Britain's history in the space business is accidentally quite good.
We had a rocket, called it Blue Streak, meant if for use as an ICBM / deterrent but then realised it was obsolete before it ever came anywhere near going into service. Apparently we gave the whole lot to the French as a "please let us in the EEC" bribe. The French said merci beaucoup, pizouf, and now they have Ariannespace.
Disaster? Big opportunity missed? Perhaps, but not as big as all that.
I don't think anyone has ever made a lot of commercial cash running a launcher. Mainly the motivation is to get a capability for national security reasons. Ariane did that for the French, we did that another way.
Instead we concentrated on satellite building. There's the sites in Portsmouth, Stevenage, Guildford, bits 'n' pieces at the Rutherford Appleton labs, etc. Building satellites has proved to be highly profitable.
If Skylon ever gets anywhere, we (the UK taxpayer) have a stake in it. Sending up lots of payloads that can then be in-orbit assembled is ultimately more impressive than trying to launch all in one go (e.g. the International Space Station). "Impressive" can turn into big money, maybe.
Yes we did have an IRBM called Blue Streak which was in fact based on design concept of Atlas and was powered by two Rolls Royce RZ2 engines based on the Rocketdyne S3D used on the US Jupiter IRBM. It was cancelled in 1960 due to the vulnerability of the system caused by the loading time of its LOX / Kerosene propellant. Though the UK had an option of building their own launcher out of it by mixing the deHavilland built rocket with the Black Knight research rocket built by SARO. The Tory government at the time pushed for a European programme which resulted in the European Launcher Development Organisation (EDLO) with the French and Germans providing the second and third stages and the Italians the front end (payload and shroud). There wasn't that much tech transfer at all (had there been the thing may have been successful), the French stage was very the agricultural in its design and used hypergolic propellant, while the Germans had massive problems in getting their hypergolic fuelled stage light enough and powerful enough to get the payload into orbit (plus the fact they were starting from scratch seeing all of their best people were in the US or East Germany). The testing regime was very step by step. Blue Streak on its own 3 times out of Woomera (the first flight was actually a failure as the rocket went out of control a number of seconds before scheduled shut down), plus 2 flights with dummy stages, the first of which was blown up by the range safety officer due to incorrect data from a tracking radar. the other three flights were successful. The next two flights had a live French stage which failed both times. After this, the live German stage was added and after the British and French stages had successfully lofted it to altitude, only for it to explode on ignition on the first attempt and fail to fire at all on the second. The final flight out of Woomera saw all three stages successfully operate, only for the Italian payload shroud to fail to separate which resulted in the satellite and the rest failing into the Indian Ocean. The final flight was from Kourou of an improved Europa II fitted with a solid propellant French forth stage. This failed due to somebody cross-wiring part of the guidance system. At this point the UK pulled out of the launcher program as it was discovered that Europa wasn't capable of putting a large enough payload into Geostationary orbit, plus the fact that there wasn't the money to do both Launchers and Satellites. So Mr Benn (the man in charge at the time), picked the satellite option, which has been very successful. The French then went the LOX / H2 propellant direction and produced the successful Ariane which is a very different beast in all regards to Blue Streak. (Plus having a launch site on the equator is very handy for putting up Comms sats as it allows heavier payloads to be lofted than from places like KSC for the same amount of propellant).