I seem to have accidentally attracted the attention of the anti-5G campaigners...

One of the bits about being a day editor of Liberal Democrat Voice is that, occasionally, you are tempted to respond to the news of the day. And sometimes, you realise why you aren’t often tempted...

On Monday, I was critical of a piece by Nick Cohen, attempting to smear the entire Liberal Democrats on the basis of a rather quirky stance on 5G masts by two councillors in Bath and possibly endorsed by the local Liberal Democrat MP. My view was that his attempt to associate the party with an anti-science stance was indicative of lazy bias.

My understanding is that 5G-capable masts aren’t an issue. At least, that seems to be the generally accepted position amongst experts and, as I know a lot less than them, unless someone is going to offer me overwhelming evidence that the experts are both wrong and corrupt, I’m content to go along with that. I’m not, for example, going to tell the pilot of a flight that I’m on that, just because someone on Twitter is convinced that there’s a better way of doing it than the way he was trained to, he should stop what he is doing and heed my words of wisdom. Expertise and consensus, whilst not foolproof, tend to offer better odds over time.

The bad news is that some anti-5G campaigners have found me and incorrectly assumed that I share their view. So, to be clear, I don’t. Please don’t send me obscure and, doubtless, thoughtfully edited quotes from reports, documents or other sources. As I’m not a scientist, I don’t have the technical knowledge to properly evaluate them, and I haven’t got the time, or the inclination, to teach myself.

It is a reminder that, out there, there are some people absolutely certain that, in the face of the available evidence, that governments are out to control us all through mind control, or microchips administered via fake vaccinations. Frankly, I haven’t encountered the government competent enough to do that or, even if they somehow could, monitor individuals any more than they currently do. The internet has given such people the means to publicise their views and convince the paranoid, the vulnerable and the disturbed to do things that harm society.

Anti-5G campaigners mostly don’t fall into that category, but they are likely to make the same sort of mistake, i.e. believing that because something passionately concerns them, the rest of us should be equally passionately concerned. And in a world where there are plenty of obvious things that need addressing - poverty, climate change, armed conflict to name but three - I really don’t have the bandwidth to worry about something that I currently have no reason to worry about.

So, if you have been trying to contact me without response, perhaps this might explain why. I’m a statistician by training, sceptical of data but prone to accept the odds implied by having most of the experts on one side of the debate, especially in a field that I’m not trained in. It’s not personal though...