[dragonwriter]

> UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative

That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.

It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.

Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.