United Kingdom

Year of EU entry: 1973

Political system: Constitutional monarchy

Capital city: London

Total area: 242 500 km²

Population: 60.4 million

Currency: Pound sterling

Official language: English

The United Kingdom is situated on the British Isles; it consists of England, Wales and Scotland. Together they make up Great Britain and Northern Ireland. British Flag is a Union Jack.
The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. The main chamber of parliament is the lower house, the House of Commons, which has 646 members elected by universal suffrage. About 700 people are eligible to sit in the upper house, the House of Lords, including life peers, hereditary peers, and bishops. There is a Scottish parliament in Edinburgh with wide-ranging local powers and a Welsh Assembly in Cardiff with more limited authority for Welsh affairs.

The English account for more than 80% of the population. The Scots make up nearly 10% and the Welsh and Irish most of the rest. The UK is also home to diverse immigrant communities, mainly from its former colonies in the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Africa.

England

is one of the leading countries in the sphere of tourism. The economy - one of the largest in the EU - is increasingly services-based although it maintains industrial capacity in high-tech and other sectors. The City of London is a world centre for financial services. It is the largest city in UK and one of the largest cities in Europe.

Home to the industrial revolution, the

United Kingdom

has produced many great scientists and engineers including Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, was a Scot. English literature has produced an endless stream of poets, dramatists, essayists and novelists from Geoffrey Chaucer via Shakespeare and his contemporaries to a plethora of modern writers.