If Sir Donald Acheson had been called on to write Labour's election manifesto before the 1997 campaign, it is certain that prime minister Tony Blair would have fought on a more radical and redistributive - perhaps even socialist - platform than anything put forward by his party for many years (See News, page 8-9; News Focus, page 13-14). Whether or not he would still have been elected, of course, remains a different question.

But did Sir Donald go far enough? He is clear that task was a scientific one and his conclusions based on ethical rather than political considerations. Questions of resources, he said, were for politicians, not scientists. But the reaction of the critics is that the vagueness of many of his proposals, the lack of firm targets for increasing benefits in particular, and the absence of any recommendations at all about reforming taxes to help tackle wealth and consequently health inequalities render the report if not pointless then at least toothless. They have a point.

Certainly, the logic of the report is inescapable. It addresses the right issues, runs through the proper arguments and comes so close to drawing the starkly obvious conclusions that only a careful and healthily sceptical reading reveals it does not in fact say what many will take it to say. Sir Donald and his team had the chance to create a touchstone against which the government's commitment to tackling inequality could be judged, but, unlike his distinguised predecessor Sir Douglas Black a generation ago, did not do so.

Of course, the Black Report and the Acheson Report were launched into very different worlds. The new Conservative government of Mrs Thatcher did its best to suppress the former, reluctantly distributing a mere handful of cheaply produced copies with a dismissive foreword by then social services secretary Patrick Jenkin, and denying it what would later come to be called the oxygen of publicity. Health secretary Frank Dobson, by contrast, raves enthusiastically about the government's commitment and determination to act - and you just know that he means it. He will fight hard in Cabinet to deliver what he knows to be the right policies, willing not just the ends but the means to deliver them.

The problem is all too obvious. The programme of economic and social reform implied by the Acheson report is so sweeping and all-encompassing that it will scare the life out of many other members of the government. It is a problem Labour faced for years in opposition: put forward a radical programme and be rejected, or promise more moderate reform and risk failing to make an impact. In its failure to be more specific, the Acheson Report may just have given the fainthearts an escape route - that of radical talking and cautious reform.