Who are the "knee-jerk literary math-haters" the article is aiming at? I'm not aware of any and I certainly don't think the public or the establishment, in general, "hate maths". There is a weird tribalism in this article.
Because this is a suggestion coming from the Tories, there has been in the last month or so a whole slew of opinion pieces ridiculing the suggestion that non-STEM students should be required to take maths past age 16. It's been called an elitist, out-of-touch policy change, requiring students to learn useless math they will never use, etc. etc.
By and large these were all very politically-driven opinions. I can't help but think that the same people making these arguments might have been arguing the exact opposite--in favor of more maths education--if it had been their turn in power, or if the Conservative position was different.
So yes, this opinion piece is rather tribal. But I think it is because he is responding to an intensely political issue and trying to talk some sense into people who are already forming opinions on a purely tribal basis.
Not that the ugh-ers are entirely at fault! In society where nobody actually teaches anything deserving to be called “maths”[2], certainly nothing that would give any clue as to why people would actually want to do this thing[3], there’s little they could do to do better. Except maybe, as adults, wonder why there is this strange cluster of people who appreciate this apparently repulsive thing and investigate the reason for themselves.
(Not that this appreciation is universal even among experimental physicists, for example.)
[1] https://twitter.com/TeaKayB/status/1596485647115554817
[2] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_08.htm...
[3] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2810679
Terminology aside, it didn't seem that the article was trying to drive wedges, but in fact attempting to build bridges.