Ok is it have or me Google been making this mistake from day 1.
When you do a search and click on the "pages from the UK" radial button you get poor results inlckuding US sites. URL also has a unclean query string:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=2...UK%7CcountryGB
Now when using Firbird you not only get better UK only results but also a cleaner query string (and my sites rank higher) :
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=goo...0&cr=countryUK