Secrecy

Research that conflicts with the interests of industry or which, if made public, would cast government policy in a poor light is frequently kept secret. This is often achieved by pleading the Official Secrets Act. Maurice Frankel deals with this whole issue and the vital need for a Freedom of Information Act - in some detail. [36]

Other authors give examples of how secrecy has prevented the public from knowing the real dangers it runs from exposure to specific pollutants:

• Angela Singer shows how a key Department of Health report on asbestos was kept secret for no less than eight years. 'When the BBC television programme, Nationwide, wanted a copy ... it had to be obtained in the USA under the US Freedom of Information Act.' [37]
• Brian Price notes how Sir Henry Yellowlees, Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health, wrote a letter in which he stated that 'the simplest and quickest way of reducing general population exposure to lead is by reducing sharply or by entirely eliminating lead in petrol.' This letter, however, was not made public until it was eventually leaked to CLEAR, the Campaign for Lead Free Air. [38]
• Secrecy also prevents the public from knowing anything about the chemical additives in processed foods. As Erik Millstone points out: "all the deliberations of the Food Advisory Committee of MAFF, as well as all the technical data on which its gives its advice to ministers, are covered by the Official Secrets Act." [39]
• So too, secrecy prevents us from knowing anything about the pesticides used to grow the food we eat, and hence about the pesticide residues which we inevitably consume. As Chris Rose notes, MAFF "insists that pesticide safety and environmental clearance data should be kept secret". [40]

Such secrecy over the health effects of pollutants is particularly irresponsible. Serious and objective students of carcinogenesis are agreed that somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of human cancers are caused by exposure to radiation, or by the chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe. This is certainly the position of Professor Samuel Epstein - one of the leading authorities on the subject in the USA.

Alan Irwin and Doogie Russell, though not venturing a figure themselves, point to research sponsored by the trade unions which shows that up to 30 percent of cancers are caused in the work place by exposure to such pollutants as asbestos, 2,4,5-T, vinyl chloride, benzene, BCME, low-level radiation and aromatic amines - all of which are well-documented carcinogens. [41]

The chemical industry and the scientists whom it employs either directly or indirectly insist that industrial pollutants are not a major cause of cancer. Instead, they blame the majority of cancers on viruses, smoking and the consumption of alcohol and animal fats. At most, industry tells us, chemicals in the workplace cause 5 percent of cancers. But even if this figure were true, it would mean, as Allan Irwin and Doogie Russell note, that about 7,000 people are dying of cancer every year as a result of occupational exposure to carcinogens. [42] If Epstein is right, then the real figure is far higher - between 70,000 and 112,000 every year.

How can we possibly justify having hidden from so many people information which, if it had been acted upon, could have prevented them from dying a slow and painful death?

If we are to reverse the rising tide of cancer deaths in Britain, there is only one possible course open to us. As Irwin and Russell argue, our first priority must be to tackle carcinogenic substances in the environment. [43] To do this we must counteract "the secrecy and the complacency that has characterised the state's approach to regulation" and indeed oppose "the powerful lobbies in this country which act against good health". We can no longer tolerate the stonewalling and secrecy of government and industry on this vital issue - and it is up to the environmental movement to make this clear.

Misleading the public

Today, much of the information supplied by government and industry on key environmental issues is designed to rationalise current practices and policies. To that end, numerous public statements have been made which can only be described as purposefully misleading.

Alice Coleman, for example, considers that the land-use surveys provided by the civil service were designed, "consciously or unconsciously", to conceal information rather than reveal it. [44] This, she says, may reflect the fact that the department responsible for advising on land-use policies (the Department of the Environment) also designs the surveys that might expose the adverse consequences of its advice. Elsewhere she refers to the official land-use surveys as "smokescreens of disinformation".

Likewise, the CEGB is shamelessly cooking the books in order to suggest that nuclear power stations are more economic than coal-fired ones. The Board has resorted to every possible accounting trick in order to delude the public on that score. Even the House of Commons Select Committee on Energy has concluded that "the method used by the CEGB to justify past investments in Nuclear Power is highly misleading as guide to past investment decisions" and "entirely useless for appraising future ones". [45]

The National Radiological Protection Board is also misleading the public when it states that "no overriding reason connected with radiological protection considerations has been identified which would preclude the disposal of suitably conditioned high-level waste on the ocean floor."

