Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason the UK is behind continental Europe is the lack of testing. Their numbers are no worse than continental Europe (excluding Italy, of course). The US, on the other hand, are lightyears behind Europe on testing, the real number of infections is closer to 5000 than to 1250, again bringing it in line with the rest of Europe.
Actually the UK has done a lot more testing than many other countries, more than double the rate of France, and 4x of Japan - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/ I don't know where you get that info from but it is severely outdated or just outright wrong.
Number of tests: 3395 Source: https://www.ontario.ca/page/2019-novel-coronavirus Population: 14,659,616 (estimated for 2019-Q4 found on Wikipedia)