Well there are many reasons, but one of the major ones is that the last time the ruling party in the UK won a majority of the popular vote was, drumroll... 1931.
The FPTP system essentially means that elections are decided by a small number of people living in marginal seats, that usually straddle poor urban and wealthy rural areas and so that is who (successful) politician's messages and policies are targeted at. It's also how you get the weird situation that on a lot of social and economic issues both major political parties are often to the right of the public.
Add to that the dominance of the Oxbridge PPE brigade in both parties, and you end up with them all drawing on a small, outdated set of policy options (basically what they were taught as undergrads), that don't really work in the modern world.
Finally we still have a monarch, and it turns out the last one (God bless 'er) had a large number of kaws modified in her and her family's favour.
You assume that a government in an elected democracy will solve anything or be any better than the current situation. This has proven to be false over and over again in history. The only countries that flourished and had tremendous economic growth, are those who had a period of more personal freedom and an almost non-existent government. The more government you have, the less can the human spirit succeed in moving things forward. The few deciding for the many is a failure in any way you spin it.
> “The only countries that flourished and had tremendous economic growth, are those who had a period of more personal freedom and an almost non-existent government.”
Post-WWII USA was both a period of big government and tremendous economic growth.
The government is just people deciding to come together and delegate power. It’s not something separate from people. Why can’t the “human spirit moving things forward” express itself through the public sector?
Government is separate from the overwhelming majority of people, because the overwhelming majority of people have no practical influence over the government.
Power concentrates to a few. Sometimes very few, as in North Korea. Sometimes a slightly broader few, as in America. But it's always a few. The rest are acted upon by government.
Also it's pretty jokey to say that government is people delegating power. The only reason it needs to be delegated is because it was seized in the first place - by government!
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world, specifically, the English Revolution of
the seventeenth century. Brought birth to a radical libertarian movement, even though only partially successful in its birthplace, Great Britain, it was able to usher in the Industrial Revolution, thereby freeing industry and production from the strangling restrictions of State control and urban government-supported guilds.
The classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against
what we might call the Old Order—the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in
the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions.
The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants—an alliance to be called "mercantilism" by later historians—and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
-- For a New Liberty / by Murray N. Rothbard
Today we have a much worse alliance of government and privileged monopolies, corporatism. The few have decided that the companies are "responsible" for doing the decisions for us. Effectively removing any personal freedom the people might have, freedoms that most countries had in their constitutions for centuries are today being removed by government-backed corporations, as-if they don't need to exist at all.
> only countries that flourished and had tremendous economic growth, are those who had a period of more personal freedom and an almost non-existent government
I forgot about the famously non-existent ancient Egyptian and modern Chinese governments.
Communist China says hi! And the British Empire was hardly a bastion of freedom and yet kickstarted the industrial revolution. Even the USSR, for all ita horrific flaws and mass murdering ways turned the Russian Empire from an agrarian one to an industrial powerhouse in 2 decades.
Russian industrialization started well before the USSR came to power. The Trans Siberian Railway for example first opened in 1904. The locomotive’s boilers, engines and some other components were built in Saint Petersburg, industry was alive and well at the time.
Arguably it was the new power blocks associated with industry that destabilized Tsarist Russia, not that WWI helped.
Communist China has not been a "free country", it has (had?) several free trade zones (FTZs) which are special economic zones where goods may be imported, handled, manufactured and exported without direct intervention from customs. Thus there has been very very limited government and regulation in these FTZs. With minimal government there, the FTZs enabled them to succeed. Everywhere else in China there was (is?) stagnation and the only way out was to move into these FTZs as a citizen to get ahead.
The FPTP system essentially means that elections are decided by a small number of people living in marginal seats, that usually straddle poor urban and wealthy rural areas and so that is who (successful) politician's messages and policies are targeted at. It's also how you get the weird situation that on a lot of social and economic issues both major political parties are often to the right of the public.
Add to that the dominance of the Oxbridge PPE brigade in both parties, and you end up with them all drawing on a small, outdated set of policy options (basically what they were taught as undergrads), that don't really work in the modern world.
Finally we still have a monarch, and it turns out the last one (God bless 'er) had a large number of kaws modified in her and her family's favour.
So yeah. Sclerotic socio polotical system