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Science and Technology

My Lords, I am a great fan of the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, and what I say is in no way a criticism of his excellent record as a Minister. However, all is not well with public attitudes towards science and technology. By that I mean the attitude of public bodies, including the Government. There are many favourable developments but I want to draw attention to those which are less so and give three examples. First, I follow the noble Lord, Lord Soulsby, and mention agricultural biotechnology. The Prime Minister made a speech in which he gave very strong support to the development of genetically modified crops. Shortly afterwards Defra agreed to license one particular GM crop. I then wrote an article saying that that was a rather brave act which I welcomed, and said how refreshing it was. How wrong I was because the licence was then surrounded by such impossible conditions that the company which was to grow the crop found it impossible to do so on a commercial basis. What Defra had done, not for the first time, was to face both ways—on the one hand to give nominal support to the Prime Minister and on the other hand to make sure that it did not offend Green activists. The result of this cowardice on the part of the Government—for which the Minister is in no way responsible because he is not allowed to take any part in discussions on GM—is that agrobusiness has left the United Kingdom. It is an enormously important business which is flourishing outside Europe. In Europe only Spain grows GM crops commercially, and grows them very successfully. Last year the amount of such crops under cultivation grew by 26 per cent. The total amount of GM crops under cultivation is now three times the total land mass of the United Kingdom. They are enormously successful in China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. The governments of India and Brazil initially opposed the idea of growing these crops but there was a farmers’ revolt. They obtained some illegal seeds and made it clear that they would continue to grow these crops and, if necessary, beg, borrow or steal the seeds. The governments caved in and now both the Brazilian and the Indian governments are enthusiastic supporters of the new technology. Within a few years China will undertake about half the total research into agricultural biotechnology carried out in the world. However, we are being left completely behind; that is a failure on the part of the Government. Secondly, I read the recent report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution on crop spraying and was astounded by its lack of scientific rigour. I then talked to a number of leading toxicologists who are appalled by the report. It starts by accepting that there is no evidence that crop spraying causes ill health. It forgets the lesson that evidence is not the plural of anecdote, because it then proceeds to rely on anecdote. It is recognised that psychological factors such as dread of harm can cause ill health but there are no laboratory-based criteria for the diagnosis of such an effect, yet the commission proposes that new animal models should be developed to test for such effects. So it wants us to develop a model for something that may not exist and for which there are no objective diagnostic criteria. In effect, the commission has based its report on asking for proof of safety. You cannot rule out the possibility of harm; you cannot prove safety. It is the old statement that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. If we had to prove that all food was safe we would all starve, because no food can be proved absolutely safe. It is a sloppy report. The irony is that if people are really worried about the effect of pesticides they should go for genetically-modified crops, because genetically-modified, pest-resistant crops can greatly reduce the amount of pesticide sprayed. My third example is mobile phones. The Stewart inquiry was set up in 1999, not on the basis of evidence that mobile phones caused harm but on the basis of anticipating public concern because the Sunday Times and other newspapers had said that mobile phones fry your brains. There was no evidence to that effect, and indeed the report did not find any, but it nevertheless recommended that small children should not use them very frequently. That advice was conspicuously ignored. There was evidence from the Netherlands and a mass of evidence from the United States, all of which showed a complete absence of any evidence of harm. In the mean time, the campaigns go on for local authorities to take health into account in the siting of phone masts. If there is no evidence of any harm from mobile phones, as the latest reports make clear—not in the first 10 years at any rate—phone masts hugely dilute the amount of radiation because of their distance from the ground, and there is even less risk from masts than from mobile phones. Such disregard for evidence is not atypical, because recently the Physical Agents Directive on Electromagnetic Fields was published, which was based on no evidence whatever. It poses considerable threats to MRI scans and will in fact do more harm than good because it means that more people have to rely on X-rays. Fortunately it is now in the safe hands of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, who seems to be taking a sensible approach; but why on earth did we not oppose the directive? No doubt because there was agitation by some of the Green activists, and we did not want to be seen to be opposing them. Earlier we had the phthalates directive nonsense. There was no scientific evidence for it. For years, babies have been chewing, without any harm whatever, plastic toys and objects which are now banned. It is all based on the precautionary principle that we should be better safe than sorry. There are 14 definitions of the principle and none of them is very illuminating, yet the Government continue to declare that it must be the basis of our policy. The principle is either so obvious that it is useless: ““if there is evidence of risk then be careful””. Of course, who could possibly disagree? But more generally the definition used for the principle is that when there is a threat of harm measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not established scientifically. That opens the way for press campaigns, for public fears, for those people who want to stop a technology that they do not like—who want to stop the world because they want to get off. There are many scare stories; almost one a day. We are told that we are swimming in seas of chemicals or we are being poisoned by pesticides—when in fact food has never been safer and we have never been healthier or lived longer. We need a rigorous approach to evidence. We need to counter the march of unreason, which poses a serious threat to science and technology in Britain.