Arts and Humanities funding is not a pot of gold
Quote: Personally, I see no problem with redirecting funding from the arts and humanities councils into the EPSRC (engineering and physical sciences), BBSRC (biology and biotechnology) and NERC (environmental stuff).
Well, EPSRC alone receives over seven times the grant given to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which was already cut back substantially by the previous govt before the current lot "ringfenced" (i.e. cut) the total non-medical research budget to maintain growth for medical research. But let's, for the sake of following your "argument", cut the AHRC budget to zero (by the way, AHRC funds a surprising amount of sciencey activities such as archaeology and corpus linguistics - but you may not see them as "proper" sciences, so we'll let that slide). Shared out among your list of research councils (let's add the STFC, who could certainly do with a few quid), we find the net effect is .. not much.
Doesn't seem like a huge benefit to the nation, whereas you've now given up much of your ability to research, teach and critically think about languages, history, culture and traditions, including your own, which (regardless of any value that has in its own right, which you are free to discount) is a reasonably profitable enterprise, as any English-language publisher, or any university that offers language instructions to the foreign students that prop up their numbers, will tell you. Since the govt. is also planning to break up the block teaching grant and forbid the cross-subsidisation that also supports laboratory subjects with low enrolments in not a few universities, your plan will certainly hurt the sciences rather more than help them.