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The UK ministers attempting to block a Europe-wide suspension of the neonicotinoid insecticides increasingly linked to serious harm in bees are heading for a crashing defeat. That is the only conclusion I can draw having been given an insight into the arguments they are deploying by Prof Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser to environment secretary Owen Paterson.

“It is very finely balanced – there is no doubt about this at all,” Boyd said. He gamely argued that the “balance of scientific evidence suggests [a ban] is not proportionate” and that a financial cost-benefit analysis indicated a ban would cause significant economic damage. Yet in almost the same breath he acknowledged that a definitive test of neonicotinoids has yet to done, over two decades after their first use, and that the data does not exist to do a proper cost-benefit analysis.

No wonder the UK finds itself, with Germany, isolated among the EU’s major nations. France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands – all major farming nations – all back the Commission’s proposed suspension of neonicotinoids on flowering crops like oil seed rape.

This tale is complex and involves science, economics and politics, so let’s take them in turn. Boyd assessed the balance of scientific evidence by comparing three semi-field studies showing harm (there are more) with five field studies, suggesting no harm (refs 1-8 here). He raised questions about the doses used in the former studies, but you should note that all three were published in the world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed journals, Science and Nature.

Of the five opposing studies, one was the government’s own catastrophic research where the supposed control hives suffered serious neonic contamination. That’s not surprising, given that neonics are the most widely used insecticides in the world but I will be surprised if the work ever passes peer review.

“It is extremely difficult to have a control in a landscape where neonicotinoids are widely used,” said Boyd, highlighting the very problem a suspension would solve.