[kingcharles]

I was born and raised in the UK and I still can't explain to people how it works. Are England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separate countries? Is the UK a country? It's countries all the way down.

[mFixman]

The UK is an unitary state with 3 autonomous areas that have different devolved levels of self-governance, similar to Italy or (in theory) China.

The difficult part comes from calling these autonomous areas "countries".