James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA and one of the most talented and distinguished living scientists in the world, got himself into a furore this week. In an interview in the Sunday Times magazine, he argued that Africa would remain forever underdeveloped, on account of the supposed inferior intelligence of the African population.

Watson’s statement was a travesty of science. However, the reaction to his statement has been a travesty, too. The Nobel Prize winner should have been criticised by fellow scientists, countered in peer-reviewed journals, or simply dismissed professionally as a once-great has-been that has not been at the forefront of biology for decades.

Instead, he has been suspended from his job at a laboratory in New York, forced to cancel his speaking tour (including at the Science Museum in South Kensington tonight), and had his reputation torn to pieces in public without debate or discussion.

A range of scientific opinion came down on him in public like a tonne of bricks, including the Federation of American Scientists, which called his comments ‘noxious’. However, surely the most noxious of the statements was by the Science Museum, which asserted that Watson’s comments were ‘beyond the point of acceptable debate’.

To assert that any scientific opinion is not open to debate is an affront to both scientific and social principles. The scientific method demands the advance of statements that may be right or wrong, their debate, and their test. It the statement is correct, it will victor in the debate, and be proven by the tests. If the statement is incorrect, it will be defeated in the debate, and disproven by the tests. However, to argue that a statement cannot be debated, for reasons of political correctness, runs fundamentally counter to the idea of scientific discovery.

To throw away these principles takes us out of the Enlightenment, and throws us back into the Inquisition: when certain scientific ideas, such as the Earth daring to revolve around the Sun, were deemed so politically unappetising, that any scientist that proposed them was soon brutally murdered.

There are a number of scientific issues that have been settled through a process of political ostracism: either promoted by the political-scientific ‘consensus’ (the anthropogenic theory of global warming being the most prominent) or opposed by it (as Watson’s is).

Regardless of one’s position in the scientific debate, there can be only one position to hold in the political one. The over-reaction means only that free speech is denied, that minority opinions are unheard, and that reason is held subservient to convenience, presenting a critical threat: not just to our scientific future, but to our political one, too.

The BBC Russian Service radio station, which has been designated one of the BBC’s top global priorities in the years ahead, has been ordered off the FM airwaves by the country’s regulators. The last of the Russian Service’s three local distribution partners, Bolshoye Radio, was ordered to remove the BBC from its programming or face being shut down itself.

This, by itself, is a gross abuse of state power. The Russian state has ordered the BBC out of business to prevent the propagation of foreign and free ideas that might prove dangerous to the neo-Soviet Kremlin. This abuse of state power is done under the pretext of defending local producers (itself an despicable act of protectionism), which makes it even harder to fathom.

But there’s another side to the argument, and one that hasn’t been lost on the Russians. In defending the removal of the BBC from its station’s programming, Bolshoye Radio spokesperson Igor Ermachenkov said:

Any media which is government-financed is propaganda. It’s a fact - it’s not negative.

Surprisingly enough, this Russkie gets it. The state has no role to play in the media - broadcast, printed, online, or otherwise - and that applies to state broadcasting as it does to state censorship. Two months ago, the BBC admitted that it’s institutionally biased: that it abuses its remit of ‘public-interest’ broadcasting to propagate the civil service’s left-wing ideas. And since the BBC extracts its revenue by taxing its rivals’ services, its bias is funded by what (in the economic short-term) amounts to monopoly power.

The sad thing is that both Russia and the United Kingdom fail to apply the principle of non-involvement with any consistency or morality, with any respect for the underlying reason for our opposition. It’s fashionable for everyone - left and right - to oppose Vladimir Putin’s tyrannical government, and, as it is fast becoming one of the most unfree countries this side of Zimbabwe, that criticism is justified. Just as justified is criticism of the BBC, which applies Putin’s principles with a smug smile on its face, confident that neither this country’s people nor government understand why it must be shut down, just as it has been in Russia.