Tony Blair yesterday signalled a healthy and grown-up new relationship between Canterbury and Downing Street. Welcoming the arrival of Dr Rowan Williams as a potent intellectual and spiritual force, the Prime Minister as good as said that sometimes he would agree with the Archbishop, sometimes disagree, and sometimes conclude that the Primate of All England and Wales was talking a load of cobblers. He hinted that parts of Dr Williams’s Dimbleby Lecture given on the BBC last Wednesday fell into the last category.

Mr Blair is right. The Archbishop’s argument was all over the place. We should all rise to the Prime Minister’s challenge, listen to this restless and transparently good man, and tell him when he’s talking nonsense. Much of his Dimbleby Lecture made no sense at all. We must not, just because a man has a wild beard, place upon nonsense a weight it cannot bear, or invest in palpable non sequiturs a mystic significance.

The Primate’s logic fell into three parts. He maintained first that the shelter of the nation state is being torn away by global forces, leaving the individual exposed and insecure in an unprecedented way; secondly that we live in a new and market-driven age of individual greed; and thirdly that religion is needed to give moral anchor to politics in a fractured and grasping world.

The nation state is not being torn away. The citizen has never in history enjoyed a higher level of protection and shelter from government. Individuals are no greedier today than they ever were two, 20 or 200 decades ago. And there is no evidence that religious belief solves moral problems and some evidence that it causes them.

Let us examine each misconception. Dr Williams said we were living in a period “where the basic assumptions about how states work” are shifting. “The idea that’s being increasingly canvassed is that we are witnessing the end of the nation state, and that the nation state is being replaced in the economically developed world by what some call the market state.”

That the nation state is being blown away by the global market is a fashionable view for which there is no sound evidence. The delusion has three understandable causes. First, we in Europe are conscious that some functions previously exercised by our domestic governments are now in the hands of the European Union. But, whether you deplore or welcome this, federalisation is not globalisation: it is the agglomeration of small units into a larger state-like bloc — a bloc which could well retard the advance of free trade.

Certainly the size and shape of nations are changing; but though many existing nation states may feel threatened — from separatist nationalisms within or supra-nationalisms above — nationalism as a human force is alive and kicking; some would say too hard.

Secondly, we are uncomfortably aware of the emergence of a new imperial power. Unchallenged now or for the foreseeable future, the US is increasingly prone to throw its weight around, trampling over the sovereign rights of weaker nations. Again, you may welcome or deplore this but it is not the end of the nation state, it is the rise of one nation state at the expense of others. The sovereign equality of all states in international law was a recent, short-lived and artificial period, temporarily frozen by a few decades of stalemate between the US and the Soviet Union. The ice is cracking now. In the 19th century, when Britain was throwing her weight around, the world probably felt a bit like this.

Thirdly, now that currencies float and protectionism is out of fashion, we have the illusion of being newly exposed to global market forces. In fact most countries were always (ultimately) exposed, and the erection of capital controls, employment guarantees, fixed-rate exchanges and import tariffs amounted over time to sand walls against the tides. Until they were breached they did give protection. When they were breached the shocks were sometimes devastatingly sudden, bringing destitution and famine. It is true that in medieval times some countries were almost self-sufficient but that has not been true of our own for many centuries.

The second leg of Dr Williams’s argument therefore baffles me. “Where the job of those who ran the State was once seen as guaranteeing the general good of the community,” he says, “the State no longer has the power to keep its side of the bargain.”

I have no idea upon what the Archbishop bases this remark. More than at any time it now lies within the power of politicians to organise, structure and (as they may see it) improve the lives of citizens.

Dr Williams has been chosen as Archbishop by a Prime Minister who, with his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has spent much of the past six years tweaking at this, snipping at that, tugging here and shoving there. The only signal way in which we can be said to have lost a measure of state protection is in the lost value of our pensions, some of which can be attributed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s own raid on pension funds to pay for extra government.

The State has never been able to “guarantee the general good”. Nevertheless our state supports citizens more today than 50 years ago, more than a century ago, and more a century ago than two centuries ago. It can do this — and does — in ways which use the market. A free aspirin is a free aspirin, whether the State has bought it from Beechams or manufactured it itself.