John Gardner (Oxford), who notes pointedly that he is "still a Labour voter in spite of everything," writes:

You say that the idea of impact measurement for research funding is' gaining ground in the UK'. Only it isn't. It's a twitching corpse. At the 2010 election the Tories will win, unless that huckster Cameron is exposed as having an investment banker as a lover. The 'impact' analysis will be postponed and then quietly dropped. Now of course, under the Tories, there will be less public money to go round as usual, although there's a lot less of a budgetary gap between the right-wing bastards and the left-wing imbeciles than there used to be in the good old days, when a Labour government could still borrow vast sums at affordable rates to pay for their votes … errr, policies. The little money that does go round, though, will be heading towards what the Tories call 'good' universities (i.e. the ones they went to) and away from what the Tories regard (in their deepest, basest souls) as chavulous polytechnics. It will not be a happy time for those universities, bless their New Labour cotton socks, that think of themselves mainly as agents of social change. But probably it will be back to business as usual, late-1980s-style, for such things as PPE and History at Oxbridge. Austerity in capital projects, real-terms decline in wages after the artificial boom years of the last decade, but – on the plus side - a retreat from micromanagement of academic affairs by the funding bodies and hence by Whitehall. So probably we'll be able to write about academic subjects after all, instead of toadying around in the extremely shallow intellectual waters of policy thinktanks and the wider 'knowledge economy' beloved of mandelsonian newspeak. (It's actually an ignorance economy, no?)  So the dangers that face us in the UK universities are real enough, but they are not the ones that you are writing about.