No, the UK government requires you to have no clue (but be chums with a minister or Tory MP) before it spaffs torrents of money your way.

But once you have that, anything is possible e.g a lucrative ferry contract despite owning not a single boat.

Nah, the way they got that contract - along with a bunch of private sector funding - was by having previous experience running a ferry boat line to the UK until the Competition Commission forced it to shut down due to being owned by Eurostar, and (from what I can tell) by already having everything lined up to actually operate ferries by the time the opportunity came along. It turns out that you don't actually need to own a single boat to run a ferry and generally wouldn't want to. Instead, you need to be able to lease one of the handful of ferry boats of a suitable size to operate from their chosen port, and it just so happens that the company which owns the only suitable boats in the world ended the existing contracts right when the new ferry line would've needed them... if they hadn't imploded due to all the key players pulling out because the press coverage had lead them to believe the whole thing was fake, including the port at the other end and the funding (which earlier media coverage made it seem didn't exist, right up until the point it was pulled).

As far as I can tell, the British media destroyed a potentially viable new company by seeding the belief it was a scam just out of sheer anti-Brexit spite. That seems like a pretty good reason not to set up business in the UK actually.

It isn't enough to be an idiot, you have to be an idiot with connections to get spaffed

>It isn't enough to be an idiot, you have to be an idiot with connections to get spaffed

The first part I can manage. But how do I get connections?

Whenever I hear advice about using connections and networking, I always interpret that to mean "be born with the right relatives".

It can be work connections too. My brother worked for a startup that got bought for a 150 million and he still connects with the old ceo whom I bet my brother could get funding from now if he had a good idea.

Go to eton is common

You are too late. They met at school!

Yes, I am in violent agreement. If anything the comment I replied to was understating the case, that was what I was pointing out.

Well that and all that boring but important infrastructure that means you have the pleasure of living in a viable society, rather than a hellscape.

Easy now, I think they'd rather be called Florida