The NRPB knows that there is no commercially obtainable material that can contain high-level wastes for the tens of thousands of years (in some cases hundreds of thousands) during which they are potentially dangerous. Certainly the stainless steel drums in which the wastes are normally encased are quite inadequate to the task in hand - not least because they will be corroded by the action of the salt water in a matter of decades. The NRPB also knows that it is impossible to predict the movement of radionuclides on the ocean floor, especially if one considers that violent storms are known to occur in the ocean's depths which could transport them just about anywhere.

Besides, the Board's reassurances are based on the assumption that radionuclides are diluted in the sea water - "the myth of dilution", as Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University refers to it. In reality, radionuclides tend to concentrate in specific organisms, organs and tissues. Thus ruthenium concentrates in seaweed, strontium in the bones of living things, plutonium in bones and testicles (which might partly explain the current epidemic of testicular cancer among young men in the industrial world), iodine 129 and 131 in the thyroid gland and so on. Such concentrations can be anything up to 300,000 times the levels in the surrounding environment.

Patrick Jenkin MP also misled the public when he said that although the contamination of Cumbrian beaches (as the result of an accidental release of nuclear waste from Sellafield in 1983) was "very unsatisfactory", there "was no evidence it could cause significant damage to anyone's health".

He went on to say that the worst that anyone might suffer would be "localised irritation of the skin from prolonged contact with one of a number of pieces which have been found with much higher than usual levels of radioactivity". As Peter Bunyard describes in detail, even very small doses of radioactivity can cause cancer. Yet, in the case of Sellafield, we are dealing with the release of a substantial amount of radioactive waste, quite sufficient to affect the health of anyone exposed to it.

The government, as we now know, was also guilty of hoodwinking the public when it insisted that plutonium from civil nuclear reactors had been exported to the USA for military purposes. Nigel Lawson,when Secretary of State for Energy, stated quite explicitly that

"There is no more connection between the generation of power in a nuclear power station and weapons than there is conventional power station and conventional weapons."

CEGB representatives took the stone line at the Sizewell inquiry. Significantly, Lord Hinton, the first Chairman of the CEGB to commission nuclear power stations for generating electricity, made the following comment:

"I am absolutely certain the CEGB statement is incorrect ... I don't know whether they should get permission for a PWR at Sizewell or not, but what is important is that they shouldn't tell bloody lies in their evidence."

In March 1986, Lord Marshall, Chairman of the CEGB, admitted that some civil plutonium had indeed been diverted for military use.

Suppressing information

All too often, government scientists who actually take it upon themselves to tell the truth on some vital environmental issue immediately get into trouble with the authorities, usually on the grounds that they have broken the Official Secrets Act and are thereby some sort of traitor.

Thus, when in 1982 Dr Matthews, a soil scientist working for the MAFF, dared warn Cumbrian mothers not to take their children onto the radioactive beaches in the area around Sellafield, he was immediately dismissed from his job. No one was supposed to know that the beaches were significantly radioactive. So, too, when Dr Ross Hesketh revealed in 1983 that the British government, contrary to all its assurances, was exporting plutonium to the USA for military purposes, he suffered the same fate.

When a government-appointed body decides to publish environmental information that is not consistent with the government line, it is also likely to get into trouble. Thus, the Standing Technical Advisory Committee on Water Quality warned the government in 1983 (in two leaked draft reports) of the alarming increases in the nitrate contents of most of our drinking water. It even dared show that some of our drinking water was so contaminated that we would be in breach of an EEC Directive on water quality, when it came into force in 1985. The government's response was simply to abolish the committee and to decree that, in future, reports on water quality would be drawn up only for the purpose of advising ministers, and would remain unpublished.

Scientists from the Soil Survey of England and Wales found their funds cut off after they reported on the true extent of soil erosion from arable land in Britain. The survey revealed that soil erosion is widespread, thus giving the lie to previous government assurances that erosion is not a problem in Britain. The results of the survey highlighted how destructive and unsustainable are the modern capital-intensive methods of farming which successive governments have been encouraging farmers to adopt. The Soil Survey is now likely to be discontinued.

Given such heavy-handed attempts to manipulate the flow of information to the public, it is hardly surprising that government announcements are treated with increasing scepticism by those within the environmental movement. Nor is that scepticism restricted to environmental activists. An informal poll conducted some years ago revealed that no more than 12 percent of BNFL's employees at Sellafield actually believed what their management was telling them regarding the safety of the plant they worked in. How long will it be before the electorate, as a whole, reacts in a similar way to the pronouncements of its elected Government?

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Notes