Well it is because the judiciary smacked the secrecy side of it down pretty hard to make sure that it was done in public. That's a pretty strong indicator of a functioning democracy.
The judiciary is (thankfully) the most undemocratic institution in Britain. It functions well because it is undemocratic. It has no place being democratic. In no sense does its effectiveness indicate a healthy democracy.
It's not perfect of course. We might take a step back occasionally but this usually results in two steps forward. Some press like only to comment on the backward steps though.
Do you even know when our National Health Service was created? Or our social security net? When laws were repealed that suppressed minorities, when human rights were added to our legislation? National minimum wage? Freedom of information laws?
There are several ministers from the House of Lords, who aren't elected by the people.
I haven't checked for this Parliament, but for the previous one that included people who had LOST their election to be an MP, but got nominated to the Lords anyway.
we have a constituency based first past the post system.
we vote for a local MP to represent our constituency in the house of commons. first one past the threshold wins and represents our area in the house of commons.
each MP gets one vote. one vote in the house of commons for each constituency.
so yes. this is possible. because it’s not about total votes — it’s about representing the individual local areas and the people within those areas.
labour won a landslide of “areas”. that’s how our system works.
just because it doesn’t match what you think democracy should look like doesn’t mean it isn’t democratic. it’s just different.
plenty of criticisms exist about our system (esp house of lords). we even tried to have a referendum on first past the post about two decades ago. i voted for AV. but oh well.
I don't consider FPTP to be democratic, because it disenfranches large swathes of the population and means that you can rule the country with a massive majority despite only getting 34% of the vote.
Modern democracies moved on past creaky old FPTP and its strong tendency to produce two party non representive majorities.
The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.
One's vote physically being counted is not the same as having any representation in Parliament, let alone government. It's a system of artificial consensus. Managed democracy, in other words. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's very arbitrary.