One of the most deplorable aspects of the Labour Party’s ever-changing spiel about its plans for a new power station is the dubbing of the extant one as a “cancer and asthma factory”.
I wish I could call this naked populism, but it’s worse than that. It’s a calculated, cynical appeal to ignorance, the sort that is successful where people lack basic information and analytical skills, the sort that only a rogue or joke politician would risk making in a more sophisticated society, because proper politicians know they will be taken apart at the seams for making it.
As far back as 1988, the Conservative Party politician Edwina Currie was forced to resign her post as junior health minister after saying that British eggs carried the salmonella bacterium. The egg industry, which sold 30 million eggs a year, went berserk. The British Egg Industry Council and the Farmers Union sought legal advice and threatened to sue for “factually incorrect and highly irresponsible remarks” as people stopped buying eggs. The Department of Health was unable to back Mrs Currie with evidence that most British chickens were infected with salmonella (because they were not), but a spokesman for the British Egg Industry Council was able to provide statistical information that the risk of an egg being infected with salmonella was less than 200 million to one. But the point is this: when Edwina Currie said that, and she was just a junior minister, all hell broke loose. But that was Britain in 1988 and this is Malta in 2013. What can I say? They had something of a head start.
A power station isn’t eggs. Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party are not at risk of being sued by an angry power station supplier worried that it might not sell another one to the Maltese (that’s sorted already, apparently, with an ‘expression of interest’). But these ‘cancer factory’ and ‘asthma factory’ statements are dangerously irresponsible. And they are, of course, misleading, cavalier with the research diligently undertaken by medical people, and dismissive of the work of Enemalta personnel whose job it is to control, monitor and record emissions.
People in a position of great influence also have a great burden of responsibility. They cannot simply shoot their mouths off like Mr and Mrs Everyman at a supper party. People whose analytical skills and information base are poor will believe this because their leader said it. Others might well believe it too. Joseph Muscat doesn’t believe it. He has been through the mill of doctoral research and has had to defend his thesis. There is no way on earth he can believe something like that when the attendant research does not back it up. He says it because it is a cynical move, the means to the end of making him prime minister.
It’s a short-term move and a crazy one. What Muscat and his colleagues (and some of them are medical doctors) are saying here, effectively, is that if we vote for them and their new power station, and let them close the other one, we will have less cancer in Malta. Or no cancer. And of course, that is not going to happen, because the real causes of cancer and respiratory illness in that cluster are heavy smoking, a poor diet and a generally unhealthy lifestyle. And there’s a genetic component, too – which means that families do not succumb because they all live near each other and near the power station, but because they are genetically related and probably also have the same habits.
Cancer specialists (oncologists) Stephen Brincat and Nicholas Refalo have spoken out and called the ‘cancer factory’ claims alarmist. Refalo told The Times that high rates of cancer in a family – the woman produced by the Labour Party during a recent discussion was used as an example – cannot be taken at face value because the high rate of cancer in a single family could depend on variables like socio-economic status (which has dietary and lifestyle significance), smoking habits and genetic history. “If we really want to make a difference to Malta’s health, then people should look into smoking cessation, because that would have a huge impact,” he said. He’s right – cigarettes and the compulsion to smoking them are the real killers here.
Stephen Brincat pointed out that burning any fuel releases pollutants which could cause cancer, but you have to look at the whole scenario, the type of chemicals emitted, and the controls used on emissions, like filters. There are many different pollutants in the air anyway, and Malta is so small that it is very difficult to prove a correlation between the power station and cancer among its neighbours. In other words, what we might well be looking at here is a situation where people who tend to be heavy smokers who eat a poor diet live near a power station.
The Health Ministry has released some figures, showing that far from Malta having an extraordinarily high rate of cancer, as has been suggested, it has the second lowest in Europe. It also said that asthma rates in Marsaxlokk are the lowest in Malta. Yes, the lowest. So much for the asthma factory. Or the cancer factory, for that matter.
Joseph Muscat is having none of this, though. Despite his doctoral thesis, he knows he operates in a society where opinion is considered a substitute for fact, or equal to fact. If somebody says that man did not walk on the moon, you are no longer supposed to say “But you are wrong. These are the facts.” You are meant to say instead: “Everyone has the right to his opinion.” You know, because the moon landings, or asthma cases in Marsaxlokk, are a matter of opinion not fact.
And so, despite the facts released by the health ministry, and the spoken opinion of our leading oncologists and other medical specialists, Muscat said: “I insist that power stations which run on heavy fuel oil are factories of cancer and asthma.” That’s right: he insists. In the fact of all evidence to the contrary, he insists: because he has an opinion and it is equal to fact. Equal to? What he says here (but doesn’t believe himself) is that his opinion supersedes fact.