Voting is just a first step, but there are many other related problems, politically:
- parties are basically the same with a different veneer on top. Ideology blah-blah is radically different, actual policies quite close to each other, real implementation of policies almost indistinguishable
- So much of the country is now run by quangos and civil service departments that politicians come and go but the people actually taking and implementing decisions mostly stay the same.
By the way this isn't just UK but pretty much everywhere
Stepping back from political and looking at the bigger picture, a lot of this stems from basic human cognitive disabilities that have been repeatedly demonstrated:
- cognitive bias, accepting what we already 'know' and rejecting evidence for opposing views
- horribly skewed 'intuitive' risk assessment
- horribly wrong 'intuitive' feeling for numbers, especially very large ones
- terrible short-term-ism
- etc etc
Unfortunately, significantly changing anything in our social / economic / political systems requires a constant struggle against not only the status quo but against millions of years of evolution that have left humans as a species woefully incapable of properly adapting to modern life.
Bugger!