Comments by "jdg" (@jdg9999) on "Curious Droid" channel.

What happened was people who thought state direction of industry was "enlightened" and far superior to the horrid free market took over (imagine letting the people who created and built companies from the ground up decide their own strategies, much better a bureaucrat from the ministry of whatever to be in charge!). The combination of Labour governments full of people who hated private enterprise, and Tory ones full of aristocratic non-entities who held private enterprise in contempt was a huge drag on the potential of British industry. If the British aircraft industry had been left to compete with each other, make their own decisions when to consolidate rationally, and fail where they weren't good enough, things could have been very different.
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