there will be no persistent servers, either in the UK or elsewhere from what I understand.
the idea is for the game to operate on a peer to peer basis.
the subject / technology has been discussed on the forums previously if you were to do a search.
Actually there will be persistent servers. Having a persistent universe that's the same for everyone with a dynamic economy would be impossible otherwise.
The difference is that these central servers will only handle non time sensitive data. Economy, news, missions, contacts, the political landscape and other forms of information that can be handled at a slower pace will be handled here. They will also take care of the handshaking between players. Basically, if they see that two players are in the same location they will match them to each other (based on a lot of different variables).
When two players have been connected to each other they will themselves keep track of each others position, movements, weapons fire, comms and other things that requires low latency. Possibly with the central server doing checks every now and then to make sure everyone "agrees" on whats happening.