Apparently the UK isn't leading any nanotechnology programs according to a blog by Richard Jones. He thinks that the UK has give up on nanotechnology for four main reasons.

• Prior high profile projects have been perceived as failures
• Lack if industry support
• Failure to address the health and safety issues of nanotechnology
• Science community does not have a strong proponents for nanotechnology

This all seems surprising since there seems to be a lot of good working going on in the field like the work on Graphene from the Manchester group, for example. Perhaps, this would be a good lesson learned for other countries in planning and going their own programs.