Guess only England was meant. That would insinuate they don't care about scotland though.
If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.
The bit that gets me is that people often refer to the UK but actually mean GB or vice versa.
> That would insinuate they don't care about Scotland though.
You forgot the other states of the United Kingdom: Wales and Northern Ireland. But I disagree, it says nothing at all about Scotland - this seems like the "I like pancakes!" "So you hate waffles?" faulty reasoning. (2)
If you disagree, why don't you care about Wales? /s
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_England https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/
2) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-bitch-dats-a-whole-new-x-w...
James VI/I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I) was king of _both_ England and Scotland and only later did the Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union combine the two. You might notice I've neglected Wales which was (considered?) part of England.
In any case, England is a country, yes. Also the UK is a country.
For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).
In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...
The green circles are each a single island. The yellow circle are a bunch of islands.
2) The monarchies in the Commonwealth countries are ruled by different crowns; but, for historical reasons, most of those crowns are worn by the same physical head. (But not all of them. The King of Malaysia is a different natural person from the King of the UK, for example.)
If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.
It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.
For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
† The exact rules are complicated, but they don't depend on where on the island you were born or stuff like that.
> Rugby in Ireland is governed by the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU), which was established in 1879, decades before Ireland was partitioned in 1921. It has always organised rugby on an all-Ireland basis.
Except when they play as part of the British & Irish Lions!
So in modern English they may be states, but there sure is a lot of overlap between "country" and "state".
As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.
You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".
It's like if you put four boxes in a box, it's not too confusing that the outer box is still a box.
The NI thing is different, involving a peace treaty between the UK and Ireland.
The Scottish referendum did not use neutral international observers, and had extremely biased coverage by state media. The BBC itself even tried to stir up forms of violent unionism. (Look up the so called "passionate Highlander", a drunken loyalist type who talked about defending the union to the death "in the name of Jesus Christ".)
"The 45" has a resonance in Scottish history and it is a bit of a coincidence the Yes vote was stuck at that rather than 47 or 44.
Having neutral international observers was a no brainer, but the SNP often seems to trust the system they're trying to break up much more than it should.