... and far less democratic than many others.

> and has been making democratic progress longer than many countries have existed

... or, in other terms, has been slower to produce a soundly-democratic system than many younger countries.

In fact, one of the main puzzles constitutional scholars struggle with, is exactly this: how (and why) did a nation that reached substantial parliamentary rule so early, deliberately refuse to evolve towards more democratic forms of governments for so long? Why did England fight the French Revolution so bitterly, when on paper the French were just completing the job started in Westminster so many decades before? How can aristocratic privilege survive, in this day and age, in the same nation that first theorized it as fundamentally unjust?

I know this can be difficult to understand for people grown under the ultimate myth of Westminster "mother of all democracies", but there are other models out there; and some of these models are ultimately much more coherent, in theory and in practice, than the constitutional hodgepodge we experience in modern Britain.