Im not expert but i presume you mean for graphene research. Yes there was an EU budget for it, but in the end we'll all benefit from it. The UK ministry of defense must have concluded that solving the problem of graphene on their own was too hard and the best option was to open source the problem. Don't forget there are many technologies that get patents or are discovered in universities and then get classified top secret and developed by the military industrial complex, optical invisibility camouflage for example. The world has the UK to thank for not classifying graphene from the get go.