New Labour's hostility to history and the past has put the country's cultural heritage in peril, warns a former art minister.

Stoke MP, Mark Fisher told BBC Online that Tony Blair's obsession with "popular music, youth culture and new technologies" was in danger of sidelining the great museums and high culture.

"The government seems to be of the opinion that the past is a place of mistakes, and that to characterise the government as being forward-looking, they do not want to be associated with the past," he said.

"You can carry this too far - there's a great deal we can learn from the past and at the moment the government does not seem to be interested in history."

Speaking at an Institute of Ideas seminar on Monday, Fisher will highlight concerns that an emphasis on "art created for and by young people" poses a threat to world-beating museum collections.

"The government has abolished the Museums and Galleries Commission and replaced it with an organisation called Re:Source, which looks after museums and libraries.

"The whole thrust of Re:Source's concerns and interests is in new technologies and access and education.

"The emphasis they are giving to collections and scholarship and curatorial skills - the things that make the collections of museums and galleries particularly fine - is diminished, given a lesser priority," he said.

Fisher called on the government to resist being a follower of fashion and develop a "balanced" approach to culture.

"This may be part of the zeitgeist, but the role of a government is to lead and not necessarily to follow. A wise society would do well to adopt a more balanced approach.

"The mistake is to give the impression that the future has no roots, that the future starts today - when the future starts in our past," he told the website.