The United Kingdom’s economic deceleration is conventionally attributed to fiscal consolidation, anaemic productivity growth, and the supply-side dislocations that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These are real constraints. But treating them as primary causes rather than downstream symptoms is a misdiagnosis—and an increasingly costly one. The deeper pathology is regulatory density: an accumulated architecture of formal constraints that suppresses entrepreneurial discovery, crowds out new entrants, and reduces the adaptive capacity of institutions. It is this environment, not fiscal