The disbanding from next year of the UK Panel on Sustainable Development, chaired by Sir Crispin Tickell, is being seen by panel members and campaign groups as evidence of a down-grading of environmental priorities by Downing Street. Sir Crispin's panel has won few friends in Whitehall by embarrassing ministers earlier this year with a warning of the potential nutritional and ecological dangers of genetically modified crops. 

It has also criticised the European Union's involvement in overfishing the world's oceans and criticised "questionable assumptions" behind government forecasts that show the need to build 4.1 million new homes over the next 20 years.

 Environmental bodies see the panel's demotion as further evidence that Mr Blair is uncomfortable with "green" messages. They say he has been hostile to heaping further taxes on motorists and slow to comprehend the potential dangers of GM crops.

 This week Mr Blair faces criticism from the Fabian Society, Britain's oldest think-tank, which is affiliated to Labour, which publishes a pamphlet saying that the environment is clearly not part of the Labour "project".

 "New Labour is fundamentally hostile to green ideology, seeing it as anti-aspirational, anti-business and anti-poor, and most of all as anti-modern," says the author, Michael Jacobs, general secretary of the society.