Or will he distance himself from Mr Prescott's call for a reassertion of Old Labour values?
The "Old Labour" figure of Frank Dobson, for example, has proved very effective at Health.
This is unlike Old Labour's approach, which preferred to leave such matters to the government.
The Old Labour way was to put all its faith in public services and public-sector unions.
The policies pursued by that government are ones guaranteed to appeal to many traditional "old Labour" supporters.
Old Labour members of Mr Blair's party will blanch at such open courting of the Lib Dems.
But as an Old Labour stalwart, Mr Prescott helped to maintain links between the party leadership and membership.
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New Labour licensed Mr Field to think the unthinkable about reforming the welfare state Old Labour had invented.
Just as its economic beliefs were fundamental to Old Labour, so its constitutional beliefs are fundamental to Old Conservative.
If the new mayor has real power, old Labour politicians will see him as a Blairite threat to their fiefs.
New Labour (if the economy plays along) can be judged more prudent than old Labour, but not much more imaginative.
At last year's general election New Labour reached parts of suburban London which old Labour had been unable to get to.
Services in what used to be two of the staunchest of old Labour boroughs, Islington and Hackney, have already been partially privatised.
Britain's 18-month-old Labour government lost its first cabinet minister to a scandal.
One of the differences between New and Old Labour was supposed to be that Mr Byers and his colleagues had made peace with the market.
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Or have I become Old Labour? 10 years ago, if you had asked me to put environmental obligations on business, I would have been horrified.
In the National Health Service, the government has resisted the Old Labour approach of caring only about the volume of spending rather than its efficiency.
Mr Brown is more prone to use Old Labour language, to criticise fat cats, to support redistribution and portray public spending as a good thing in itself.
New Labour, if not old Labour, has got over its historic antagonism to private-sector involvement in education, and several recent government-sponsored initiatives rely heavily on private-sector investment to succeed.
In the 1980s the tabloids were the scourge of Old Labour and it was the left-wing broadsheets, in particular the Guardian and the Observer, who stuck with the party.
Old Labour supporters, who never signed up to his vision of a "third way", independent of unreconstructed socialism and old-fashioned capitalism, saw an opportunity to make one last stand.
The first derives from what was once a basic New Labour insight: that, beneath the current bitterness, Britain is a more aspirational, capitalist country than old Labour gave it credit for.
Mr Blair needs to clean up the mess in Paisley fast, or risk seeing the new Labour flagship of Scottish devolution holed by Old Labour even before it has left the slipway.
Labour may not do anything like this well nationally on May 6th because many voters now clearly distinguish between Mr Blair's shiny New Labour government and the Old Labour hacks who run many local councils.
Imagine what the old Labour party would have said had a Tory government proposed contracting a third of NHS operations to private firms. but this evening I want to analyse the second revolution in more detail.
Moreover, at some point, he could lose patience with the remnant of the Old Labour left and expel them from the ranks, in which case he might need the Lib Dems to make up the numbers.
In a nod towards old Labour, the first thing New Labour did in power was to abolish the Tories' assisted-places scheme, which enabled brighter pupils from poorer backgrounds to take up state-funded places at the top public schools.
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