The United Kingdom will hold an election next week, and it’s of great importance. That much, everybody agrees on.

But ask voters and politicians what the May 7 vote is about, and you get sharply contrasting answers, depending on which corner of this not-so-united kingdom you’re standing in. Britain’s 55th general election feels less like a country coming together to choose its leaders than a collection of loosely-linked debates held in different parts of an increasingly fractious land.

Record numbers in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will vote for politicians who say they want fundamental changes in what the U.K. is and how it works. “If you’ve travelled around Britain, you’ve realized we are not one country in the way that we used to be,” said Simon Hix, head of the department of government at the London School of Economics.

The contest in London, which is about a recovering economy and how best to ensure continued growth, is at odds with the debate a few hours’ train ride north, where a creaking industrial belt feels little of the turnaround London is talking about. And that clashes with the conversation in England’s southeast, where the chief concerns are immigration, and whether Britain should remain in the European Union.

The votes being held in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are even further disconnected, with questions of national identity mingling with public anger over government austerity programs. One poll this week suggested the separatist Scottish National Party could win all 59 seats up for grabs in Scotland.

The big parties are struggling to grasp what’s happening. Conservatives wonder why Prime Minister David Cameron isn’t 10 points ahead in the polls, given the reasonably good economic story he has to tell – the U.K. boasts the fastest-growing economy in the G-7 after five years of Conservative-led government – and the fact that he is running against Labour’s uncharismatic leader, Ed Miliband. There are reportedly plans afoot to replace Mr. Cameron as leader if he can’t deliver a majority.

Labour supporters, meanwhile, speculate they’d be winning this election in a walk if David, the more charismatic Miliband brother, had won the party’s fratricidal leadership race five years ago.

Such recriminations miss the big picture. The Conservatives’ struggles are due to the rise of the radical U.K. Independence Party, not Mr. Cameron; polls suggest he is actually more popular than his party. Labour is going to fall short of a majority not just because Ed Miliband looks awkward on television, but because Scotland’s nationalists are in the process of redrawing the country’s political map.

“There’s something bigger going on. There are issues of leadership, but there’s a general feeling that the Labour Party, even if Ed Miliband were replaced, and the Conservative Party, even if David Cameron were replaced, are unable to represent large sectors of society,” said Victoria Honeyman, lecturer in British politics at the University of Leeds.

If the polls are even close to accurate, the next parliament – and the government it produces – will have more in common with the multiparty coalitions often seen in Italy or Israel than the stable British governments of decades past. (Even the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed after the indecisive 2010 election lasted a full five years.) Both parties look set to claim about a third of the overall vote, well short of a majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.

So there’s a crippling logjam ahead. And the stakes have rarely been higher.

If Mr. Cameron is eventually able to cobble together enough seats to remain prime minister, he has vowed to hold an in-or-out referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU by 2017. If Mr. Miliband moves into No. 10 Downing Street, it will almost certainly be via an informal deal with the SNP, speeding up talk of another referendum on Scotland’s independence after last year’s narrow win for the No campaign.

Worryingly, neither big party can truly claim to be a country-wide force any more. In much of east and southeast England, Labour is on the outside looking in on a contest between the Conservatives and UKIP. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have been politically irrelevant in Scotland – except as a focal point for anger – since the Margaret Thatcher years. Neither party directly fields candidates in Northern Ireland.

It’s less a national election, then, than half a dozen regional elections, with different two– and three-way battles in each of those regions. “We now have different party systems in different parts of the country,” Prof. Hix said.

Remarkably, the two main party leaders are doing little to try and reverse that trend. Mr. Cameron has spent the campaign mainly in London and southern England, making only token appearances in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland while trying to fend off the UKIP threat to Conservative strongholds in middle England.

In defending his right flank, Mr. Cameron has taken the calculated risk of stirring up English nationalism. He has questioned the legitimacy of a potential Labour government supported by the SNP, and said he’ll change the way parliament works so that only English MPs can vote on laws that pertain only to England – arguably making Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs into second-tier parliamentarians.

Mr. Miliband’s campaign travel map is even more striking in its omissions. Despite forecasts that the Scottish National Party is set to romp to victory in the longtime Labour stronghold of Scotland, Mr. Miliband has made just one appearance in Edinburgh since the start of the campaign. He’s skipped Northern Ireland entirely.

Only in London and centre-west England does the old dichotomy of Conservatives-versus-Labour still relevant.

On the gentrifying fringes of London, and the affluent countryside just beyond, Mr. Cameron’s argument that Britain’s economy is slowly recovering makes sense. Led by a resurgent financial services industry, and a wildly booming real estate market, the 2008 financial crisis feels like the distant past for the British capital.

That better times haven’t reached the north of England yet is evidenced by the giant “Vote for change, Vote for hope, Vote Labour” banner hanging from the downtown Leeds office of Unite, Britain’s largest trade union. Mr. Miliband barely needs to make the argument here that a Labour government is needed to protect the beloved National Health Service and to end the Conservative reliance on trickle-down economics.

While both parties are promising to invest millions more in the NHS (one of the few issues uniting Britons), they differ in how they say they will raise the extra money. The Conservatives say they will cut personal income taxes to boost growth, and thus government revenue. Mr. Miliband has vowed to raise the needed millions by cracking down on rich tax-dodgers, and by introducing a “mansion tax” on properties worth more than £2-million ($3.7-million).

The U.K. is changing rapidly, but the core ideological debate – Conservatives cut taxes, Labour tax the rich – could have been borrowed from almost any previous decade. “I don’t think either of the parties can quite believe the situation they’re in,” Dr. Honeyman said.

