I'm very glad that you did decide to comment, Nutty, thank you! If the outlook for UK civil regulation is as bleak as you say, and I for one have no reason to doubt you, then all the more reason for the CAA to get its own house in order, before our dear EU friends (as I understand is the approved way of referring to them) ban all UK civil aviation from their airspace. It might start by trying to lure back those who saw a future for themselves with EASA. It might also just be that there arises an equal and opposing force repelling them by our dear EU friends. Who knows?
I don't for one moment see the CAA as any sort of Regulatory panacea. Those of us who have had to earn a crust while under their benevolent bureaucracy can vouch for the never ending bumph and extortionate charges they are minded to levy. In their favour though, I very much doubt if they have ever deliberately sought to subvert and suborn their own airworthiness regulations and thereafter protect the perpetrators, thus obstructing any possibility of reforming the dysfunctional system their malevolence would have caused.
It is no solution to shrug our shoulders and say that UK civil and military airworthiness is going to hell in a handcart but what can we do? I'll tell you what aviation will do, take its toll of human life as though it were Christmas! I hope that we can agree that Regulator, Investigator, and Operator must be truly independent of each other to ensure Air Safety, or it cannot work. At the moment that is precisely the situation in UK Military Aviation. Until we can ensure that independence, avoidable accidents and needless fatalities will continue unnecessarily.
Air Power, the whole raison d'etre of military aviation, will suffer accordingly. One day the RAF will once again be pitted against a comparable opponent. Too late then to discover that there is something wrong with our bloody aircraft!