Lessons learned from the British parliamentary elections of 2024 
The recent parliamentary elections in the UK provided a host of political lessons for many countries. Elections in Britain are held every five years according to the fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011, which set the term for how long a member of the House of Commons could serve.
The elections were held on Thursday, July 4, 2024, and saw the Labour Party win by a large majority. There are 650 seats or constituencies contested in the general elections. The Labour Party won 411 seats, adding 214 seats to its parliamentary representation. The Conservative Party now maintains 121 seats, having lost 252 seats in the recent election. The Liberal Democrats gained 61 seats, bringing their representation in the British Parliament to 72 seats. The Scottish National Party lost 37 seats, and it now has nine seats in the House of Commons. The Reform Party gained five seats in what became its first time to be seated in the House of Commons. The Greens now have four seats, having won three more seats. There are several small parties that have a total of 28 seats, which is a six-seat increase since the last parliamentary elections took place in the UK.
Great Britain now has a new prime minister — Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB KC. He is a Knight Commander of the Bath. As a lawyer, he also carries the title of a King’s Counsel. In his victory speech, he set a realistic tone, stating he would lead a “government of service” on a “mission of national renewal” and promised to “rebuild Britain.”
The first lesson to be gleaned from the British elections is that protest vote counts. The British people were sick of 14 years of Tories’ rule, characterized by many failures. Labour’s victory over the Tories in Britain was not necessarily a total endorsement of its political agenda.
The second lesson is that small margins still can count significantly in the scope of the victory of any political party. While Labour won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, it achieved such a high level by winning a large number of constituencies by relatively narrow margins. Robert Ford, a political scientist at the University of Manchester, observed that “more than half of their seats were won with a majority of 20 percent or less.”
Small margins still can count significantly in the scope of the victory of any political party.
Third, party tactics can significantly change the outcomes of any election. Labour and the Social Democrats were able to coordinate their efforts whereby if a candidate from either one of these two parties ran against a Conservative Party (or other party) member, they would ensure the defeat of their common opponents. The conclusion is that the victory in terms of the number of seats is not proportional to the percentage of the popular vote that the Labour Party won. Labour won only 34 percent of the total vote cast. Surprisingly, this is the lowest tally for a winning party in the history of the UK.
The elections also warn against the persistence of the public’s dissatisfaction with the electoral process. Only 28,805,931 people voted. The number of registered voters in Britain is 48,214,128. This means that the percentage of the vote was 59.75 percent, which is a 7.775 percent decrease from the last British elections. Voter turnout in 2024 was the second lowest in 100 years of British elections. Almost half of all British voters said that they voted to throw the Conservative Party out from power.
The elections highlight the increasing role of third parties. The centrist Liberal Democrats won many seats. In addition, extremist right-wing parties are all very powerful. For example, although it only won six seats, the Reform Party had 609 candidates and 4,117,221 votes were cast for them. Had there been a system of proportional representation in Great Britain, whereby seats are allocated according to the percentages of the popular vote and not according to the winner-take-all system, the Reform Party would have gained a bigger representation in the House of Commons than what it has now. This British system allows for centrist governing whether left-of-center or right-of-center.
Another lesson learned from this round is that voter verification is essential for a fair election. According to The Guardian, over “400,000 people may have been prevented from voting in the general election because they lacked the necessary ID, with those from minority ethnic communities more than twice as likely to have experienced this, polling has suggested.”
Furthermore, democracy is always tested. The UK will have more elections soon. The 2025 UK local elections will take place in May. There will be 25 seats to be contested in all of the 21 county councils in England, besides the nine unitary authorities in the country. There is no guarantee that the Labour Party will win the next municipal elections.
The US has two big parties. Britain has two big parties and other medium-sized parties, and there is more competition among them. This gives more opportunities to voters. In the US, third-party candidates will neither help Joe Biden nor Donald Trump. The British electoral mechanism of making the total popular vote dependent on the choices inside each district helps organize a partisan effort against an undesired third candidate. This gives voters in Britain more alternatives than voting for one of two big candidates often described as “the lesser of two evils.”
• Faisal Al-Shammeri is a political analyst. X: @Mr_Alshammeri
