This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are each, in ordinary usage, called a country, and the United Kingdom is the single sovereign state that contains all four of them at once, a structure that confuses almost everyone who did not grow up inside it. England has no devolved parliament of its own, governed directly from Westminster; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own devolved legislature, with varying powers over health, education and other domestic policy, won gradually since the late 1990s rather than granted at the country's 1801 or 1922 founding. A resident of Cardiff or Edinburgh genuinely has two governments, a devolved one and the UK one in London, answerable for different things, which is part of why questions of independence, Scottish most prominently, keep recurring inside a union old enough that most of its citizens have never known anything else. London sits at the center of all of it: the seat of the UK Parliament and the Crown, but not, formally, the seat of an English parliament that does not exist.