Read the speech in full on Ruth Gledhill's blog

The Archbishop of York has launched a powerful attack on the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, accusing it of sacrificing liberty for misguided notions of equality.

In a speech this evening to leaders of Britain’s Jewish community in London, Dr Sentamu accused Labour of betraying its decade-old mantra of “rights and responsibilities.”

The Archbishop said: “Unfortunately the impact of a rapacious consumerist appetite upon this mantra has led to the situation where seemingly unfettered rights and entitlements have come to the fore whilst responsibility has not simply gone out of fashion but seems to have fallen off the radar.

“The language of social justice may ring out in the phraseology of policy makers but it is a hollow call if at the same time our duties to one another, our responsibility to care for and look out for one another is lost.”

The Archbishop was speaking at a dinner organised by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research on the role of religion in politics.

Although the Archbishop, who was a high court judge before fleeing Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda in the 1970s, did not specify any particular legslation, he is understood to have had Britain’s anti-terror laws in mind as one concern. He has previously condemned 90-day detention laws as on a par with the approach of Amin.

Defending his right as a religious leader to intervene in political debate, he said: “Our current Government is in danger of sacrificing Liberty in favour of an abused form of equality – not a meaningful equality that enables the excluded to be brought into society, but rather an equality based on dictat and bureaucracy, which overreaches into the realm of personal conscience.”

He accused the Government of “petty-mindedness” and warned that human rights without a reference to God or the divine were left lacking essential safeguards.

“Our society needs once more to rediscover the compassion and service at the heart of religion,” he said.

He also warned that eliminating religion from the public sphere would mean it was simply replaced by unbridled consumerism.

“If this is the direction which will shape our politics moral responsibility will be displaced not by reason, science or ethics but by sheer consumerism,” he said.

“The moral imperative of doing the right thing is in danger of being replaced by the consumerist imperative to buy the right thing.”

Dr Sentamu acknowledged that organised religion could itself be an instrument for good or great evil.

Apologising for the crimes of the Christian religion against Judaism, he cited as an example the massacre of the terrified Jewish citizens of York in the city’s Clifford Tower in 1190.

“I belong to a religious tradition which, at times, has organised Crusades and Inquisitions, treating Jews as less than human,” he said. “For me, as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, I am sorry and deeply ashamed. And especially over the Holocaust: where God was violated and blasphemed. Lord have mercy.”

But he said the eradication of religion was not the answer.

“We only have to look to the Third Reich, the former Soviet Union and the present regimes of North Korea and Burma to consider that a society without religion rapidly loses faith in humanity.”