Although I am not a “Tory”, I quite liked the former UK Prime Minister Rushi Sunak. He is young, intelligent, and has a swag that reminded me a little of Tony Blair back in the day. But he was never elected by the British people. And I knew that when the time came, they would have preferred someone who looked and sounded more like them. So, in the end, at the close of polls on July 4, 2024, a Surrey-born, middle-class Labour atheist beat the wealthy Conservative Hindu Indian son of immigrants.

Congratulations to Great Britain’s new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party.

Make no mistake, this outcome was not only about optics. The Tories were hurtling towards defeat since their ineffective handling of Brexit. The British people, over the course of the Tories’ 14-year reign, became frustrated not only with their arrogance, but also the high cost of living, health care, COVID-19 contradictions, the blatant disregard for the Windrush generation, the overall running of essential services which they felt only catered to the rich, among a host of other matters which they were no longer prepared to put up with.

Meanwhile, the British Labour Party was being more strategic after its last defeat at the polls in 2019 with Jeremy Corbyn. It revamped the party’s face, similar to what “New Labour” did in the 1980s with new leadership. Such actions paid off almost with the same high results as the Labour Party in 1997.

Accordingly, what I and others predicted took place. The British populace voted out the Conservative Party after 14 years, allowing them to suffer their lowest number of seats since 1832 to give the Labour Party a landslide victory with an enormous 411 seats.

This outcome is historic with “more pon plenty” for the Labour Party. Yet, it is not all that exciting when you look behind the numbers. As a matter of fact, one could say it is more disturbing.

Therefore, before any political party on the eve of an election begins to get excited or nervous, it should first understand that, in today’s world, a landslide victory does not mean overwhelming support for your party or its policies.

The Labour Party indeed gained 209 seats. Yet it only managed to increase its share of the vote by 1.6 per cent. The reality is that Labour’s total vote share was 33.8 per cent, a minuscule increase from its 32.2 per cent in 2019, and approximately 10 per cent below the Tories’ 43.6 per cent total vote share in 2019.

Furthermore, due to a lower turnout, the Labour Party won fewer votes than it did in 2019 — 9.7 million compared to 10.3 million in 2019.

So you could argue that Labour Leader Starmer got a landslide victory with fewer votes in 2024 versus Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who received more votes but a landslide loss in 2019. Things that make you go hmmmm.

You could also ask yourself: If you received 600,000 fewer votes than the former leader, can you really say you are the preferred leader? Or are we at the point where most people just don’t care anymore?

As a result of the low turnout, the data becomes even more interesting when looking at the fact that the Reform UK Party, who received 14 per cent of the popular vote, only won 5 seats, while the Liberal Democratic Party, who received only 12 per cent of the popular votes but won 72 seats.

In other words, the LibDems won 67 more seats than the Reform UK Party, who got more votes than them.

Based on the numbers, analysts argue that Britain experienced the lowest turnout at the polls in 20 years at 60 per cent.

Who cares, really?

Why should any of us care?

Why should we even pay attention to other elections and who is voting?

Well, because this election in the UK demonstrates that the number of seats a political party wins does not automatically translate to popular support.

In Jamaica, only a little over one-quarter of our registered voters participated in the recent local government elections in February. In 2020, it was a little over one-third or 37.8 per cent of eligible voters came out to vote in the 2020 General Election.

Jamaican general election results.

Intriguingly, the data suggests that Jamaicans who vote now are relatively equally divided in their support of the two major political parties. For example, in the general elections of 2007 and 2016, the difference in the number of people who voted for either of the two major political parties was less than 1 per cent. In 2011, the difference was 6.7 per cent. In other words, if we take our focus away from the number of seats won, the popular vote count tells a whole different story. See table.

What’s more, looking at the number of votes, except for the general election of 2020, during the COVID-19 times, it implies that none of the political parties over the past 17 years have been dominant in the minds of the Jamaican electorate. We cannot even get up to 500,000 Jamaicans to come out to vote anymore in a general election.

The evidence is even more disappointing when analysing the data from the voter turnout in the past local government elections, which suggests that it has steadily declined since 2007. Actually, the voter turnout of Jamaicans eligible to vote in 2011 was 37.92 per cent, 30 per cent in 2016, and 29.6 per cent in 2024.

Our voter turnout has moved from nearly 80 per cent in the general election of 1972 to 37.8 per cent in 2020 and, worse, 29.6 per cent in the 2024 Local Government Election.

Moreover, in today’s world, winning an election is now more about mobilising your dwindling base of supporters, by any means necessary, than about convincing the public to vote for your leadership and policies.

If our election numbers over the last four terms are anything to go by, then neither party should be celebrating. The brutal fact is that both parties have been unable to persuade the Jamaican majority to vote for them.

We must change that. The question is: How?

Lisa Hanna is Member of Parliament for St Ann South Eastern, People’s National Party spokesperson on foreign affairs and foreign trade, and a former Cabinet member.