RAMSGATE, ENGLAND

Take the same two-hour train ride from London, but head southeast rather than north, and the election gets turned on its head. Yes, there’s still anger at the state of the economy. But the blame is directed elsewhere – at immigrants, at the EU, at rapid changes in the nature of British society. And, increasingly, at Scotland.

With Scottish nationalism ascendant, and Wales and Northern Ireland lining up to get the new powers promised to Scotland as part of a lure to keep it in the kingdom, it’s little surprise the concepts of England and Englishness are also rebounding. Flag-waving patriotism is still uncommon outside of Scotland – where the blue-and-white Saltire is now a common sight – but since the acrimony of the Scottish referendum, the white-and-red English flag is an increasingly common sight in pub windows and taxi cabs.

The capital of the emerging, angry entity sometimes dubbed “Little England” is a collection of seaside towns in the east and southeast. Once – before there was a visa-free EU, or budget airlines – this was where middle-class Londoners came to holiday. Now it’s the economically hurting, inward-looking heartland of UKIP.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage presided over a St. George’s Day celebration on April 23 at a flag-bedecked pub in Ramsgate with fish and chips, a pint of bitter, and boisterous talk about the need to preserve “Englishness.” He has chosen the coastal constituency of South Thanet for his seventh, and he says final, stab at winning a seat in the House of Commons.

While UKIP looks set to finish third nationally with an historic 14 per cent of the vote – a leap up from barely 3 per cent in 2010 – Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system looks set to reward the party with just a handful of seats. The polls in South Thanet are mixed, with some giving Mr. Farage a wide lead, and others suggesting he’ll narrowly lose.

“I can’t get my head around it, but I think Nigel Farage will win here. There’s a lot of disgruntled folks, a lot of xenophobes … People are jumping up and down saying these Polish people stole my jobs,” said Philip Coll, a 53-year-old taxi driver and Labour supporter who – as a Scot who immigrated to Ramsgate 20 years ago – cringes at some of the “racist” talk he hears from his passengers.

The debate has shifted so far to the angry right in South Thanet that the Conservative hoping to block Mr. Farage’s path to parliament is himself a former UKIP leader. Even the local Labour candidate calls in his campaign literature for a referendum on EU membership.

But with only 4 per cent of voters telling pollsters the EU is the most important issue for them, Mr. Farage and his party now spend most of their time talking about the dangers of unfettered immigration, the top concern for 14 per cent of voters. Since the referendum, Mr. Farage has found another target: Scotland, and the rising clout of the SNP.

“We’ve just about had enough,” Mr. Farage told his fellow St. George’s Day revellers. “We want a fair deal for the English.”

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND

Nobody in Aberdeen is talking about immigration, the EU or the economic recovery. There are few immigrants in northeast Scotland, and those who have moved this far north did so for jobs in and around the oil industry. They’re generally well-liked. So is the EU, which Scots are broadly more in favour of than the English.

The economy, meanwhile, is in free fall along with the oil prices. Just last fall, when oil was $110 (U.S.) a barrel, Aberdeen’s oil industry was the centre of the SNP’s economic argument for going it alone. Today, with oil trading at closer to half that price, many in Scotland are breathing a quiet sigh of relief that they still have tax transfers coming from London.

Despite the near miss, the SNP is more popular than ever, and poised to storm Westminster, hoping to extract sizable concessions from Mr. Miliband in exchange for supporting a Labour-led government. The left-of-centre SNP has ruled out backing a Conservative-led coalition.

“I think [the SNP are] going down there [to Westminster] to cause problems,” sighed Christine Jardine, a journalist who is running in Scotland for the Liberal Democrat Party, the long-established third-force in British politics that looks set to lose more than half the 57 seats it won in 2010. Like the other national parties, it could be wiped out in Scotland.

The disintegration of the old party system has also given a boost to the nationalist movement in Wales, with Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood earning an invitation to appear in the campaign’s lone televised (seven-party) leaders’ debate. And, during coalition talks, either Mr. Miliband or Mr. Cameron may find themselves having to negotiate with not just the SNP, but one or more from a mess of parties from Northern Ireland.

The party expected to win the most seats in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party, has indicated that, while its policies are closer to the Conservatives’, Mr. Cameron’s embrace of “English votes for English laws” has it considering supporting a Labour government. Meanwhile, the second-largest party in Northern Ireland is expected to be Sinn Feinn, which favours union with the Republic of Ireland and has a policy of leaving empty any seats it wins in Westminster.

The situation is a shock to much of the U.K. “Ten days to save the union” read a blaring front-page headline this week in The Times newspaper.

LONDON

The Queen has made it clear she’s not amused.

The monarch’s role following an election is supposed to be purely ceremonial. She speaks with the leader of the party that wins the largest number of seats, and asks him or her to form a government. She opens parliament by giving the Queen’s Speech – which is written for her, and outlines the proposed program of the new government – and then, assuming it passes, returns to her primary role of tourist magnet.

There are worries that even the Royal Family could get could dragged into the muck this time if there’s a protracted dispute over who the prime minister should be. Buckingham Palace, which has reportedly been holding “war-gaming” sessions over how to respond to various constitutional scenarios, has warned the two main parties they should only call on the Queen to address the House of Commons when they are certain they have the support of a majority of MPs.

The message was clear: Her Majesty shall not be used as a prop to convince MPs to lend short-term support to a government destined to collapse a afterward.

“I have no idea where this is going to end up, and nobody else does, either,” said David Seawright, senior lecturer on British politics at University of Leeds. “There are undoubtedly consequences for the union, whatever happens.”