The Pope, this newspaper reported on Saturday, is about to ensure that the first married woman acquires sainthood. Now that the precedent has been established, I would like to recommend Margaret Beckett for (eventual) canonisation.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, deserves this and other accolades for apparently convincing her colleagues in the Cabinet that there would be “no scientific case for an outright ban” on the cultivation of GM crops, and that it would be “irrational” for ministers to take the “easy way out” and concede one. If her view prevails, as seems probable, she will have struck a rare blow on behalf of sanity on the subject.

Less obvious candidates for the place at the right hand of the Almighty are the Sunday Times journos who have exposed Andrew Wakefield’s claims about the MMR vaccine as “fatally flawed”. A partial absolution for past sins would be sufficient reward for them.

That the conflict of interests behind the Wakefield crusade has been outlined is welcome. It is a tragedy, however, that it has come after six years of ceaseless scaremongering.

What both the GM crops row and the MMR controversy reveal is a new (or rather the reversion to an old) division. For many years the character and role of the State has been the main faultline in British politics. But arguments about the State aren’t what they used to be, now that we are in an era when the two major parties are discussing whether public spending should be 42 per cent or 40 per cent of national income, each has agreed that health and education are the supreme national priorities and where the distinctions in their policies are largely technocratic.

What is emerging instead is a contest over the character and role of society. It can be witnessed in attitudes towards immigration, sexuality and women in the workplace. But above all it involves approaches to scientific progress. The contrast is between optimism and pessimism, confidence and fatalism, change and continuity, hope and fear, reason and reaction. The State is almost irrelevant to this debate.

The GM and MMR disputes are the first of many similar contests, which is why their resolution is especially important. On both questions an oddball alliance has emerged — the old Left, the old Right and the New Age have united against what they perceive as an “establishment” consisting of Whitehall, big business and the scientific community.

This alliance rages against those it believes are out to poison food, injure children, fry our brains with waves from mobile phones and their masts, slice up cuddly animals for the fun of it and, under the cover of “therapeutic” cloning, develop a master race of which the Nazis would have been envious.

Such suspicions, and the sense of a shared enemy, have made unlikely bedfellows of the Daily Mail and The Guardian, which jointly oppose GM crops.

This bizarre collection, apparently under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, has three features in common. The first is the reversion to a pre-Enlightenment view of humankind and history to a period before it was assumed that each succeeding generation was capable of doing, knowing and understanding more than the one before.

The second shared facet is an extraordinary passion, a paranoia even, for conspiracy. Not only are politicians, civil servants, business executives and scientists behaving recklessly but they are doing so deliberately. It is as if the “GM” in genetically modified crops stands for General Motors and the letters MMR represent Ministers, Money and Research. These opponents are the sort of people who believe not only that John F. Kennedy died as a result of an elaborate plot, that Elvis Presley is alive and well somewhere on the Moon and that Diana, Princess of Wales, was fiendishly murdered, but that the same organisation is responsible for all three events. And they are running the cover-up on flying saucers.

The third element is an attitude towards evidence that matches the credulity displayed by those who served on the O. J. Simpson jury. The fact that, on GM food, as the Royal Society put it, “the results of the farm-scale trials show that the weed management of the GM maize variety clearly has a less damaging effect on farmland wildlife than current conventional practice”, is deemed no more valuable than that some bloke in the pub reckons his ploughman’s lunch has started tasting peculiar lately.

The Wakefield “study” on MMR, which included a whopping 12 individual patients (some of whom, we are now told, were sent in his direction by parents already hostile to MMR), is deemed as valid as others that concluded that MMR was safe and that involved the study of three million children.

The real irony here is that those who favour logic and reason are far weaker than their opponents would suppose. Those most sympathetic to progress as a cause — the “modernisers” — are split between the three political parties, new Labour, the Conservative Portillistas and the heirs to Jo Grimond among the Liberal Democrats. And even among the activists among those groups they are not in a majority.

Despite the heroic efforts of a small number of underfunded groups, scientists remain inclined to fight separate battles over the likes of GM food, MMR, mobile phones, vivisection and therapeutic cloning, rather than combining forces to wage a wider war. Big businesses, partly because of competition between them, are similarly ineffective.

A little more conspiracy among the rational would, therefore, be helpful.

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