deep. These two mighty architects of Labour's historic success - not just winning elections but making real change on the ground - are endangering the future. It grows increasingly difficult to stand on neutral ground, but it is where most Labour members, councillors, MPs and even ministers stand, while having to navigate this central dysfunction in getting their business done. Get on with it! Oh, for God's sake!

So who's to blame - and what (little) of substance divides them? Tony Blair has behaved exceedingly badly and -worse - stupidly towards Gordon Brown. In doing so he infuriates the large part of the party that wants peace. Why be so pointlessly provocative? Magnanimity in leaders only adds to their glory. It was not necessary to put Alan Milburn in overall charge. Milburn is showing good organisational talent, according to councillors already receiving far more structured, locally usable campaign materials than ever before. But Blair should have ensured Brown a key role in the manifesto, not just to soothe the savage breast but because he is the most trusted (at the moment).

Why does Blair deliberately stir up ideological unease among his own, with touchstone words meaningless to the general voter that light the blue touch-paper to many in Labour? He threatens to be "unremittingly New Labour" (reviving the New that had happily slipped from usage). On Frost he warned he would press on with a "market-based NHS" and "independent state schools", but few inside Labour like either the language or substance implied. Brownites are right to protest that such talk simply triangulates away public understanding of Labour's essence, blurring the difference with the Tories. Blair, they say, should stop all that right now and divest himself of damaging advisers who urge him on.

Milburn has promised that the manifesto will have social justice first and last, with children's chances at the heart of it. So which will it be? Marketising or social justice? And don't say both. Even if using the private sector to increase a bit of NHS capacity helps towards social justice, it isn't a political ideal.

But Brown deserves as much blame. His perpetual coded claims to be old Labour's soul, destructively push Blair further along his "market" line as both riposte and counter-balance. Brown is entirely right about Labour's need to use the language of social democracy, but there is thin evidence that Labour's trajectory would have been so different under him. He is every bit as cautiously pragmatic as Blair: it may or may not have been necessary to have his damaging two-year spending freeze; private finance initiatives (PFIs) may have delivered a lot of new buildings fast - but the tube public-private partnership delayed improvements by years; and Brown may despise Blair's triangulations, but his own slashing of the civil service plays the same game, with the Tory James review (out soon) competing to cut even deeper than Brown's 80,000. It makes for a joint Labour/Tory message that bureaucrats are a waste of space and public servants are rubbish. An outsourcer who prefers vouchers for childcare, Brown is as suspicious as Blair of large public workforces: hear his homilies to Europe. His fascination with US gurus makes that inevitable.

The irony is this chalk-and-cheese pair are closer in their politics than in anything else. When Blair made that astonishing promise to abolish child poverty, it was all his own work, forcing him to redistribute more every year if he himself wants to keep the figures on target. Disputes over tax credits between Nos 10 and 11 have not really been about redistribution but about how to do it. Blair knows he is dead in the water if his child poverty figures ever slip back. Brown is right that poverty can't be abolished without preparing the voters for a more radical shift - but he is equally reluctant to talk about the necessary reform in gross pay differentials.

Another truth: in a third term, all failings will be firmly Labour's own. A lot of maimed Labour chickens are on their way home to roost - on Gordon's windowsill as well as next door.

On Blair's side, the plan for a full NHS market where money follows patients Thatcher-style has had to be postponed already (don't say abandoned - yet) as some hospitals learn to fiddle the system, others plunge into unexpected debt, and few primary care trusts are capable of complex commissioning. As for "independent" state schools, no one has explained how floating them free of local authorities will deliver the "extended schools" Blair also promised. He says extended schools will offer "wraparound" all-day care with one-stop social services, health services, training for parents, benefits and employment help. Wonderful - but that takes integrated, joined-up local services, while "independence" runs in precisely the opposite direction.

Among Brown's chickens are his PFIs. Take just one council I spoke to this week. In Brighton and Hove, an expensive new PFI school needs to close after two years, suffering a sudden drop in pupil numbers. But the 25-year contract remains. A local FE college would take over the site - but not with high contract rates for all building, cleaning and maintenance fixed far ahead. So the council has to pay off the contract - made with the now struggling Jarvis and sold on to some investment firm. Nearby, a popular PFI school discovers it cannot build to expand because all the work has to be done by the PFI owner at any price it fixes. A PFI library down the road finds that for the next 25 years it can't open for longer hours without paying a penalty, because it wasn't in the contract. All this in just one authority, which says it will never use PFI again.

Instinctively Brown feels to the left of Blair. Probably true, but not by much. These two are the joint architects of Labour's extraordinary success and are responsible for all manner of "New" Labour policies that seemed necessary at the time. Most people I spoke to want and expect Brown to inherit. But, they say, he'll have to remind them he can grit his teeth and work with those he hates: that's what leadership takes. And Blair needs reminding of that too.