TONY
BLAIR has sacked his panel of independent green advisers and is considering
replacing them with a body that no longer reports directly to him.
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.