Downs is Dangerous
by Christopher Booker

Listeners to the BBC's You and Yours on Thursday might have been surprised to hear an interview with Georgina Downs, a pesticides campaigner, from the venue where the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution had just launched its report on the dangers to health of toxic chemicals sprayed on fields. Twice, after noises off, Miss Downs was forced to stop, with strangled cries that the Royal Commission was demanding that she get off the telephone.

That this report appeared at all was a tribute to the pressure Miss Downs, a 32-year-old former singer, has brought on ministers, for four years, on behalf of all those who, like herself and her family, have suffered severe health problems after exposure to spraying of nearby farmland. So forcefully did she pursue her campaign, as frequently reported in this column, that last summer Alun Michael, the minister for rural affairs, agreed to ask the commission to investigate.

Although its report does make nominal concessions to her case - as in admitting it is "not implausible" that there might be a connection between ill-health and exposure to toxic chemicals - the fact is that Miss Downs has run into that familiar brick wall which successive governments have built round pesticides, ever since ministers learned in 1992 that the health of thousands of farmers had been ruined by the use of organo-phosphorus sheep dips.

The trouble is that, since all pesticides are licensed by the Government itself as safe to use, the Government cannot afford to admit that it is responsible for a massive public health disaster.

The licensing agencies, such as the Pesticides Safety Directorate, are happy to emphasise how dangerous these products are to those who use them, insisting on every kind of safety precaution. But when something goes wrong, as with all those hapless victims represented by Miss Downs, officialdom moves into implacable denial mode. To admit otherwise would make it liable for the fact that its regime has failed.

The most vital thing of all, as borne out yet again by the Royal Commission report, is to ensure that no serious study is ever made of the connection between pesticide exposure and damage to health. Report after report can thus come out dismissing all evidence of damage as "anecdotal", while making sure that no one is ever allowed to put it to proper scientific test.

For what she has achieved with her campaign, Miss Downs is a heroine of our time. But like other campaigners before her, such as the redoubtable Countess of Mar, she has run into one of the most ruthless conspiracies of silence in modern government.
The Sunday Telegraph, 25th September 2005