[pjc50]

Goes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and beyond.

The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment.

The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained.

Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything.

I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.

[paganel]

I'm not British, but it is my understanding that after WW1 and WW2 the money had just dried up when it came to capital-intensive projects. I've just finished reading a book [1] that explicitly mentions the lack of available money as a reason for the Brits having to give up their Sea Power status just after WW2.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-...

[pjc50]

This was certainly a real problem, as was the whole IMF rescue business in the 70s, but not across the whole postwar period. More could have been done with the oil wealth than turn it into a real estate boom, for example.

Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.

[rjmunro]

> Concorde somehow escaped cancellation

Was that because it was owned by a government treaty with France? Neither country could cancel without the other.

The final result was way overbudget and not a market fit, but a bunch of skills and technology went on to Airbus.