Jodrell Bank may have to be shut down. The Cheshire observatory sprang to fame in 1957 as having the only radiotelescope in the West capable of monitoring the Soviet Union's Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Since then, Jodrell Bank has studied quasars, pulsars and gravitational lenses, and it is now such an icon that the Government may nominate it as a World Heritage Site.

But the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Government's quango for funding research into physics and astronomy, is threatening Jodrell Bank with closure. The STFC faces a deficit of £80 million on its budget of £670 million, so it hopes to save £2.5 million annually by letting Jodrell go.

Even worse, the STFC also wants to cut by a quarter the number of research grants and researchers it supports in British universities, undermining our future in physics at the very time that the Prime Minister hopes to renew our efforts in space. Yet it is Gordon Brown who created the current crisis.

Just as Mr Brown, gratuitously, created the Financial Services Authority, which produced the first run on a British bank in 141 years, and just as he forced the Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise into a disruptive merger that led to the loss of the personal details of 25 million people, so last year he forced the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council into a meretricious merger as the STFC.

As a result of this bureaucratic change the new body was ill-prepared to fight its corner for funding in last year's Comprehensive Spending Review. Over the next three years its income will rise by 13 per cent, well below the level of real inflation in big science. Hence the cuts.

Yet, ironically, this is the same Gordon Brown who has been so free with our money, having doubled science's government budgets in real terms from £1.3 billion per annum in 1997 to £3 billion today. He did this because he believes that economic growth is ultimately based on the government funding of science. This is an improbable thesis because the State delivers all services badly and allocate resources idiotically. So the current mess is attributable solely to his meddling.

The immediate solution must be to transfer some of the Medical Research Council's money. The MRC is the least essential of the Government's research councils as its budget of £503 million is already overshadowed by those of the medical charities including the Wellcome Trust (£650 million) and Cancer UK (£553 million). A cut to the MRC would not hurt research into health as much as a cut to the STFC would damage physics.

But if Jodrell Bank is to be our last managerial crisis, we must remould our scientific institutions to render them immune from politicians.

Terence Kealey is Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University and the author of Sex, Science and Profits

Times Recommends

• We have kit and leadership. Let’s go
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal
• Conferences — what a waste of money