All very true Tim.
The tragic saga of the UK Aerospace industry fromthe late 1950s onwards is real story.
TSR2 was a notable victim of monumentally poor planning and project management. It was the icon it became because unlike most of the other cancelled projects, it had actually flown and there was some room for optimism. All the others were just drawings.
The financial state of the UK at the time meant we could not afford anything of any scale. Remember that Harold Wilson tried to pull out of the Concorde project, but the contractual terms were too tight for him to wriggle out of it.
I just wish I felt that governments had learned this lesson from history, but, sadly, they haven't.
You'll see in the Military section a regular item asking why the UK insist on 'UK-ising' any aircraft purchased from the US or elsewhere. The F4, C130, F-III were all made more expensive thanks to this policy.