I haven’t seen this, OP. You’ve got me curious.
The amount you cite, £9B, suggests cuts to more than Humanities. The scale suggests to me a possible attempt to focus research on quick, applicable results across STEMM also.
Both the restriction of certain research in fields, such as Humanities, and an overly controlling approach to research in any field are big mistakes in my view. A lot of intrinsically good work gets throttled this way.
It is also impossible to know what research will have applications. To take one example from Mathematics and Computer Science: most internet security used today, including for e-commerce, is based on an algorithm invented at GCHQ, but classified, and rediscovered by American and Israeli mathematicians. They published over the objections of the National Security Agency in 1977. (DH was studying Maths then and this was very hot stuff!) The algorithm is known as RSA.
My point here is that that the key theorem used in RSA is called Euler’s Theorem and it was already about 200 years old when applied in the development of RSA. Until then it was, AFAIK, almost exclusively used within the study and development of theoretical mathematics. Pragmatists would have considered Euler’s Theorem useless.
Yes, 200 years is a long wait. But the money e-commerce has generated for the British economy has covered all the maths research done on these islands many times over, and probably all the STEM research as well.
Graphene, which won Britain a fairly recent Nobel Prize in Physics and is proving tremendously useful, was a serendipitous discovery. Many here will know the story of penicillin. I could go on and on and on.
Obviously grants need quality control mechanisms, but when government thinks it knows better than researchers what research needs doing, much is lost.
(BTW there are now many secure cryptosystems based on the same principles as RSA, but using different types of maths. RSA is still the most widely used. You can try it out yourself at many secure sites.)