A scientist called Adam Leadbetter has written a thoughtful piece on the Paul Nurse programme. He is writing from a mainstream standpoint and therefore gets some of the Climategate facts wrong, but his conclusions about data openness are worth a look.
In passing he makes reference to the political control of scientific funding:
Science journalism needs to be more responsible
The Daily Express, The Daily Mail and The Guardian were shown by Paul Nurse to have reported the outcomes of the investigation into Climategate in completely different ways. Yes, newspapers have different editorial lines and I will choose to read one newspaper based on how it fits with my political standpoint and you may choose to read another. Fine. It is also true that scientific funding bodies may choose which projects are deserving of their money based on a political agenda set at a national governmental level. Despite that, however, the results of a scientific programme should be apolitical and as such deserve to be disseminated, at what ever level of detail, in an apolitical, factual way and not spun out of all recognition to the tone a newspaper editor finds most appealing.
The idea that politicians direct scientific funding is, I think, at least mainly incorrect. There is a long-standing convention - the Haldance principle - that scientific funding is directed by scientists, or perhaps more accurately by scientific administrators. So while we might be concerned about scientific funding being directed to support the ambitions of politicians, I'm not sure that things are any better with the science bureaucracy running the show. The bureaucrats, like the politicians have little or no incentive to direct funding towards projects that will further the interests of the public. Their economic incentive is simply to get more funding.
We can see the results of these perverse incentives in the pages of New Scientist every week.
Bishop Hill
The original article seems to have disappeared. Adam says he's in the process of moving to a different blogging platform. The copy from the Google cache can be seen here.