George Pitcher

In the springs of both 1997 and 2003, social, political and religious liberals were glad to be alive and rejoiced that authoritarianism and bigotry were on the back foot again and looked with hopes renewed for new dawns of tolerance, freedom and progress. Those hopes have very largely been dashed.

Tony Blair has the worse track record, his neo-conservatism posing as social democracy, running an Animal Farm on which two conservative legs are good and four socialist legs bad. But then he's been at it longer than the Archbishop. For the record, a selection of "Labour" reforms since 1997 consists of a law and order agenda that has witnessed the slapping of Asbos on unborn babies, on-the-spot cash fines for youthful offenders, an abolition of the principle of double jeopardy, an attack on the ancient rights of Habeus Corpus through detention without trial and a full scale assault on trial-by-jury.

Social welfare has been restrictively reformed and the Human Rights Act dismantled. Freedom of speech has been restricted under the guise of incitement to religious hatred. Asylum laws have been tightened, compulsory identity cards for all adults been touted and peaceful protest banned from Parliament Square. An octogenarian has been ejected from the Labour conference for heckling Jack Straw and held under anti-terrorist measures and a woman arrested for wearing a T-shirt disrespectful to Blair. Fox-hunting has been banned and there are now 3,000 more offences on the statute book than there were in 1997 - it is illegal, for example, to sell a grey squirrel.

But the shining light of Blair's warrior, neo-con mentality must be the coat-tailing of George Bush's Republicans into the illegal and disastrous misadventure in Iraq, destroying hundreds of thousands of lives in a bid, at best, to secure a working relationship with the most powerful regime on earth and, at worst, to win the kind of jingoist, popular support that Margaret Thatcher enjoyed after the Falklands War.

Many people may support some, if not all, of these initiatives. But it's not what liberals had in mind when they voted for Blair. These liberal voters exacted their revenge on Blair's government at the last election; they are also doing so by holding him to his promise to leave soon and may well deliver the coup de grace by defeating his successor, with the assistance of David Cameron's lib-cons (another party in disguise), at the next general election.

But there is a terrible sense of lost opportunity - so much could have been achieved with Blair's first impenetrable parliamentary majority; so little has been. Similarly, there is so much that Rowan Williams could do as Archbishop of Canterbury. His record is anything but as reactionary as Blair's - he has stood up to the Iraq hawks and spoken out for the vulnerable and oppressed that the PM may not even know are there - but there is a prevailing sense of liberal disappointment just the same.

In the early days of three years ago, his liberal fans supposed there was wisdom in his persuasion of Canon Jeffrey John to step down from his appointment as Bishop of Reading in the face of anti-homosexual Church sentiment. It was supposed that it was a bishopric too far - too early to start the fight for sexual equality and tolerance, but that in the coming war John's sacrifice could be pointed to as the kind of compromise that should now be expected of the conservative wings of the Church.

Williams, however, has swung to the right on matters of sexuality, suggesting that those who don't accept orthodoxy on the subject are quitting the communion and distancing himself from the consecration of the first openly gay bishop in America. On gender he has pussy-footed around the issue of women's episcopacy. The rest is silence - Williams has taken a low profile on a range of issues of the day, letting it be known that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not so much a leader as a convenor and that God will find a way for the church, not him.

Disappointing, but there's time. A new Secretary for Public Affairs at Lambeth Palace, Tim Livesey from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, should grasp nettles. And what can the Archbishop learn from Blair's decade in the hot seat? Most answers are irrelevant, because Williams is a very different animal. He is not a politician. He is not interested in power and its maintenance, or the ego trip to which so many political leaders succumb. He is consensual and committed to unity and to one nation and one world under God.

But there is one thing Williams could usefully learn from the Blair years as he faces the bulk of his Canterbury years ahead: It is not consensual, nor unifying, nor even satisfactory to pay career lip service to liberalism, while sucking up to conservatives.