Why do you need any of that to get started? You can trade as a sole trader, and use PayPal to take payments in the interim. Not ideal... but it does the job.

For merchant accounts, there are plenty of third parties that will do the job as well. Again, it's not ideal... but at least you get started.

* You just simply don’t see the level of entrepreneurs in the UK as you do the US in my experience and I feel that is not helped with the bureaucracies.*

And with only a £3100 ($5000) deposit.

I highlight these quotes to illustrate the fact that there's still a problem: what if you don't have a $5,000 deposit? At that point, whether it's $50,000 or $5,000, it doesn't matter: you still have to use some ingenuity to succeed. The same ingenuity to doing things in a less than ideal manner at first - but that can be "fixed" soon enough if you start to succeed.