Last week’s United Kingdom general election delivered a historic result. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer won a landslide majority in the House of Commons, within a few seats of Tony Blair’s epochal 1997 victory.

The Conservatives were shattered. After 14 years in power — and 32 years of the last 45 — the center-right party was reduced to just 121 Members of Parliament out of 650. Eight sitting cabinet ministers were defeated. This is the smallest number of seats the Tories have won since the Conservative Party’s founding in 1834, and they received less than a quarter of the vote.

Everyone had expected a sizable Labour win and a bad night for the Conservatives. But the overall picture turned out to be much more fractured than anticipated. A campaign carefully targeted on winnable seats saw the Liberal Democrats, for so long the third party of British politics, soar from only 11 MPs to 72, although their share of the vote grew by only a half percent. Reform UK, the populist anti-immigration group led by Trump ally Nigel Farage, won more than 4 million votes and stole huge swathes of traditional Conservative support but, due to the quirks of the electoral system, won only five seats. They are few but they will be noisy, and they will claim that their voters are disenfranchised.

The Green Party, which had until this election only ever seen one MP elected, increased its tally to four. And a system that favors established parties........

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