UK Politics

It’s too early to draw clear conclusions about the meaning of Thursday’s dramatic national election in the U.K., and still less about what lessons it might offer to America's feeble attempt to preserve democracy. But one thing is clear enough: Headlines around the world announcing that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has won a huge victory are factually accurate yet fail to convey the underlying complexity of the situation — especially the extent to which British politics has been thrown into complete disorder.

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Based on near-final vote counts, Labour has won 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons — one of the largest majorities in British political history, and the party’s biggest win since Tony Blair’s neoliberal-flavored “New Labour” surged to victory in 1997.

But the actual voting patterns in this week's election appear not just counterintuitive but counterfactual, compared to those results.

Labour’s overall percentage of the total vote was up less than two points from its near-catastrophic 2019 loss — in fact, it appears that Labour received 500,000 fewer votes nationwide than it did under the supposedly toxic Corbyn regime. And if we compare this week's election with Corbyn’s narrow loss to Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017, the picture is even more upside-down: In that election, Labour got 40% of the vote and about 12.9 million votes overall; this time around, in what will go down as a historic victory, Labour garnered less than 34% of the vote, about 9.7 million in all.

Starmer’s supporters will no doubt shrug that off, and maybe they’re right: What matters in the British system, as in ours, is winning enough seats to control the reins of government, and Labour has certainly done that. But it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that below the surface Britain has just experienced an implosion of mainstream electoral politics, along the lines of what has already happened in major European nations like France, Germany and Italy. The full consequences of that meltdown are effectively concealed, however, by the U.K.’s “first past the post” electoral system, in which the candidate with the most votes in a given district wins the seat, even when that person often (or, indeed, most of the time) falls well short of a majority.

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This leads to the most salient single fact of the 2024 British election: Labour's huge parliamentary majority is built on just 9.7 million votes; Reform and the Tories, put together, got nearly 11 million — and as a hypothetical united force, would probably have won. On paper and in the House of Commons, Keir Starmer looks like this year’s big winner, but the pendulum that just swung so hard in his direction can just as easily swing back. He needs to learn the lesson that American liberals and progressives are absorbing, in painful fashion, right now: Don’t assume that the disgruntled far right has been beaten just because it lost an election.