Anti-Mast Protests

Today's announcement by the government to tackle mobile blackspots got me wondering about the phone mast protests of the last decade. Remember them? Plucky little neighbourhood groups set up, and supported by the usual suspects on the left, to fight the good fight against those evil corporations and their phone masts! Concerned about cancer and their children (always the children, the modern equivalent of the Belgian nun circa 1914) they fought bitterly but have since vanished.

A google search of mobile mast protests shows that there are indeed still some protests rumbling away but it is a far cry from their peak in the late nineties early naughties when they were the ubiquitous form of protest despite the many good reasons for protesting around the same time.

Could it be that now that 92% of adults in the UK own and use a mobile phone that suddenly we have had a Paulian moment and seen the error in our ways? That 92% of the UK population is, almost as we speak, clutching a little black brick in their hands and shaking it violently trying to get that Youtube video to load makes the days when we were worried that phones caused cancer seem a distant memory. But there are still areas of Britain where folk have to shake their phone in order to get the text message to send, bless...presumably those areas where mobile mast protesters were successful, although I can't verify that, and areas like the Welsh Valleys and Scottish Highlands were people are not considered important enough in which to invest. So, thankfully we have this new government initiative to right this wrong, and to undo the 'good' done by busybodies standing in the way of progress.

Still, it makes me wonder. When the windfarm is undoubtedly the mobile mast of this decade...when, in the not so distant future, we sincerely wish that we had actually built more of the buggers will we have the opportunity to rectify the folly? I highly doubt that.